Is Team USA men’s basketball headed back toward disaster?

Make no mistake: Barring outright catastrophe, Team USA men’s basketball will indeed be admitted to the 2019 FIBA World Cup field despite featuring not a single household name in the qualifying rounds.

The United States men play Uruguay on Friday and Panama on Monday. Few NBA regulars will participate. Frank Mason III, Reggie Hearn, Dwayne Bacon, Isaiah Hicks, and Henry Ellenson are the most well-known names; and these are known only to college basketball fans or League Pass addicts.

The United States men probably need to win four of six games in the second round to definitely make the World Cup, which will be played in China next summer. Team USA went 5-1 in the first round of qualifying, losing a shocker to Mexico in late June. That apparently led to some roster changes — few players facing Uruguay and Panama played in the late June window that featured the Mexico loss.

What that loss didn’t lead to is actual American NBA stars getting involved in this two-game September window, the only one of the second round that doesn’t directly conflict with the NBA season. That indicates that there is either no appetite for mid-September games among the stars who typically fill the U.S. senior men’s national team roster, or that USA Basketball’s management doesn’t really fear Uruguay (who is decent) or Panama (who had a strong first round).

Still, Team USA should make the World Cup. The team of fringe NBA players and G Leaguers did beat Puerto Rico twice in the first round, which gives the United States men some room to lose to Argentina (but probably not Uruguay or Panama).

What happens at the World Cup, though, is a different story. We may be watching the disastrous cycle of events that led to embarrassment at the 2002 World Championship and 2004 Olympics replaying.

For those too young to remember, in 2002 the U.S. men’s national team (coached by mercurial George Karl) finished No. 6 in the global tournament held on home soil. The Americans lost to Manu Ginobili’s Argentina in the second group stage, which set up a bad draw in the knockouts: eventual world champ Yugoslavia booted Team USA in the quarters. A broken American squad eventually lost to rising rival Spain in the fifth-place game. That’s three losses in one tournament.

It got worse: In the tournament that American fans actually care about two summers later, the Olympics in Athens, the United States men finished third, earning that team’s (very) young star LeBron James the nickname “LeBronze” for a time. (LeBron has since won two gold medals with Team USA.)

It’s worth remembering why Team USA fared so poorly in 2002 and 2004. The short answer is that the roster wasn’t constructed as well as it could have been and there was no continuity. Larry Brown, who did such a bad job with the 2004 roster he actually blamed himself, which is shocking if you know anything about Larry Brown’s career, had no real sense of how his weird roster should be used. It felt as if this wasn’t even really a concern as Team USA struggled through the group stages.

Those were problems USA Basketball purported to fix the following year by hiring a permanent coach of the senior men’s team and pushing two dozen stars to commit to a 4-year cycle if they wanted to play in the Olympics. Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski took the reins, stars including Kobe Bryant and LeBron — with his generational peers — bought in, and Team USA has been sweeping golds ever since.

But FIBA’s mammoth competition calendar change has really disrupted USA Basketball’s blueprint. The system had worked like this: In odd years, two dozen or so legitimate American men’s basketball stars would meet in Las Vegas for a week to train and scrimmage against young bucks and college stars. In even years, Krzyzewski and USA Basketball management would form a 12-person roster to train for a couple weeks in July, scrimmage against each other and a few national teams in warm-ups, and then compete seriously in either the World Championship or the Olympics. Because the Americans always won those tournaments after 2004, they wouldn’t need to participate in FIBA qualifying in the odd years.

But beginning in 2017, FIBA changed everything. Winning the 2016 Olympics didn’t qualify Team USA for the next World Cup, which was moved to 2019. The qualification system moved away from summer tournaments (which the United States men’s team was equipped to compete in) to a number of two-game qualification windows (most of which conflict with the NBA season).

So we have a situation where the stars of the United States men’s team haven’t played competitively since the 2016 Olympics, and never under new coach Gregg Popovich. They’ll be expected to pull it together next summer with very little preparation as a team.

Add in that we have no idea who will actually participate in the World Cup. 2016’s roster saw huge turnover, with only Carmelo Anthony and Kevin Durant bringing prior Olympic experience. Five of the best players on that 2016 team (including Durant) will be free agents in 2019, and while their situations should be resolved before Popovich assembles the squad, that’s a red flag.

A roster that isn’t so much constructed as pieced together based on who’s available. No continuity. You see the problems reminiscent of 2002 and 2004, yes?

If Popovich can’t get a solid roster for 2019, there’s no time to fix it before the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. (In fact, Team USA needs to finish top-two among Western Hemisphere teams in the 2019 World Cup just to qualify for the Olympics directly and avoid a last-chace wild card tournament in July 2020. And yes, this new FIBA system is a complete mess.)

Popovich is the one of the greatest basketball coaches ever, and the draw to play for him could bring LeBron or other big-name stars out in 2019 and 2020. Or history could repeat itself and USA Basketball could crumble again, having forgotten what it feels like to be humbled on the global stage. It’s a year away, but the sprouts of that potential doom are already showing themselves.