Hoops

Are the Boomers a top 5 team?

Looking at Euro qualifications and it appears that Slovenia and Croatia are out of the WC. Poland the surprise qualifier in Croatia's group, while one of Montenegro, Latvia or Ukraine will take the 3rd spot in Slovenia's group. That's two bogey teams out of the way, but Europe is Europe so there will be other tough opponents to take their places.

"on paper the boomers have the 2nd or 3rd best collection of basketball talent in the world

sadly it doesn't translate, especially to fifa ball and the only real way that we could do anything is if a massive emphasis was placed on pace control and defence."


If by pace control you mean generating pace then I agree with you. The current system is excellent for making oppo teams defend from early in the shot clock and defend a whole heap of exchanges. It's something a lot of European teams aren't overly comfortable with and suits our players, who've grown up in systems where the ball gets shared.

The World Cup is super tough, there are a lot of good teams out there, but we certainly have the talent and system to make the top 8 and from there, if our luck holds up, challenge for a medal.

Can we have him please?

Nz with Adams would be up there imo.

Anon #136, I think you’ve only been reading half the posts. Going back to 2016, I think more posters applauded him than hung him out to dry.

As was said often, we were only a dubious ref decision away from Silver medal. How is that a coaching fail?

Turkey with willbekin are a different team.
Finished top of the group in qualifiers Over Spain, Slovenia, Latvia, Montenegro etc.

Greece are being underrated. Could be a dark horse to win it.

Lemanis can be blamed. have you never read hoops.com.au before? this place hates him. its like 2016 even even happened.

Food for thought, we’re obviously assuming each team will be at full strength. If not, then it’s a lucky dip.

Take Simmons out of our squad and I’d drop us to 5-8; take out Baynes and Ingles and I’d drop us to 9-12.

Lemanis can’t be blamed for poor results if we don’t have strength and depth at key positions.

France with Gobert should rightly be second favourites.

Canada has a poor international ranking for a reason- they have never put their best team together and their international results have been poor.

In addition to the poor points available for winning tournaments in Asia, rankings are also based on eight years of results. We haven’t been good across that whole period.

Finally, the world rankings points on offer for 1st to 3rd are huge, but coming 4th in a tournament you basically get no separation from 5th-8th (despite winning an extra game than those teams).

So Australia’s rank is likely to be in the 8-10 range for a while.

It a all about tornament wins and international games and who those international games are against. So Euro teams will always have higher ranking than us because they play better teams more often. Even woth the intro into the asian region unless we get a medal at a world event 10th is the best we will get for the men.

The opal are higher because they finish higher more consistently and play more warm up matches against better competitions

P.s I don't know the formula for how they do the rankings, but they look absolutely ridicolous.

Philippines at 30? versus NZ all the way down at 38? NZ are behind countries that I have never even seen on the international stage (Uruguay, Georgia, Senegal?)

Canada at 23 - should be more top 15? Mexico at 13 seems high too

I feel like its fair to say that there isn't much if any drop off between say a lot of Euroleague players and some of our bench NBA players;

Therefore, there's a lot of teams from Europe especially that are very good teams.

As noted above, a lot will depend on match-ups (could get a real stiff QF matchup you never know) and how well you play on the day(s).

OMG, is Mrs Cadee back on here, nearly fell out of bed seeing that comment about him making team. But Lemanis will probably select him.

And Gobert will make France tough to beat.

Melbourne Boomers are not just a top 5 team but also title favourites. I bet they are also the only Boomers team thats had 4 Opals in it.

Germany will surprise when you add

Schroeder
Theis
Kleber
Wagner
Hartenstein

All comers are fortunate Goran Dragic retired from international competition. He led Slovenia to the Eurobasket title last year alongside Luka Doncic, both named to All-Tournament Team. They beat Spain and Serbia to get it done. Would’ve been a real handful for upcoming events if Goran stayed on.

I think at full strength Australia is better than current FIBA ranking of 10th. Top 5? We finished 4th at last Olympics and I have current full strength team as better so yes I think so, need strong results/medals at World Cup and Olympics though.

BTW that team above is for the Olympics 2020 when Ben will play, not the world cup.

Baynes/Maker/Bogut
Simmons/Bolden
Ingles/Creek
Broekhoff/Exum/Green
Mills/Delly

If Andre woke up and primarily played the lineup above with Simmons defensively at the 4 but offensively running point surrounded by shooting, we'd look terrific and be a tough cover for any team, even the US if 3 or 4 guys really lit it up from the perimeter.

But instead Andre will run his system with 2 bigs and 3 guards, all with equal opportunity and totally not suited to maximize our best players on offense, and with a second big guy unable to defend the perimeter.

His system is great with this current qualification team, and it's a good NBL offense, but time will tell if he shows the flexibility to change systems to suit the team, otherwise our best player will look like a super sized Cedric Jackson who's in a simmilar system with Bevo, his defender never leaving the paint when he doesn't have the ball, remember there's no illegal defense in FIBA.

Cadee is no chance.

We have Delly, exum, mills and sobey even if Simmons is out.

Slovenia plagued by injury and absentees cost them. Won't see them at the WC.

The teams above or close to us are

USA
Serbia
Canada
Greece
Slovenia
Spain
France
Turkey
Lithuania

Germany rising fast too.

Not with Andre coaching

Not with Lemanis as coach they ain't

Some teams have a plethora of talent in the euroleague.

Greece is pretty stacked when they all come together.

The way these tournaments are structured I think they are a rough chance of getting a medal but could just as easily finish in the 5-8 group.

I know this has been discussed, but at the Boomers game tonight their logo is really starting to piss me off.

Does anyone know why the logo change? Does it have some political reason behind it? i.e. they no longer own the BigV teams so neither do they own the logo anymore?

I know Tigers juniors also have different set of logo due to that reason. there are also whispers that Tigers juniors maybe forced to change name as legally they are not allowed to be called Melbourne Tigers?