Men's Basketball FIBA World Cup 2023 Road to Paris 2024

[Bearas 365]

4 hours ago, Vic Liu said:

According to multiple unofficial resources, Kyle Anderson will go to China as neutralized player in around 10 days after dealing with his eye injury. He will play World Cup and hopefully OG for China once the neutralization process finishes. 

Disappointing. A country of 1.4 billion should be capable of developing their own talents...

[Makedonas 1,587]

Greece naturalized Thomas Walkup last week. It's been a pretty big and controversial story here, that a basketball player who has only been here for two years got citizenship.

 

We haven't had any of these sports naturalizations in about 20 years (unlike most of our neighbouring countries who do it religiously for example), and now in the past month we got a Russian wrestler and an American basketball player. I'm not sure what we are trying to achieve here. I was always proud that we only had athletes who had connections to our country (even if they were immigrants from a young age or had a Greek parent or grandparent), and now we can no longer say this...

 

Meanwhile Olympic gold medalist Helen Maroulis, who comes from a Greek family and has a grandmother that still lives in Greece, could not get citizenship in time for Rio 2016 but for some American basketball player of Olympiacos, everything gets fast tracked...

 

 

 

Anyways, we still don't know if Walkup will be able to play for the national team, as teams are only allowed to have one naturalized player under FIBA rules. Despite his Greek mother, Dorsey is considered naturalized because apparently they rushed the paperwork back in 2015 when he became a Greek citizen. I was reading that if they get the proper paperwork, he will be considered "not naturalized" due to his Greek origins and then both him and Walkup will be able to play. I'm not sure how possible this is but it's quite interesting.

[nenad 361]

Everything is possible in FIBA. This rule is made for small basketball nations, when big basketball countries do it, it's really a shame. 

[phelps 6,883]

yeah...now in Italy it's time for the Banchero affair...  

 

it's 2 years that's a circus, but now we're reaching points still untouched...by most part of our (uneducated) press and by the usual bandawagoners (pretend to be basketball fans).

 

I just don't want to imagine what's gonna be like in our media and social media if he finally decides not to play for  after all the promises of the past 2 years or so (and I'm pretty sure he's not coming to , especially now that he got the ROY award in the NBA and possibly increased his chances to be called also by the US team). 

[George_D 874]

i am 100% against naturalized players. The national identity of teams is lost.

[Makedonas 1,587]

11 hours ago, nenad said:

Everything is possible in FIBA. This rule is made for small basketball nations, when big basketball countries do it, it's really a shame. 

I don't think anyone should do it, but I always especially hated when a lot of the Balkan/ex-Yugo countries would get American basketball players who never even stepped foot in those countries prior to getting citizenship (I remember  had about 5 players like this, also I remember some from  and , and I'm sure there are many others).

 

At least in Walkup's case he has lived in Greece since he plays for Olympiacos since 2021, and he is apparently learning the language and says he plans to live in Greece for the rest of his life, though that might be fake. Still I do not think he belongs on our national team, but at least there is some connection to the country.

 

Regardless I think it's even worse when Spain, the most successful national team in Europe the last 20 years, who has the best league in Europe, can't even naturalize from their own league and needs to find Lorenzo Brown who never even played in the Spanish league. (and for the Spanish users who tried to bring up Dorsey playing for Greece when I said this about Lorenzo Brown during Eurobasket, I will say again that Dorsey has a Greek mother and he played briefly in the Greek league and had Greek citizenship since he was a teenager, it's a very different situation from Lorenzo Brown who has absolutely zero connection to Spain)

 

I think Lithuania is the only big European basketball country that does not have any naturalized players? Serbia doesn't either, but they have had several on their women's team (and also in wrestling). Also Greece never did until literally two weeks ago (I am not including real immigrants who lived in the country for many years and waited for the citizenship process or people with Greek ancestry).

 

Also I am not sure about France, Germany, Italy but for sure they do in other sports.

[Griff88 1,737]

Meanwhile in Indonesia we just recently stopped to naturalize people without a proper rule. After taking 3 Americans and 2 Senegalese (the two boys are not even 17 years old) with no connection to this country whatsoever, our federation finally decided to find people with Indonesian descent who are playing in other Asian countries.

 

What makes me amazed was the fact the 3 Americans ditched their US citizenship for an extremely useless passport (no dual citizenship here) if they are still planning to play in abroad, that's some incredible persuasive skill by the Indonesian association lol

[PHI2019 188]

FIBA World Cup Final Stage to be moved to the Mall Of Asia Arena

 

Mall of Asia Arena is the new host of the final stage of the 2023 FIBA World Cup to be held in Manila in September, the Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas announced Friday.

 

https://www.espn.ph/basketball/gilas/story/_/id/36309325/fiba-world-cup-final-stage-moved-mall-asia-arena

 

You can’t blame FIBA for moving the venue. During some of the recent concerts staged there, it took hours for the fans to exit the parking area.

[PHI2019 188]

The FIBA World Cup draw is live on FIBA’s YouTube channel.

[Bearas 365]

40min in the stream and they still no where near drawing the countries.....