The US basketball team wants to regain the gold of the world championship

Starting tomorrow, the World Basketball Championship, which will be hosted by three countries at once – the Philippines, Japan and Indonesia, seems to be a good chance for the US team to regain the valuable title lost four years ago. The reason, perhaps, is not so much the power of the American team itself, which is too young and inexperienced, but that several European superstars at once, including the main character of the last NBA season in the NBA, Serb Nikola Jokic, decided to skip this championship for various reasons.

This World Cup in the United States is given quite a lot of attention for good reason. For decades, American basketball looked down on its opponents, from somewhere beyond the clouds, but somehow imperceptibly its positions were shaken. In the NBA, for example, since 2019, the title of the best player of the season goes exclusively to Europeans, and the US team is finding it harder and harder to get to valuable prizes. Every time they have to be gnawed out from those who once seemed hopeless weaklings against her background. Now America owns the Olympic gold won two years ago in Tokyo. But at the previous, four years ago, world championship, she suffered a crushing failure. In China, the Americans were already beaten by the French in the quarterfinals, and after them, already in the “consolation” play-off, by the Serbs. The final place of the US team in the tournament won by the Spaniards turned out to be seventh, simply shameful by the standards of the eternal favorite.

The fact that the new World Cup is a good chance for her to regain gold is, at first glance, a rather controversial statement. A person who follows the NBA casually, obliquely, grabbing only the most delicious, looking at her current application, on the contrary, will think that now it will definitely be terribly hard for her. Yes, in it, the application, there is absolutely no one whose last name would be familiar to such a person, not a single real – to properly thunder – superstar.

And you can’t argue with this statement. The US team for the World Cup has always been completed more modestly than for the Olympics. But this time the selection was very special. This team is very young. In it, a third – four out of 12 – players were born in 2000 or later, and in the first half of the 1990s (and then – at the end of the first half, in 1995), two were born. Only four basketball players – Anthony Edwards, Tyrese Halliburton, Jaren Jackson and Brandon Ingram – were selected for the All-Star Game. Once. And no one has the experience of international competitions, which is important at the World Cup, since the rules of the NBA and the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) are still different.

And yet, the chance seems to be really good, despite this personnel specificity. Two points matter here. The first is the abundance of problems with the main competitors of the Americans. The Spaniards have aged a lot in four years, while others have missed the brightest players. There are a huge number of them, noticeable losses. The French, for example, could be greatly strengthened by the first number of the summer draft Victor Vembanyama, a basketball prodigy and the only one, as well as center Joel Embiid, the owner of the prize for the most valuable player of the past NBA championship. But both chose to focus on preparing for the club season. The Greeks do not have the incomparable Giannis Antetokounmpo healing injuries. And on the hopes of the Serbs to fly to the top, apparently, Nikola Jokic, who decided to miss the world championship for “family reasons,” decided to miss the world championship, an outstanding center that led the Denver Nuggets to the NBA championship, put an end to it.

In addition, ESPN, in explaining why there will not be a second failure in a row, recalls the past. The Americans also sent an insanely young team to the 2010 World Cup in Turkey, for an uninitiated fan – even an unprepossessing team. But she convincingly won the tournament, and some of her players – Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, Derrick Rose, Russell Westbrook, Kevin Love – soon turned into unconditional NBA superheroes, who later said that they were helped to take the Turkish gold, among other things, by their youthful motivation and hunger. to victories, sometimes compensating for the lack of motherhood. And I must say, the test matches of the US team before this championship strengthened the optimism of the experts. In them, she dealt with all, without exception, strong rivals that came to hand – Puerto Ricans, Slovenes, Spaniards, Greeks, Germans.

Alexey Dospekhov