Sometimes a game is just a game. Except when it has implications for foreign policy and national prestige.
America’s recent drubbing in the FIBA Basketball World Cup tournament is a warning of humiliations to come in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. Two reasons for our seventh place finish. First, the starriest stars of the NBA cannot forget that two-time all-star Paul George suffered open fractures of the tibia and fibula in his right leg during an intra-squad scrimmage of the USA men’s basketball team in 2014. He missed most of the 2014-2015 season. Better not to risk injury, and instead take the summer off to rest bodies sore from the pounding of the long NBA season and post-season.
Second, we have allowed foreign players to hone their skills in our NBA before returning home to represent their own countries before returning to the NBA to pocket some real gold to match their home countries’ Olympic Gold—rather like Chinese engineers and scientists study here, train here, and then return to China to make their skills available to the communist regime.
“We thought we had enough with what we had,” Jerry Colangelo, USA Basketball managing director said. He was wrong, and not by a little. France, led by Utah Jazz’s Rudy Gobert (26 points, 16 rebounds), upset America earlier this month in the quarter finals, meaning the U.S. will not win a medal in the World Championships for the first time since 2002. The winner of gold, Spain, was led by Gobert’s Jazz teammate, Ricky Rubio (recently traded to the Phoenix Suns), voted best player in the tournament. The Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo, voted the NBA’s most improved player, suited up for Greece. The list goes on.
What to do? International players come here from all over the world to earn fortunes and to become stars and super-stars. Then, when a competition for international prestige takes place, they return from whence they came, to help their native countries humiliate America. (It is not as if we lost at any sport, but at one with which this country is identified.) Should the NBA consider a rule that bars any player from donning an NBA uniform for, say, three years after he represents another country in an international tournament? After all, they would not be leaders of their nations’ teams had they not benefitted from their U.S. learning experiences. They come, they steal our intellectual property, and use it to enhance the international standing of their native countries, before returning here for yet more experience.
Colangelo, in his 14th and final year as head of USA basketball, is determined to bring to Tokyo the twelve best players in the country, many of whom turned him down for FIBA. The NBA can help by encouraging our top players to say “yes” rather than “no” to invitations to represent the U.S. Surely, the vastly wealthy NBA can insure the incomes of its vastly wealthy stars for at least a decade if any are injured while preparing for or participating in an international tournament. After all, the league has a financial stake in all of this: America’s reputation as the leading basketball power provides it with a head-start as it seeks to expand its international reach.
Is this important? Think the national morale boost that followed our victory over highly favored Russia in 1980 in the hockey game that became known as The Miracle on Ice. And the national reaction when the U.S. women’s soccer team won the FIFA World Cup a few months ago. Or, if you can remember it, the boost to our image when our basketball Dream Team ploughed its way through international competitors en route to our second straight Olympic gold in 1996.
In short, there are circumstances when a game is more than a game, when the particular sport is identified with a single country. Such is the case with basketball. A humiliation in Tokyo next year would be taken as a sign that America is on the decline even in areas in which its power was until now unquestioned. That is not inevitable. As Charles Krauthammer argued a decade ago, “Decline is a choice.” In a small but consequential way, we have an opportunity in Tokyo next year to demonstrate that it is not ours.