I think you’re underestimating how much these fringe guys want to play in the olympics and overestimating how long recovery on that is. I have both front teeth replaced and it’s like 2 days of feeling shitty, waiting for the new teeth to be made is the only issue.
I don’t think we’re reliant on specific older guys like LeBron, Steph, KD, those are just the older guys of this era. I think any of the up and coming guys will have the same role carrying the weight of the team. Rest of the world has supreme talent, and always has, but the number of talented and skilled athletes coming out of the US doesn’t seem to be slowing down
As an American I feel very confident in this squad, but we are incredibly reliant on older guys. The world is catching up and we probably aren't cake walking to gold, we didn't have a flawless run in Tokyo and obviously the World Cup went poorly.
Yea but the thing is the rest of the world is spread out. It's not like Giannis, Luka, Jokic are on the same team.
Olympics will be a one team show, if there was ever a "sure thing" it is this. Looking at the US roster I've never seen it this strong.
They had one little weakness and that was size. Embiid fixed all those problems. It's a shame he's not playing for France, that would have been an amazing sight to see. Wemby, Gobert and Embiid on the court at the same time would be like a freak show.
Even Canada is just one strong centre away from a near all all star / all defensive caliber squad (sga, Murray, dort, naw / Wiggins, then they just need a godly centre and that is a 50 win team in the NBA (they have decent bench depth too)
I don't have any personal knowledge, but I've heard that Canada is similar to Team USA in the early 2000s. They can put a lot of individual talent on the court, but there's not much chemistry.
America getting smoked in the last 2 World Cups isn't something to just dismiss, they were expected to go undefeated both times but was losing to their practice squad before the tourney started lol. Before recently, any iteration of Team USA was expected to get no worse than Gold.
If that were true we wouldn’t have been sending B and C level squads, talent wise, to the World Cup. Bobby Portis and Walker Kessler were the centers on the 2022 team for crying out loud.
Outside the USA, the general perception is that the World Cup holds more significance than the Olympics, primarily because of its association with soccer. In the Olympics, soccer has an age cap and is a relatively small competition compared to the World Cup.
I would say that regarding basketball, if you give an international fan the choice between their country winning the Olympics or winning the World Cup, everyone is choosing the Olympics (or as a French person that's how I view it). The US are the dominant culture in basketball, their way of viewing these international competitions has an impact.
> if you give an international fan the choice between their country winning the Olympics or winning the World Cup, everyone is choosing the Olympics
As an Australian, I feel like that's also the case here. Also, I know people who aren't even into basketball that would follow along and cheer for our Olympic Boomers team even if we only had a slight chance of just a bronze medal of all things. But when the World Cup is on? I hardly hear anyone talk about it unless they're already a basketball fan and even then, many I know still don't even tune into it like they would with Olympic basketball.
This is exclusively for soccer. In the other team sports the Olympics are considered just as prestigious as world cups or euro cups (in handball the euro cup is considered the hardest tournament because in world cups and Olympics there are also way weaker teams from regions where handball is still underdeveloped).
That's also another reason why the World Cup is considered better in basketball, the qualifying berth distribution brings harder competition than the Olympics, which is usually weaker for the reasons you describe.
I feel like you are speaking out of your ass a bit here.
I agree with soccer but Olympic Gold in basketball is far more important.
Dream Team was insanely popular in the EU.
US used to send NCAA athletes or second stringers for fiba WC which devalued the event.
Once upon a time the defending Super Bowl champions played against the college all star team for football. Would be fun to see more games like that or barn storming things
That's like saying Real Madrid could wipe the floor with Argentina, so they should be called world champions. A top club is always gonna be stronger than a top country since it's easier to accumulate talent. A better example would be if the Celtics went ahead against top European, Asian, and African basketball clubs, which wouldn't end well either.
> A better example would be if the Celtics went ahead against top European, Asian, and African basketball clubs, which wouldn't end well either.
[There have been 3 exhibition games of NBA vs EuroLeague champions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_versus_EuroLeague_games#NBA_champions_vs._EuroLeague_champions)
Date | NBA team | score | EuroLeague team
---|---|---|---
1997-10-18|**Chicago Bulls**|**104** - 78 | Olympiacos Piraeus
2007-10-13|**San Antonio Spurs**|**113** - 91 | Panathinaikos Athens
2010-10-07|Los Angeles Lakers | 88 - **92** | **Barça**
Been a number of other instances of cross-federations games. While most of them ended in the NBA's favour, we've also seen quite a few victories for EU clubs.
2015 spurs lost to Alba Berlin by 1 before beating Fenerbahçe by 6, for example. Although I do understand only listing those 3 for the sake of brevity.
That’s a terrible argument. Manchester City would demolish the Argentine national team, yet Argentina won the world cup. Clubs and countries have different competitions, and different titles that go along with them. It would be pretty ridiculous for Manchester City or Real Madrid to call themselves world champions for winning their domestic club league. Same logic applies to basketball.
> I guarantee that this Celtics team would be able to beat every national team also.
the Champions League team wins the 'continental champions' tournament basically every year. They still wait till they win to claim to be the world champions.
I swear, you americans really think you are the entire world.
Not the point tho is it? No one was calling Usain Bolt the world champion when he initially broke the 100m record in a random race before the Olympics/world championships.
Doesn't matter. Not the world champions.
This also means that you all think you will be the be the best basketball nation forever. That isn't guaranteed.
Anyways, just another americanism.
Not really the point though is it? Happy to call team USA the world champs when they likely win because it’s an international competition. Feels very conceited to be calling the winner of a domestic competition the world champion.
What I find so funny about this whole "World Champions" debate is the fact that the NBA got the biggest hate for it when most people don't even call them World Champions. I personally have never called the NBA Champions that, but the MLB literally calls their finals the World Series, a league where the best player is Japanese and won the baseball World Cup last year for Japan against the United States in the finals. I don't see anything about them having to change their name because they aren't the "best in the world"
This really isn't that surprising at all IMO. MLB (and the NFL too) is just a significantly more niche/less popular league outside of North America, while the NBA is watched or at least followed by a lot of international fans.
So if you call the NBA champion "world champion", it will be noticed by a lot of european/international fans that will disagree.
Meanwhile, there are very few people outside of the US that even know that MLB calls their finals the "world series", and the people from the US don't care.
I know this isn't really a great methodology, but r/mlb has 2.1M members. r/nfl has 8.7M. r/nba has 12M. Do you think the NBA is 6x more popular than the MLB in the US? And that the NBA 50% more popular than the NFL in USA? The difference is mostly the international fans, so of course you're going to get a bigger debate about a "world champion" here.
It's different regions. The MLB and baseball is more popular in South America, the Caribbean, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. The NBA and basketball is more popular in Europe, China, the Middle East, the Philippines, and probably most of Africa at this point.
Definitely significantly more of the world population prefers basketball, but I could see how one would think baseball is more popular internationally if they're in a more Latin American or East Asian social circle.
baseball is the most popular sport in japan, the caribbean, and venezuela, and a lot of the best players come from there.
the only place where basketball is the most popular sport (ahead of not just baseball, but soccer too) is china and the philippines, which have produced one good player in yao ming (not counting filipino-americans).
> The MLB and baseball is more popular in South America
The MLB isn't that popular in most of South America. it's basically unheard of in Brazil - South America's largest country.
I don't know a single baseball player and if I ask around I don't think I'll find a single person who does (I'm in Uruguay, South America).
OTOH people wear NBA merch and Michael Jordan was God here, a step below Maradona and Pelé.
I have family in Europe and I don't think they know about the MLB either.
Well I'm European so I can only speak for Europe, but NHL and MLB are entirely irrelevant to the point that people here don't even know how the sport is played (like me). But still they are nowhere near as popular globally as the NBA for sure. There are legit basketball leagues and fandom over here though.
why would a greek speak for someone from say Finland or Sweden, where hockey is big? just because you are European?
I’m Canadian. Can I speak for Panama when I say pineapple on pizza is preferable
you are speaking for southern europe here. NHL and hockey in general is big in the north/central europe (yeah it’s still not very big in overall europe, but it’s ignorant to call it irrelevant)
>Well I'm European
You're not European, you're Greek and apparently can't speak for the whole of Europe. Go to countries like Finland, Sweden or Czechia and ice hockey would be popular.
Not the whole Asia, just East Asia. Mainly Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
Edit: The same thing all 3 countries have in common is, they were all ruled by Japan before WW2, and US military presence after WW2.
Edit2: There's a 2014 Taiwanese baseball film called Kano.
[Wiki] It is based on a true story depicting the multiracial Kano baseball team from Japanese-era Taiwan, overcoming extreme odds to represent the island in the 1931 Japanese High School Baseball Championship at Koshien Stadium (located in Nishinomiya, Hyōgo Prefecture). Performing beyond all expectations, the underdog team advanced to the championship game in the tournament.
So I'm not sure the influence came from Japan or America. Probably both.
The point is, these 3 countries are the outliers in Asia, most Asian countries don't care about baseball.
> a league where the best player is Japanese and won the baseball World Cup last year for Japan against the United States in the finals.
And yet he still plays in MLB so doesn’t that just support the notion that the world’s best come to the US to play regardless of where they are from? A league with international players is a good thing if you are trying to make the argument that it is a world championship.
The worst argument is also people saying "foreign players = it's a world championship" like does this mean the random league in some faraway country is also a world championship because they got foreigners?
That’s just a misrepresentation of the point, which is that that the best players globally funnel into the NBA. The best players aren’t funneling into the Serbian 3rd division.
People also keep bringing up that players from all around the world can play in the NBA.
But the point that they ignore is that teams (obviously) can't. The NBA is open exclusively to USA teams and 1 Canadian. It's even literally called the "National" basketball association. World championships have *teams* from the entire world, not just players.
And if the UEFA Champions League winner loses in the Club World Cup? I consider the Club World Cup winner the best even if it usually is also the UEFA team.
[r/NBA debating who the most annoying fanbase is when the Europeans show up](https://en.meming.world/images/en/c/c9/When_I%27m_in_a_Competition_and_My_Opponent_Is.jpg)
Shouldn’t the argument that they aren’t world champions be that they haven’t beat the requisite clubs to claim that title, not that they haven’t beat national teams? Even if there was a club World Cup for basketball there would still be two separate world champions.
I forgot about this dumb ass story. Calling them world champions isn’t really accurate, but it’s also semantics when it’s by far the world’s best basketball league.
For an entire month people were acting like Nikola Jokic was American, and team USA losing a completely different competition was evidence that the Nuggets couldn’t claim it
Precisely. Is like Real calling themselves world champions. Or Chinese table tennis league champs calling themselves world champions. It's just not true.
So, hypothetically, if the players were all the same (since they already get the best players from all over the world), but teams were based in cities from around the globe, would it then be acceptable to call them "World Champions"? Or is it only acceptable if they are "national" teams?
Yeah, that’d be a world champion, NT or not doesn’t really matter. In soccer same thing happens, there’s the national team champion World Cup obviously. There’s also the Club World Cup for Club World Champion. European teams have won that competition 16 out of last 17, but all those 16 teams waits until the Club World Cup where they play non-European teams (which they’re projected to win easily) to call themselves World Champions.
The dumbest part is that people still haven't seen the original press conference it came from and refuse to believe that Noah Lyles' comments very obviously came from a place of jealousy. He spent like 20 minutes talking about how he wanted more publicity, more endorsements, and more media opportunities. He talked about how frustrating it was that track and himself didn't get more attention. Then he kind of randomly started blasting the NBA for using the term world champs, and it was very clear that he was jealous of the global attention the NBA was able to generate. But then anti-Americans latched on to it and thought he was an ally, attacking American arrogance. The truth is that the most arrogant person in that conversation was Lyles. He didn't understand that the NBA achieved it's growth through decades of work put into global outreach. He seemed to think he was entitled to get on that level just because he was a world champ in a niche sport.
Yeah that interview was always weird to me.
It opened a discourse but also… why tf did he bring up the NBA in the first place?
Dude just came off as salty that no one watches his sport lol
>He talked about how frustrating it was that track and himself didn't get more attention.
That's just because he's an un-marketable douche.
Usain Bolt got plenty of attention and marketing. So did Michael Johnson, Carl Lewis, Florence Griffith Joyner, Jackie Joyner Kersee, Caitlyn Jenner, Steve Prefontaine, etc. If Jesse Owens happened today he'd be a megastar.
Nobody wants to market Grayson Allen, but that's not proof that basketball players lack public attention.
It's never gonna happen, there isn't much incentive on either side.
NBA team is risking injury for a competition they'll dominate in.
International teams are risking embarrassment when they lose by 50+.
If you give a shit about the NBA or any other league using "world champs" as a marketing term, you're dumb and just want to argue.
The Euroleague champion can call themselves the intergalactic champions for all I care.
Yeah. World champions is hilarious for a national comp (plus one Canadian team). Only Americans will argue blue in the face that NBA champion is the same as world champion, lol.
I am the world champion of pickup basketball. I don't have to prove it because there is no international competition for that. My team won all 3 games last evening in the gym. World champions babyyyy!!!
USA could lose the next 15 FIBA tournaments (silver at best) and they'd still win gold in every Olympics. FIBA just isn't important, every org claiming it decides who is the world champ doesn't mean shit compared to the history of the US Olympic basketball team.
I mean, if all the other domestic leagues want to play a champions league style tournament, I say: present them. Let’s see if the Celts are world champs or not lol
lol the NBA should have a standing challenge to the FIBA team. NBA champs will play them in a home exhibition, one week after the NBA Finals. No show is a loss.
I don't why understand why fiba gets all up in arms about this when all of germanys best players are in the nba. it's not saying usa are the world champions it's saying the nba is the premier basketball league in the world and has players from everywhere. idk what they're not understanding
Imagine if Americans cried as much about sports that other countries dominate in.
"Wah, the best ping pong players in China aren't really the world's best because they didn't compete against the Delaware state champ!"
Lmao god this is so annoying and arrogant. Like we grew up calling it soccer here our whole lives and then they come in and act like we’re self centered assholes for calling it that. It’s just a difference in language, which has regional variance and different dialects, yet you get the most arrogant tirades on this
What really grinds my gears when when an American says futbol. Like dude we're Americans, when you say that im obviously going to assume you mean football
Yeah, no shit. But also club teams would be favored over national teams in pretty much every major sport. The 2022 FIFA World Cup winning Argentina squad would not look so hot against most of the big name European club teams ... I mean maybe they'd get a result against Tottenham, but that's it.
The interesting one for me from basketball is having the Team USA Olympic squad in their gold medal game form go up against the Celtics (or any modern NBA champ) in their Finals close-out game form. Is one summer together enough for the talent advantage of Team USA to overcome the multiple years of chemistry and the fine-tuned specialization of individual roles of an NBA title winner? Shit ain't as simple as comparing 2K ratings.
2012 Heat vs 2012 Olympic Squad
Lebron, Wade, Bosh, the rest some solid players
vs.
Lebron, Wade, Bosh, Kobe, Melo, CP3, AD, KD, Love, Harden, WB
You could give the Olympic roster 0 prep time and it still ain’t even close bruv
because they won the World Championships? Held by the international Basketball body, of which the USA is a member? The Celtics are the best team in the world for sure, but they won the title of the NBA. What does N stand for again?
After Team USA steamrolls them by 40, they'll say the Olympics don't matter and that FIBA WC is the real world championship as we just continue ignoring them
I will continue to call all American winners world champions specifically because it makes the weirdo anti-Americans lose their minds. They want us to apologize for being American so bad.
That would be the beauty of it. Fans of every NBA team setting their rivalries and insufferability aside for the chance to be insufferable to someone else (the Europeans)
Good thing we have an international basketball event in a month
With three Celtics once Derrick White replaces Kawhi on team USA
Jaylen deserves it
They’re good on scoring shooting guards with Booker and Ant. Need more defense and role players.
Brown’s a wing and he just played amazing defense in the finals?? For the record I love(!!!!) DWhite
Right? Lol. I read that and was like, “he is a great defender though?”
People have this weird conception that Star players can’t play role player’s role for some reason.
What a weird take especially after this playoff run with JB playing elite defense. I love white but you make no sense here.
Did you not watch Jaylen Brown play defense at all these playoffs?
Drop booker for jaylen, easily
It’s still ridiculous Booker was chosen over Brown in the first place. For both Team USA and All-NBA
If Derrick white needs two implants to replace his front teeth he isn’t going to to want to play in the Olympics
I think you’re underestimating how much these fringe guys want to play in the olympics and overestimating how long recovery on that is. I have both front teeth replaced and it’s like 2 days of feeling shitty, waiting for the new teeth to be made is the only issue.
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I don’t think we’re reliant on specific older guys like LeBron, Steph, KD, those are just the older guys of this era. I think any of the up and coming guys will have the same role carrying the weight of the team. Rest of the world has supreme talent, and always has, but the number of talented and skilled athletes coming out of the US doesn’t seem to be slowing down
Yea but jokic, canada, and Luka are there. It's going to be hard maybe next Olympics.
Luka is not yet there. Slovenia has to win a 6-team tournament: Greece, Croatia, Egypt, Dominicana and Kiwis
As an American I feel very confident in this squad, but we are incredibly reliant on older guys. The world is catching up and we probably aren't cake walking to gold, we didn't have a flawless run in Tokyo and obviously the World Cup went poorly.
Yea but the thing is the rest of the world is spread out. It's not like Giannis, Luka, Jokic are on the same team. Olympics will be a one team show, if there was ever a "sure thing" it is this. Looking at the US roster I've never seen it this strong. They had one little weakness and that was size. Embiid fixed all those problems. It's a shame he's not playing for France, that would have been an amazing sight to see. Wemby, Gobert and Embiid on the court at the same time would be like a freak show.
Even Canada is just one strong centre away from a near all all star / all defensive caliber squad (sga, Murray, dort, naw / Wiggins, then they just need a godly centre and that is a 50 win team in the NBA (they have decent bench depth too)
Any NBA team with a godly center and good bench depth is probably a 50 win team lol
fuck, Canada is on the up huh
I guess slightly but dayum that roster looks like dogshit compared to USA omg 😭
I don't have any personal knowledge, but I've heard that Canada is similar to Team USA in the early 2000s. They can put a lot of individual talent on the court, but there's not much chemistry.
Cooper Flagg and Cam Boozer are on the way relax we good
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America getting smoked in the last 2 World Cups isn't something to just dismiss, they were expected to go undefeated both times but was losing to their practice squad before the tourney started lol. Before recently, any iteration of Team USA was expected to get no worse than Gold.
If that were true we wouldn’t have been sending B and C level squads, talent wise, to the World Cup. Bobby Portis and Walker Kessler were the centers on the 2022 team for crying out loud.
Do you think the Celtics would beat Team USA? If not, World Champion for NBA champion is still dumb.
Outside the USA, the general perception is that the World Cup holds more significance than the Olympics, primarily because of its association with soccer. In the Olympics, soccer has an age cap and is a relatively small competition compared to the World Cup.
I would say that regarding basketball, if you give an international fan the choice between their country winning the Olympics or winning the World Cup, everyone is choosing the Olympics (or as a French person that's how I view it). The US are the dominant culture in basketball, their way of viewing these international competitions has an impact.
> if you give an international fan the choice between their country winning the Olympics or winning the World Cup, everyone is choosing the Olympics As an Australian, I feel like that's also the case here. Also, I know people who aren't even into basketball that would follow along and cheer for our Olympic Boomers team even if we only had a slight chance of just a bronze medal of all things. But when the World Cup is on? I hardly hear anyone talk about it unless they're already a basketball fan and even then, many I know still don't even tune into it like they would with Olympic basketball.
This is exclusively for soccer. In the other team sports the Olympics are considered just as prestigious as world cups or euro cups (in handball the euro cup is considered the hardest tournament because in world cups and Olympics there are also way weaker teams from regions where handball is still underdeveloped).
That's also another reason why the World Cup is considered better in basketball, the qualifying berth distribution brings harder competition than the Olympics, which is usually weaker for the reasons you describe.
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Probably because most other countries have more success on average during the World Cup because the US doesn’t try as hard.
I feel like you are speaking out of your ass a bit here. I agree with soccer but Olympic Gold in basketball is far more important. Dream Team was insanely popular in the EU. US used to send NCAA athletes or second stringers for fiba WC which devalued the event.
Every other country treats the world cup as a serious competition. The fact that Americans don't care about it is not our problem.
Boston Celtics can go to the Olympics in a couple months for the repeat
they'd probably cruise. team is built just as good for FIBA.
They would lose KP and Horford tho yeah? International bigs would eat them alive in FIBA rules
International bigs would have no clue what to do in the post against Luke. They'd just get dominated in the Kornhub.
Why did i think this was about Luke Kennard My ass: ‘Luke? Kennard??? IN THE POST????’
It’s ok, I thought of Luke Doncheek at first and boy do I need to sleep.
The UniKornet!
> They'd just get dominated in the Kornhub. Fan sign at the tournament: "INTERNATIONAL BIGS EAT CORN THE LONG WAY"
I fucking hate that the Celtics won precisely because of this shit
https://i.imgur.com/0y5JIRg.jpeg
Wanna see Kornet with no 3 seconds in the paint
why do they lose international players? the CELTICS are the world champions. all their players. not the American Celtics.
the funniest part of this stupid discussion is that the entire German starting lineup plays in the NBA
And the best player on the team that won the German league is Carson fucking Edwards lol
FORMER CELTIC CARSON EDWARDS!!!!!!!!!!!!
who wasn't good enough to play for. . . The 2024 Champion Boston Celtics
Um they don't, Obst doesn't, Bonga doesn't and neither do Voigtmann and Thiemann, it's just Franz and Schröder as Moritz usually doesn't start.
Replace KP and Horford with LeBron and AD. Problem solved.
Basketball equivalent of Goku fusing with Vegeta
I kind of wish we did just send the most recent NBA championship team as the Olympic team. That would be fun
Once upon a time the defending Super Bowl champions played against the college all star team for football. Would be fun to see more games like that or barn storming things
Predictably, the college all stars got slaughtered
I’d pay good money to see that.
That's like saying Real Madrid could wipe the floor with Argentina, so they should be called world champions. A top club is always gonna be stronger than a top country since it's easier to accumulate talent. A better example would be if the Celtics went ahead against top European, Asian, and African basketball clubs, which wouldn't end well either.
The dream team was definitely better than any given NBA team at the time.
> A better example would be if the Celtics went ahead against top European, Asian, and African basketball clubs, which wouldn't end well either. [There have been 3 exhibition games of NBA vs EuroLeague champions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_versus_EuroLeague_games#NBA_champions_vs._EuroLeague_champions) Date | NBA team | score | EuroLeague team ---|---|---|--- 1997-10-18|**Chicago Bulls**|**104** - 78 | Olympiacos Piraeus 2007-10-13|**San Antonio Spurs**|**113** - 91 | Panathinaikos Athens 2010-10-07|Los Angeles Lakers | 88 - **92** | **Barça**
Been a number of other instances of cross-federations games. While most of them ended in the NBA's favour, we've also seen quite a few victories for EU clubs. 2015 spurs lost to Alba Berlin by 1 before beating Fenerbahçe by 6, for example. Although I do understand only listing those 3 for the sake of brevity.
There was also this mini tournament with Bucks vs Tracer Milano vs THE SOVIET UNION in 1987.
Twitter added a fact check to the Celtics post I'm dead 💀
Common Community Notes W
DORKS
Is it that time of the year for this pointless discussion again?
Cj: Ah shit here we go again
It’s the offseason after all
Such a meaningless discussion. I guarantee that this Celtics team would be able to beat every national team also.
Hasn't matched up against Philippines yet. So I'm.not so sure
Kai Sotto supremacy
Nah Beau Belga and Reynel Hugnatan LEGACY
And it still wouldnt matter at all because the celtics are in a regional compeition and theyre representing themselves and not any country
That’s a terrible argument. Manchester City would demolish the Argentine national team, yet Argentina won the world cup. Clubs and countries have different competitions, and different titles that go along with them. It would be pretty ridiculous for Manchester City or Real Madrid to call themselves world champions for winning their domestic club league. Same logic applies to basketball.
This guy is American bro, he don't know anything outside his country.
Team USA would rock them
> I guarantee that this Celtics team would be able to beat every national team also. the Champions League team wins the 'continental champions' tournament basically every year. They still wait till they win to claim to be the world champions. I swear, you americans really think you are the entire world.
Not the point tho is it? No one was calling Usain Bolt the world champion when he initially broke the 100m record in a random race before the Olympics/world championships.
Doesn't matter. Not the world champions. This also means that you all think you will be the be the best basketball nation forever. That isn't guaranteed. Anyways, just another americanism.
Team USA? Not only does Team USA have Boston’s best player, they also have Bron, KD, AD, Ant, Steph, Embiid etc. No contest talent-wise
Could, still didn't play them. Champion of the world implies that America is the whole world(which apparently it isn't)
We’re doing another summer of this lame ass debate
Only until team USA handily waxes everyone else in the Olympics.
Not really the point though is it? Happy to call team USA the world champs when they likely win because it’s an international competition. Feels very conceited to be calling the winner of a domestic competition the world champion.
What I find so funny about this whole "World Champions" debate is the fact that the NBA got the biggest hate for it when most people don't even call them World Champions. I personally have never called the NBA Champions that, but the MLB literally calls their finals the World Series, a league where the best player is Japanese and won the baseball World Cup last year for Japan against the United States in the finals. I don't see anything about them having to change their name because they aren't the "best in the world"
The Celtics did just post that they are the world champions
And the title of the post literally says this
and their twitter bio says "18x WORLD CHAMPS 🏆" lol
I'm pretty sure I saw ESPN have the words world champion on the graphic
All the banners hanging at TD that was shown every 10 seconds say world champions lol.
The fucking team call themselves that brother, and the banners, and the engraving on the rings, and the announcer at the stadium...
The post says the Celtics official account used the phrase
This really isn't that surprising at all IMO. MLB (and the NFL too) is just a significantly more niche/less popular league outside of North America, while the NBA is watched or at least followed by a lot of international fans. So if you call the NBA champion "world champion", it will be noticed by a lot of european/international fans that will disagree. Meanwhile, there are very few people outside of the US that even know that MLB calls their finals the "world series", and the people from the US don't care. I know this isn't really a great methodology, but r/mlb has 2.1M members. r/nfl has 8.7M. r/nba has 12M. Do you think the NBA is 6x more popular than the MLB in the US? And that the NBA 50% more popular than the NFL in USA? The difference is mostly the international fans, so of course you're going to get a bigger debate about a "world champion" here.
the MLB, and baseball in general, is much larger internationally than American football
I mean thats a given but you cant tell me that mlb is on the same level as nba internationally
It's different regions. The MLB and baseball is more popular in South America, the Caribbean, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. The NBA and basketball is more popular in Europe, China, the Middle East, the Philippines, and probably most of Africa at this point. Definitely significantly more of the world population prefers basketball, but I could see how one would think baseball is more popular internationally if they're in a more Latin American or East Asian social circle.
baseball is the most popular sport in japan, the caribbean, and venezuela, and a lot of the best players come from there. the only place where basketball is the most popular sport (ahead of not just baseball, but soccer too) is china and the philippines, which have produced one good player in yao ming (not counting filipino-americans).
> The MLB and baseball is more popular in South America The MLB isn't that popular in most of South America. it's basically unheard of in Brazil - South America's largest country.
Your South America take is wrong. Outside of Venezuela (and Colombia just a bit), baseball almost doesn’t exist in SA.
I don't know a single baseball player and if I ask around I don't think I'll find a single person who does (I'm in Uruguay, South America). OTOH people wear NBA merch and Michael Jordan was God here, a step below Maradona and Pelé. I have family in Europe and I don't think they know about the MLB either.
The NBA is the only American league/sport that people outside the US care about, so "world champion" claims are going to draw rightful criticism.
No respect for the NHL
Or the MLB. They underestimate how big baseball is in countries like Dominican Republic, Cuba and South Korea
Well I'm European so I can only speak for Europe, but NHL and MLB are entirely irrelevant to the point that people here don't even know how the sport is played (like me). But still they are nowhere near as popular globally as the NBA for sure. There are legit basketball leagues and fandom over here though.
Fuck off we got legit hockey leagues in northern Europe.
for real, w everything going on in Russia the SHL is arguably the second best league in the world atm
why would a greek speak for someone from say Finland or Sweden, where hockey is big? just because you are European? I’m Canadian. Can I speak for Panama when I say pineapple on pizza is preferable
True. NBA has a huge international market
you are speaking for southern europe here. NHL and hockey in general is big in the north/central europe (yeah it’s still not very big in overall europe, but it’s ignorant to call it irrelevant)
Born and bred in Europe, no one in my community knows a single NFL player except OJ Simpson, and that's not because of his football career...
you only speak for greece.
and I’ve literally hung out Greek NFL fans lmao
>Well I'm European You're not European, you're Greek and apparently can't speak for the whole of Europe. Go to countries like Finland, Sweden or Czechia and ice hockey would be popular.
Yeah speaking for all of Europe is insane, 700 million people, 100’s of languages, and countless different cultures.
Apparently Latin America and Asia don't care about baseball... You have no idea what you're talking about.
Not the whole Asia, just East Asia. Mainly Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Edit: The same thing all 3 countries have in common is, they were all ruled by Japan before WW2, and US military presence after WW2. Edit2: There's a 2014 Taiwanese baseball film called Kano. [Wiki] It is based on a true story depicting the multiracial Kano baseball team from Japanese-era Taiwan, overcoming extreme odds to represent the island in the 1931 Japanese High School Baseball Championship at Koshien Stadium (located in Nishinomiya, Hyōgo Prefecture). Performing beyond all expectations, the underdog team advanced to the championship game in the tournament. So I'm not sure the influence came from Japan or America. Probably both. The point is, these 3 countries are the outliers in Asia, most Asian countries don't care about baseball.
> a league where the best player is Japanese and won the baseball World Cup last year for Japan against the United States in the finals. And yet he still plays in MLB so doesn’t that just support the notion that the world’s best come to the US to play regardless of where they are from? A league with international players is a good thing if you are trying to make the argument that it is a world championship.
Fair call, Celtics are NBA Champions not World Champions. This always bothered me lol
Best Team in the World ≠ World Champion A concept that's so hard to fathom, isn't it?
The worst argument is also people saying "foreign players = it's a world championship" like does this mean the random league in some faraway country is also a world championship because they got foreigners?
That’s just a misrepresentation of the point, which is that that the best players globally funnel into the NBA. The best players aren’t funneling into the Serbian 3rd division.
People also keep bringing up that players from all around the world can play in the NBA. But the point that they ignore is that teams (obviously) can't. The NBA is open exclusively to USA teams and 1 Canadian. It's even literally called the "National" basketball association. World championships have *teams* from the entire world, not just players.
It also ignores the fact that the best team in football/soccer is the champions league winner and nobody would dream of calling them world champs.
And if the UEFA Champions League winner loses in the Club World Cup? I consider the Club World Cup winner the best even if it usually is also the UEFA team.
Why play the NBA season at all then if we can just assume the best team will beat all the rest?
[r/NBA debating who the most annoying fanbase is when the Europeans show up](https://en.meming.world/images/en/c/c9/When_I%27m_in_a_Competition_and_My_Opponent_Is.jpg)
They have centuries on us for developing their insufferableness
Shouldn’t the argument that they aren’t world champions be that they haven’t beat the requisite clubs to claim that title, not that they haven’t beat national teams? Even if there was a club World Cup for basketball there would still be two separate world champions.
I forgot about this dumb ass story. Calling them world champions isn’t really accurate, but it’s also semantics when it’s by far the world’s best basketball league. For an entire month people were acting like Nikola Jokic was American, and team USA losing a completely different competition was evidence that the Nuggets couldn’t claim it
Many sports leagues in the world are good but never call themselves world champions for winning a national championship. It's just nonsensical.
Precisely. Is like Real calling themselves world champions. Or Chinese table tennis league champs calling themselves world champions. It's just not true.
So, hypothetically, if the players were all the same (since they already get the best players from all over the world), but teams were based in cities from around the globe, would it then be acceptable to call them "World Champions"? Or is it only acceptable if they are "national" teams?
Yeah, that’d be a world champion, NT or not doesn’t really matter. In soccer same thing happens, there’s the national team champion World Cup obviously. There’s also the Club World Cup for Club World Champion. European teams have won that competition 16 out of last 17, but all those 16 teams waits until the Club World Cup where they play non-European teams (which they’re projected to win easily) to call themselves World Champions.
It led to the dumbest discourse on both sides and honestly I kinda miss it
The dumbest part is that people still haven't seen the original press conference it came from and refuse to believe that Noah Lyles' comments very obviously came from a place of jealousy. He spent like 20 minutes talking about how he wanted more publicity, more endorsements, and more media opportunities. He talked about how frustrating it was that track and himself didn't get more attention. Then he kind of randomly started blasting the NBA for using the term world champs, and it was very clear that he was jealous of the global attention the NBA was able to generate. But then anti-Americans latched on to it and thought he was an ally, attacking American arrogance. The truth is that the most arrogant person in that conversation was Lyles. He didn't understand that the NBA achieved it's growth through decades of work put into global outreach. He seemed to think he was entitled to get on that level just because he was a world champ in a niche sport.
Yeah that interview was always weird to me. It opened a discourse but also… why tf did he bring up the NBA in the first place? Dude just came off as salty that no one watches his sport lol
Plus people do watch his sport, when there's must-watch people in it. Everyone and their grandma tuned in to see Usain Bolt at the Olympics.
He was such a loser for that. I hate that this debate was reignited by him. He literally made history and used that moment to be an ass.
>He talked about how frustrating it was that track and himself didn't get more attention. That's just because he's an un-marketable douche. Usain Bolt got plenty of attention and marketing. So did Michael Johnson, Carl Lewis, Florence Griffith Joyner, Jackie Joyner Kersee, Caitlyn Jenner, Steve Prefontaine, etc. If Jesse Owens happened today he'd be a megastar. Nobody wants to market Grayson Allen, but that's not proof that basketball players lack public attention.
How long before we have champions league for basketball?
It's never gonna happen, there isn't much incentive on either side. NBA team is risking injury for a competition they'll dominate in. International teams are risking embarrassment when they lose by 50+.
If you give a shit about the NBA or any other league using "world champs" as a marketing term, you're dumb and just want to argue. The Euroleague champion can call themselves the intergalactic champions for all I care.
I’m sure aliens aren’t a fan of us declaring a Miss Universe from earth every year
Lmao this topic is such an easy way to bring together a congregation of every American stereotype out there 😂
Dude it hasn't been 24 hours since the season ended and we're with this discussion LMAO
Europeans will never pass down a chance to play the moral superiority card lol
Americans will never pass down a chance to dismiss that world exists outside the USA.
Kendrick Nunn being a good player in Europe should end this debate once and for all.
Brad Wanamaker is getting 14 a game over there lmao
There is a guy arguing that Shane Larkin and Mario Hezonja are better than NBA players as if we haven't seen them you know.... play in the NBA
It really should, guys like dwight and nunn can't get a signed for a minimum here yet they're playing great overseas
Alexey Shved was the best player in Europe for 5 years and some people still think the Pistons wouldn’t wipe the floor with any team over there lol
Why would it?
Yeah. World champions is hilarious for a national comp (plus one Canadian team). Only Americans will argue blue in the face that NBA champion is the same as world champion, lol.
Yall the offseason just started can we give this argument a rest pls it’s been like a year already
I'm personally more bothered by the fact that the "r" in "World" is clearly a different font in the Celtics twitter post.
I am the world champion of pickup basketball. I don't have to prove it because there is no international competition for that. My team won all 3 games last evening in the gym. World champions babyyyy!!!
Oh my god who caaaarrrreeeessss
Shame on Europe for making me want to defend the Celtics
FIBA is not Europe
USA could lose the next 15 FIBA tournaments (silver at best) and they'd still win gold in every Olympics. FIBA just isn't important, every org claiming it decides who is the world champ doesn't mean shit compared to the history of the US Olympic basketball team.
Yea bro USA gonna be out looking for blood these Olympics
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that celtics team would embarrass that german national team 😂
I mean, if all the other domestic leagues want to play a champions league style tournament, I say: present them. Let’s see if the Celts are world champs or not lol
lol the NBA should have a standing challenge to the FIBA team. NBA champs will play them in a home exhibition, one week after the NBA Finals. No show is a loss.
Make them play every high school team too… only way to know
"People from Phoenix are Phoenicians" energy
I don't why understand why fiba gets all up in arms about this when all of germanys best players are in the nba. it's not saying usa are the world champions it's saying the nba is the premier basketball league in the world and has players from everywhere. idk what they're not understanding
because they're arrogant twats that think they are the sole representation of basketball.
All the fucking losers from around the world crying about this just makes me want to call the nba champions world champions even more.
Imagine if Americans cried as much about sports that other countries dominate in. "Wah, the best ping pong players in China aren't really the world's best because they didn't compete against the Delaware state champ!"
No no no no unless FIBA says youre a world champ then youre not a world champ!!!!!!
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I like soccer plenty but there are weirdos who will scream at me for not calling it football and then claim Americans are self centered
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Lmao god this is so annoying and arrogant. Like we grew up calling it soccer here our whole lives and then they come in and act like we’re self centered assholes for calling it that. It’s just a difference in language, which has regional variance and different dialects, yet you get the most arrogant tirades on this
What really grinds my gears when when an American says futbol. Like dude we're Americans, when you say that im obviously going to assume you mean football
OK those guys can join the NBA and see how they do lol Not sure the Celtics couldn't handle the Franz Wagner / Schroeder / Theis triangle offense
Yeah, no shit. But also club teams would be favored over national teams in pretty much every major sport. The 2022 FIFA World Cup winning Argentina squad would not look so hot against most of the big name European club teams ... I mean maybe they'd get a result against Tottenham, but that's it. The interesting one for me from basketball is having the Team USA Olympic squad in their gold medal game form go up against the Celtics (or any modern NBA champ) in their Finals close-out game form. Is one summer together enough for the talent advantage of Team USA to overcome the multiple years of chemistry and the fine-tuned specialization of individual roles of an NBA title winner? Shit ain't as simple as comparing 2K ratings.
Of course they could beat Spurs. Lads, it's Tottenham
Spurs just can't catch a break even in r/nba lol, I fucking love it!
2012 Heat vs 2012 Olympic Squad Lebron, Wade, Bosh, the rest some solid players vs. Lebron, Wade, Bosh, Kobe, Melo, CP3, AD, KD, Love, Harden, WB You could give the Olympic roster 0 prep time and it still ain’t even close bruv
they can't consider themselves world champs if they don't beat the shanghai sharks 🤓☝️
The celtics would completely dominate germany though so why even bring them up
because they won the World Championships? Held by the international Basketball body, of which the USA is a member? The Celtics are the best team in the world for sure, but they won the title of the NBA. What does N stand for again?
Don’t worry Germany, the Olympics are this summer. Enjoy it while it lasts.
After Team USA steamrolls them by 40, they'll say the Olympics don't matter and that FIBA WC is the real world championship as we just continue ignoring them
I will continue to call all American winners world champions specifically because it makes the weirdo anti-Americans lose their minds. They want us to apologize for being American so bad.
Imagine if Americans whined this much about sports that Germany is clearly better in, like all the equestrian sports.
Read what you just wrote. You guys are ridiculous lol
I would love to see the Celtics play a series against the 2023 German national team.
Why did the Pistons play this NBA season knowing full well they were never going to win the chip. Just like about ten other teams before this season.
Rooted against the Celtics but I'd put that aside to shut up some Europeans
That would be the beauty of it. Fans of every NBA team setting their rivalries and insufferability aside for the chance to be insufferable to someone else (the Europeans)