Basketball World Cup Qualifying With Jameel Warney

[EvanJ]

Basketball used to do World Cup Qualifying with summer tournaments during the NBA offseason. The downside was that most countries didn't get to play at home, and Manu Ginobili talked about that. Basketball switched to doing World Cup Qualifying like soccer with games scattered for a long time. The problem is that the top soccer leagues do not play during World Cup Qualifying, but the NBA does. Some of the qualifiers are during the NBA season and some are doing the offseason. Countries must qualify without NBA players (or with only lesser NBA players) who don't get rewarded by playing in the Basketball World Cup because the top players play in that. Jameel Warney from Stony Brook is playing qualifiers, and he was the MVP of the 2017 FIBA AmeriCup, which is for teams in North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean. Former Knicks coach Jeff Van Gundy is coaching the United States in qualifying. Gregg Popovich replaced Mike Krzyzewski as the United States's coach when the top players are available. The Americans who played in the AmeriCup Final include college rivals Marshall Plumlee (who went to Duke), Larry Drew II (who went to North Carolina and UCLA), and Kendall Marshall (who went to North Carolina).