EuroBasket 2017 tips off on Thursday. While teams no longer qualify for the FIBA World Cup through EuroBasket, pride is still at stake. European players find immense honor in performing well at the continent’s tournament, and a good number of well-known athletes will compete: Kristaps Porzingis, the Gasol brothers, the Hernangomez brothers, Dario Saric, Evan Fournier, Ricky Rubio, Lauri Markkanen, Goran Dragic, Boris Diaw, Dennis Schroder, Bogdan Bogdanovic, Bojan Bogdanovic, and potential 2018 No. 1 pick Luka Doncic are among the players set to participate.
FIBA is forcing NBA’s top European stars to rely on second-tier refs at EuroBasket
FIBA’s ongoing war with top European leagues has trickled down to the officials. That could ruin EuroBasket and other top competitions.
Photo by Christof Koepsel/Bongarts/Getty Images
Spain is the overwhelming favorite. Croatia should make a deep run. Latvia is better than you think. Serbia, France, and Lithuania are always in the mix. It should be a solid, fun tournament.
Provided, of course, the tournament isn’t ruined by poor officiating.
You would expect that FIBA, the world’s basketball governing body, would hire the very best referees in Europe to work its crown jewel continental tournament. But in the deepening war against Europe’s top club competition, FIBA has shut out the continent’s top officials.
Back in 2012, I wondered if FIBA was ruining global basketball by shifting importance away from the summer continental tournaments and building a new qualification system. Little did I know how wide the ramifications from that decision would be.
As I wrote this July, Euroleague — the top club competition outside of the NBA — decided not to play ball with FIBA and did not create windows in its calendar to allow players to join national teams without missing club games. This was entirely predictable based on the fact that Euroleague argued against FIBA’s new qualification system five years ago, when FIBA ratified it. When push came to shove in 2017, Euroleague didn’t budge.
What could FIBA do? The governing body can’t punish the national federations whose teams compete in Euroleague like Spain, Israel, France, or Turkey — those are EuroBasket’s big draws. You can’t boot Euroleague players out of EuroBasket. You wouldn’t have a tournament!
So, according to European basketball insiders, FIBA went to the next level: they punished referees.
The top basketball referees — those who work in Euroleague and have officiated top FIBA tournaments in recent years — were given an ultimatum: Quit Euroleague, or lose your assignment for EuroBasket 2017 and any other FIBA tournament. Euroleague is a job, FIBA tournaments are gigs. Referees are typically able to work both. Mark Woods reports that FIBA pays officials roughly $2,300 for working the month-long EuroBasket, while the Euroleague pays $57,000 per season. As expected, the majority (if not all) of referees chose Euroleague, according to insiders.
To wit, none of the eight officials who were selected to work the Euroleague Final Four in May appear on the list of EuroBasket referees. Insiders say that most EuroBasket officials we’ll see over the next month were pulled from FIBA’s own second-tier club competition, the Basketball Champions League. (This nascent competition battle Euroleague’s second-tier competition, Eurocup, for teams. Its 2017 MVP was Jordan Theodore, who went undrafted out of Seton Hall in 2012.) FIBA also pulled a number of referees from around the world.
We’ll see how the decision plays out at EuroBasket over the next month. On paper, it reads like a disaster in the making. History has not been kind to previous instances of using replacement referees in major competitions.
Certainly, NBA teams whose prized stars are suiting up for EuroBasket must be nervous. It’s not that European officials are inferior to those based in America. It is that these referees are not the best Europe has to offer. You’d have the same concerns with stars playing in tournaments officiated by Division II college referees. With your unicorns and futures out there going full tilt, you want to be sure officials have full control and command of the action. You don’t want chippy, physical play. You don’t want melees.
FIBA has already neutered itself by changing the qualification format, costing itself stars in tournaments all over the globe. This unnecessary, impudent EuroBasket referee decision could heap on the hurt. When will FIBA realize the damage its doing to itself and stop digging itself deeper into a hole?
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