By Aris Barkas/ barkas@eurohoops.net
FIBA Europe presented the new national team competition system which starts from 2017 and the expected changes are more than interesting. Still there’s an unsolved issue about Euroleague players participating in the qualifiers.
However, according to FIBA Europe executive director Kamil Novak this is a non issue: “There’s nothing official on that. One day we hear that Euroleague players will not play and then that the issue is their insurance and sharing the revenues. That’s only speculation. We are already paying the players insurance and it’s a seven digits number. We expect Euroleague to stop during the national team breaks”. The NBA players on the other hand are confirmed to not participate in most of the qualifiers, which will take place during November, February, September and June, with the possible exception of September and June games.
FIBA wants to make its World Cup the premier basketball event, they confirmed that they work closely to the NBA in order to achieve this and 80 teams from the four regions of Europe, Africa, Americas and Asia/Oceania which are merged from now on, will fight for the 32 spots of the tournament. China is already qualified as the host, 7 more teams from Asia/Ocenia will qualify, 5 from Africa, 7 from Americas and 12 from Europe.
In the start of the 2017 World Cup qualifiers the European teams will be classified into a 32 teams Division A and a Division B, according to their previous years results. The host of the 2017 Eurobasket is expected to be announced by the end of 2015, while the idea of changing the Olympic basketball tournament into a U22 competition is not considered at this point. As the head of FIBA communications Patrick Koller said: “If you ask Messi he will tell you he wants to win the World Cup. If you ask LeBron James he will tell you that he wants to win the Olympics, so we will go the other way and try to grow our World Cup, not make the Olympics an U22 tournament”.