By Antigoni Zachari / info@eurohoops.net
A busy basketball summer for national teams and players is about to begin with the FIBA World Cup June and August qualifiers followed up by the 2022 FIBA EuroBasket.
As always, the objective of national teams remains to include as many of their stars as possible, though when it comes to NBA players, this plan could be hindered, at least for the third window in June.
As Mozzart Sport’s Djordje Matic notes in a recent feature about the Serbian NBA stars, the current agreement between FIBA and the NBA covers a maximum of 28 days of insurance for players who wish to join their respective national teams.
Therefore, if international NBA stars wish to participate in the June qualifiers (June 27 – July 5), then they could only join the preparation of their national teams for the August Qualifiers (August 22 – 30) and the FIBA EuroBasket (September 1-18) a few days before tip-off, otherwise, the insurance can no longer cover them. While it’s still possible for players to join their national teams even without insurance, it certainly increases the risk factor, e.g. in case of an injury.
In case they wish to skip the June window, then full team training, plus August and September games will all be covered.
With that in mind, not only Serbian NBA players like Nikola Jokic, Nemanja Bjelica and Bogdan Bogdanovic but NBA internationals as a whole are expected to skip the June window, in order to be able to reinforce their respective national teams in the August Qualifiers and the EuroBasket. Of course, this policy issue applies to European players whose national teams have qualified for the latter competition.