Hoops

If every country had their best players

It's useful to have players that handle pressure situations well. The best way to excel in finals/playoff/WC/Olympics games is to have experience in them, especially in key roles. Basically all of our rotation has 'grand final' experience in their respective leagues:
- core NBAers Mills, Delly, Ingles, Bogut, Baynes all have multiple WC/Olympics experience, all have NBA playoff experience, and all but one have NBA Finals experience (that one, though, has Euroleague finals experience).
- NBLers Goulding, Kay, Creek have all gone deep into the playoffs in the NBL
- The player that struggled most, Landale, had no prior Boomers experience and just one pro season with a Euro playoff run.

Out of the other names that were not available or missed out:
- Broekhoff and Motum have played in FIBA major tournaments and several Euro playoffs a starter or main rotation player
- Exum led his team to silver in the junior national team, had a small role in 2014 WC, and has two NBA playoffs experience
- Simmons has no meaningful Boomers experience, but has two NBA playoffs experience as a key starter
- Maker has just 2 games Boomers experience, but has played in the NBA playoffs for the past 3 seasons as a starter for about half of those games
- Cooks' team made the grand final in his one professional season, where he appeared to step up in the playoffs
- Humphries led the U17 WC team to silver
- Bolden has just one NBA playoff campaign (shooting at 26%, by the way)
- Adel has no prior international basketball experience and no playoff experience as a professional

And how many of “Simmons, Maker, Bolden, Exum, Broekhoff“ play regular minutes for their teams (10 minutes or more per game)?

Yes, they’re signed to rosters and train with the stars and occasionally get court time, but only Simmons can be considered a lock based JUST on being an NBA player, and that’s ignoring whether he will actually fit into the Boomers.

At least Bogut, Kay, Goulding and Creek had lots of NBL game time under their belts before the WC.

If Greece makes the "star power" list, Australia at full strength isn't miles off. Simmons is up there. And we ran out fiveish NBA players this WC and have Simmons, Maker, Bolden, Exum, Broekhoff not in the team. That's reasonable depth.

Considering basketball is a low ranking sport in Australia with minimal general media coverage and when they get coverage a lot of it is shit, we punch above our weight limit. To be even in the top five, six nations is great. Hopefully with a little more luck it will all fall into place. The women have got medals but a lot of that at the time was built on the worlds best player in Jackson, the men don’t have probably any in the top twenty, Simmons could get there but the nba is a lot different to world basketball as has been proved in the WC just gone by.

2nd you need to argue whether depth (Canada) or Star power (Serbia Slovenia Greece) or a mix of both (Australia Spain France) how do you rank them.

But I think it's still

1. USA

2. Alot of teams
Australia Canada Slovenia Serbia Spain France Dominican republic?

Slovenia won the Euros with Dragic Doncic Randolph

Isaac

Having Broekhoff would also have resulted in less minutes played by Ingles and Mills (different positions and roles, but his shooting would allow those 2 to be rested more). In the earlier games, more minutes of Ingles, Mills, Della could have been “banked” as a hedge against the fatigue that was obviously a big factor.

On the other hand, the other top 8 (and more) teams could all name players who would have bolstered their rosters. Overall, we need to remember that this is probably our best result ever. We were just a couple of dice rolls short of winning through to the gold medal game. This after the Boomers were written off on hoops.

I suspect if we even just had Broekhoff in for Gliddon, we would've had the edge on Spain and then beaten Argentina. We took the Gold medallists to double-OT.