Olympic Basketball Previews: From Team USA And Spain To Nigeria And Great Britain

USA Basketball is never and will never be measured against other nations. Any given edition of Team USA is graded only against previous editions of Team USA. That’s why we see as much or more Team USA ‘12 vs. Team USA ‘92 debate as Team USA ‘12 vs. Spain ‘12 debate.

Gold isn’t enough for Team USA; it never is. Not in basketball, at least. To be fully respected back home, Team USA must dominate.

There are two ways to view Spain as we approach the start of the 2012 Olympic men’s basketball tournament on Sunday. Spain is either simply the best of the group of teams that constitute the challengers to Team USA’s throne, or Spain is a true rival to Team USA, the only real challenger for gold.

How you answer that question determines how you’d approach the team. Either way, Spain is the No. 2 team in the world. But is the greatest threat to that status the rise of another challenger (France, Brazil) or an ultimate triumph for Spain, moving it into No. 1? Can Spain realistically beat Team USA, or is silver the best case scenario?

Brazil should be an international power. With a frontcourt rivaled only by Team USA and Spain, NBA experience up and down the roster and a brilliant coach, Brazil should be a top medal contender in every competition it enters at full or near full strength.

With Nene, Anderson Varejao and Tiago Splitter -- all three credible at center or power forward -- up front, Brazil is legitimately bigger than Team USA and as long as Spain. None of the three are elite scorers, but that’s what Leandro Barbosa and Marcelo Huertas are for. Ruben Magnano, the legendary Argentine coach, puts it all together.

France has one Olympic basketball medal in the past 60 years, and Tony Parker had nothing to do with it. Parker, arguably the greatest French basketball player in history, was just 18 when Les Bleus shockingly won silver at the 2000 Games in Sydney. Parker was preparing for an NBA career -- he’d be drafted late in the first round in 2001 -- and playing for France’s youth teams. Led by European and domestic league veterans, France romped through the Olympic tournament before falling to Team USA in the title game. It had been France’s best Olympic performance since 1948.

Parker, who quickly ascended in the NBA, took over for the next Olympic cycle, but France failed to even qualify for the 2004 or 2008 Games. Injuries ravaged the team at precisely the wrong times, leading to suboptimal performances at qualifying tournaments. But France played strongly enough at times to make the team a real concern at the top levels. That all came to a head at EuroBasket 2011, where France made it all the way to the finals before succumbing to Spain.

What is less known is that this era of Argentine basketball seems an awful lot like a limited term of success.

This should be a rousing tournament for mighty Argentina. Appreciate the Golden Generation while we can. (Yes, even Nocioni.)

There is only one player you’ll see in the 2012 London Olympics who means more to his team than Andrei Kirilenko. (That player: France’s Tony Parker. We’ll get to him later.) It’s no exaggeration to say that Kirilenko is the LeBron James of Team Russia: its best player on offense and defense, not just the Most Valuable Player due to quality, but the Most Important Player because of his all-encompassing role. In this exercise, let’s drill down further: if Kirilenko is LeBron, Russia in 2012 is the 2009 Cavaliers. There are some other good players (Mo Williams, Alexey Shved, Anderson Varejao, Timofey Mozgov) involved but just one planet. For Russia, that’s Kirilenko.

Kirilenko is the difference between not making the tournament and winning a medal. The Olympic tournament is famously exclusive: there are 30 or so respectable teams in the world, and only 12 make it into the Games. (Compare that to 24 for the World Championship.) Russia finished third at EuroBasket 2011 four years after winning the tournament, but that wasn’t enough for an Olympic bid: the Russians had to qualify via the last-chance tournament held in Venezuela this month. They did so, and quite easily. Without Kirilenko, they may have anyways, but it’s not certain. There were some good teams that got left out.

There’s something simply magical about Lithuania basketball to American hoopheads of a certain age. I was young back when Arvydas Sabonis, Sarunas Marciulionis and friends brought their Deadhead style and Eastern European power to the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona -- only 11 years old. But watching tiny Lithuania (and Drazen Petrovic’s Croatia) compete with the Dream Team was something like a geopolitical awakening. It was through Barcelona 1992 that I really learned about the Cold War and Tito and the Balkans and the Baltics, and it’s what first led to my interest in international relations.

It wouldn’t have been possible if the basketball weren’t great. Outside of a blowout loss to Team USA, Lithuania was just fantastic -- every glimpse I remember seeing (usually in highlight packages; there are some things about 1992 I do not miss, and lack of live streaming is one of them) was a window into a hoop culture otherwise invisible in the NBA. Primarily, that was because Sabonis was still plying his trade in Europe, not in the world’s greatest league. (He was drafted in 1986, but made his NBA debut in 1995.) It was no exaggeration that Sabonis looked like the greatest player ever who hadn’t suited up in the NBA; he was the one international player (with all apologies to Petrovic) who looked like he could have been on the Dream Team and not stood out like a sore thumb. (It would be the only time that Arvydas wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb.)

I have ranted more than a few times about FIBA’s status quo that places two Oceanic teams in every World Championship and one Oceanic team in every Olympics even though there are only two Oceanic teams that actually field teams, Australia and New Zealand.

While teams like the Dominican Republic, Macedonia and Jordan run through gauntlets for a bid to either of the global tournaments, Australia and New Zealand play essentially a home-and-home in regional competition, one that isn’t even needed ahead of FIBA Worlds years. It’s bizarre.

For decades, Angola dominated Africa in international competition. Angola represented the continent at the previous five Olympic Games, earned somewhat exclusive bids to the FIBA World Championship in seven of the past eight cycles and, from 1989 to 2009, won 10 of 11 African championships. Without a single NBA player and few NCAA prospects, Angola managed to run the continent in men’s basketball for basically the entirety of the 1990s and 2000s.

But that run may be over thanks to Tunisia.

On its own merits, Great Britain almost assuredly would not have made the 2012 Olympics. The nation finished 13th in EuroBasket 2011, a performance that marked Britain’s greatest ever in international competition. That’s right: being deemed the 13th best team in Europe is Great Britain’s high-water mark in international basketball. And this team has one of the 12 precious Olympic tournament bids in London.

FIBA actually granted Britain that bid after the team showed it could be competitive against the rest of the world; a 2-3 performance at EuroBasket did just that. This writer doesn’t actually begrudge Britain its bid, even though his favored Dominican Republic would have been next in line if there were one more spot.

Nigeria is one of the nations making its Olympic debut in men’s basketball in London. The Nigerians qualified through the last-chance tournament in Venezuela in early July, surprising just about everyone by eliminating recent European powerhouse Greece in the quarterfinals and beating an Al Horford-led Dominican Republic in the third-place game to earn the Olympic berth.

Led by Ike Diogu and Al-Farouq Aminu, Nigeria is a part of the wave of teams who have heavily recruited NCAA and NBA players with ties to the nation. Instead of focusing on homegrown talents, Nigeria and other nations have “recruited” players who never lived in the country or played in their youth teams in international competition. Diogu, a former Arizona State standout who played with a number of NBA teams, including the Golden State Warriors and Indiana Pacers, was born in Buffalo. His parents emigrated from Nigeria in 1980, three years before his birth. Diogu hadn’t played for Nigeria until this Olympic cycle.