Not long ago, the Argentina was in basketball 20, 30 points ahead of Chile and Colombia. Maybe more. This Friday and this Saturday playing in Buenos Aires, he suffered to beat them both. Orange ball sport paired? Without a doubt. Like football. But in the latter, the South American qualifiers they tend to consolidate the powerful, while those of basketball in the world they tend to generate surprises, to match. What is the difference between them?
Not in the format, because they are very similar: to qualify for the AmeriCup, those selected from the continent face in windows of two dates with a few months of interstice. This week the second window took place, in which the Argentine team defeated Chile 67-61 on Friday, without great merits and with quite a scare (61-61 with 23 seconds remaining), and Colombia by 75-67 Saturday, in Sanitary Works.
The best plays of Argentina 75 vs. Colombia 67
With 3-1 successes and a fall, he was very close to the goal, which he will be able to meet in February, when group A closes in the trans-Andean country. He needs one more win, or else the Chileans or Colombians lose a game. The other member of the area is Venezuela, which Chile took to a second overtime yesterday, also in Works. The Caribbeans finally won 86-77, but the scare they did not suffer from long ago.
And in basketball the danger to the strong is not restricted to South America. Europe also sees the suffering of the favorites, or directly slaps at the hands of the weak, with this window system. What is the trigger factor? One very clear: the powerful are not counting on their figures, who remain in the NBA or in their clubs in the Old Continent. In contrast to football, certainly.
Decades ago, when the South American playoffs for the most important sport took place in groups and in a handful of weeks, there was room for surprises. In fact, it is often said that Argentina always had a hard time. It is not true: since they are developed in long format, of all the teams faced each other in a year and a half and with windows, AFA easily passed four of the six classifications for the world championships. Brazil, five. And the second subcontinental line is usually the already stable protagonist of the World Cup, after a long time in which it was not: Uruguay, Colombia. Why?
Surprise results tend to lose numerical impact in a long competition. The greater the number of parties, the normality ends up prevailing. As it happens in Formula 1: you can beat Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes in some races, but it is almost impossible to take championships away from them, because the seasons span many dates. What then changes in basketball? Simply that the best are not counting on their figures.
In football, they go out of their way to come, and one example is that Ángel Di María made his bitter complaint heard from Paris when he was not called up for the first window of 2020 (Ecuador and Bolivia). Also Brazil and the rest have their stars. But in basketball, Luis Scola, Facundo Campazzo, Gabriel Deck, Nicolás Laprovittola, Luca Vildoza and other referents do not wear the Argentine jersey in the qualifiers. They do not want to? No way: they can not.
Neither the best of Brazil nor those of other selected ones. It happens that their European clubs and NBA franchises do not release them, something that is prohibited in football. FIFA obliges entities to assign their hired players to act for their national teams. FIBA, his basketball peer, is in no condition to do so. It has no power over the NBA or the Euroleague, simply because they are not under its orbit. They are competencies that move outside the global umbrella. As if the Champions League and Major League Soccer were independent of FIFA.
What the International Federation of Basketball Associations does is negotiate with the NBA and Euroleague that their calendars do not overlap with the two most important selected competitions, that is, the World Cups (August-September) and the Olympic Games (July-August) . And he has managed to sign agreements with them so that they do not prevent the national federations from citing their players during those great competitions. But it has failed to go further; got nothing for his knockout windows.
And then there are transcendent name casualties, on all continents. Saturday’s qualifying day in Europe was a series of unexpected results. Spain (87-95), the world champion, lost against … Israel. Of course: it did not have Marc or Pau Gasol, Willy or Juancho Hernangómez, Ricky Rubio, Sergio Llull, Chacho Rodríguez, Nikola Mirotic. Serbia, a great power, did not have Nikola Jokic, Bogdan Bogdanovic, Milos Teodosic, Vasilije Micic, Stefan Jovic, and so it was: they fell against Switzerland (90-92), which in basketball is far from having a PBI per capita high. Greece lacked Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nick Calathes, Kostas Sloukas, Giorgios Printezis and Ioannis Bourousis and was therefore beaten by Latvia (66-77). A leading player in this sport, Lithuania, missed Jonas Valanciunas, Domantas Sabonis, Rokas Giedraitis and Renaldas Seibutis to such an extent that he starred in a defeat unthinkable in another time: against Denmark (76-80), and at home.
For years FIBA has been on a war footing with the Euroleague due to the availability of the basketball players. Both are creating competitions to weaken the counterpart, in a race that seems to have the continental championship in front but that ends up damaging both. The international federation can, and in fact does, stop national championships to prioritize their elimination windows, but the best players on the planet participate in precisely those two tournaments that it does not manage: there are more than 200 players that make up the Euroleague and ones 120 foreigners in the NBA who are left without wearing their national colors outside the World Cup and the Olympic Games.
A clip of the Argentine triumph over the Colombians
And without the best in their selected, the distances to the not so good are shortened. Therefore to Argentina, with Máximo Fjellerup As the most transcendent piece (one of the two runners-up of China 2019 present in this window; the other was Agustín Caffaro), it was so difficult for him to impose himself in Works on the growing-worthwhile-Chile and Colombia. And it seems that he will have to adapt to that as long as FIBA does not come up with a solution to his problem. How? Developing a very good -said NBA style- second unit, reducing the gap between the first world of its stars and the level of its satellites.
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