Here are the Preliminary Round groups of the 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup! #Spain2014 pic.twitter.com/Eio9Cq4OeY— FIBA (@FIBA) February 3, 2014 From August 30, 2014 to September 14, 2014
Love that Finland essentially bought their "wild card" spot by having the Angry Birds people agree to give FIBA in-game advertising. Turkey did it the old fashioned way, apparently paying 1.6 million euros.
Here are the brackets of the Round of 16!Who will advance to the Quarter-Finals of #Spain2014? pic.twitter.com/mZ6d3i81Z3— FIBA (@FIBA) September 5, 2014
This and the Olympics should be a U23 tournament were you can select 5 overage players. The USA has proved once again were best in the world. Let the young guns have there time. If it's still played with the current rules have team USA just send u23 players.
FIBA has the 16-team bracket up: http://www.fiba.com/basketballworldcup/2014/groups#|tab=brackets FIBA World Cup Round of 8 (Barcelona Side): USA-Slovenia Lithuania-Turkey FIBA World Cup Round of 8 (Madrid Side): Serbia-Brazil France-Spain
If this is the best the world can do against the USA, this tournament is really pathetic. The USA has won all of matches by at least 20 points or more. Why does the rest of the world even bother trying to play this sport? The world at large should stick to soccer because that's the only team sport in which they will have a prayer at all.
The 2014 @FIBA Basketball World Cup Gold Medal Game is set: USA vs. SERBIA Sunday at 3pm/et on ESPN2! pic.twitter.com/oWHsfsdH70
Usually teams keep it respectable in the first half, it is usually in the 3rd quarter that the USA starts to blow teams away.
Too much depth. While everyone keeps trying to sell this as a USA B team, with young inexperienced players, their bench is still better than most team's starting lineups.
It's already a 20+ point lead in the 2nd quarter against Serbia. What a joke tournament. Is this seriously the best the rest of the planet can do in basketball? The US is barely even trying.
Although I'm complaining about the lack of competitiveness, it's still fun to watch the USA completely rout other countries in international sports.
Just like they did in June and July, right? That Group stage trophy sure was something else. You could expect the result. After Spain went out, the only team that could pose a slight challenge were France. Outside of those two teams, you can't expect much success against such an athletic team as the USA.
Right and you can't expect more from them. The result was to be expected. Like I said, only Spain and maybe France could've posed a challenge to a team that is as good as the USA.
There's got to be more to it than that. We haven't seen a US team mow down opponents like this since the mid-90s. It won its last three games by an average of 36 points (vs 14 pts in 2010). I don't follow closely enough to know what has changed, but there are a lot of countries that need to go back to the drawing board.
Talent is dispersed too much across Europe. There's one or two good players in each country, but not five and certainly not ten. Spain and Argentina were able to field a full five man roster of solid to great nba players. They were able to hang with the us and beat them on their day when things went right for them. Additionally with the growth of soccer in this country international play is becoming much more attractive to nba players. It's no longer a duty, but it's become a fun and prideful thing to take part of. Players on showing up much more prepared and motivated than in th early part of last decade. It's going to be very hard for anybody to beat the US in Rio and the next World Cup. Argentina have almost nobody coming up. Spain don't have elite players to replace the gasol bros. no team really looks capable of fielding a deep enough side to really challenge motivated deep US squad.
If this was a Ryder Cup type game Europe would have a chance. But as Corona said a bunch of separate nations have a very small chance. USA vs. Spain would have been nice to see but I still suspect the usa would have won by 15+