Image via Complex Original
While the 2014 FIBA World Cup tips off on Saturday, there’s still a lot most people don’t know about this tournament. Compared with the Olympics, it’s a relatively small-scale operation that just doesn’t draw a lot of attention in the United States, although in recent years that has changed some. The stakes are pretty high, as the winner of the tournament earns an automatic spot in the 2016 Olympics, so for all teams involved a trophy will mean they won’t have to use their best players in international competition.
But, like any tournament that is 60-plus years old, the World Cup has a fairly interesting and complex history that lends itself to some strange goings-on. When it started as the FIBA World Championship in 1950, all of the games were played outside. The players were all amateurs, or in one case barely more than a pickup team. Political protests even prevented games from being played.
With many of these facts falling into the “strange but true” category, here are 15 Things You Didn't Know About the FIBA World Cup.
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Yugoslavia has won the most titles with five.
While the country may not exist anymore, Yugoslavia still holds the belt with five championships. With four wins the USA can catch them this year, and the Soviet Union is in third with three wins.
The first U.S. team was made up solely of factory workers from a Chevy plant in Denver.
This is what happens when you really don’t care about how you do in a competition. Apparently, someone knew a guy who played basketball and also happened to be an auto worker, so he grabbed his buddies and they all headed down to Argentina. They actually did pretty well, finishing second to the host nation.
The first final was held outdoors in front of 25,000 people.
It’s pretty impressive that so many people in 1950s Argentina liked basketball enough to actually congregate in Buenos Aires’ Luna Park to watch the game, and even more impressive that they could take an accurate head count. Argentina won the game and it remains the only time they’ve lifted the trophy.
The record for highest attendance was set at the 1954 Final, where USA defeated Brazil in front of 34,000 people at the Maracanãzinho.
While the Maracanã stadium may be Brazil’s most famous, there’s also its little brother the Maracanãzinho. And, much like its counterpart, it holds a ton of people.
Political turmoil prevented many games from being played in the 1950s and 1960s.
Global politics infiltrated the games during the 1950s and 1960s, with the European nations often at the center of the drama. Both the Soviets and Bulgaria refused to take the court for certain games due to the Cold War, allowing Brazil to step in and claim back-to-back titles.
It was so cold for some of the games in 1967 that players needed electric heaters and blankets on the bench.
What we think of as summer is actually quite the opposite in Uruguay, but they still decided to have games in a steel and concrete arena with no insulation known as “The Cylinder.” Temperatures on the court reached lows of 35 degrees, which is probably not ideal for basketball.
Brazil holds the record for most points scored in a game with 154 in 1978.
All the more remarkable is that Brazil did this without the benefit of a three point line. That China team must have been pretty damn bad.
Clippers head coach Doc Rivers was the MVP of the 1982 tournament.
Before he was an NBA head coach, before he even played a game in the NBA, Doc Rivers was a college star at Marquette. Playing for Team USA in 1982, he led the team to a bronze medal after losing to the Soviet Union in the semifinals.
The 1994 tournament was the first time professionals were allowed to participate.
Once the pros got involved, it was all over for the rest of the world. The Dream Team II got their feet wet together as a team in the 1994 World Cup, and led by Reggie Miller and tournament MVP Shaquille O’Neal the U.S. took home the trophy with an average margin of victory of 37.7 points.
The U.S.'s biggest win was a 146-67 thrashing of South Korea in 1990.
South Korea is not a basketball power. That is probably something you did not need to be told, but Team USA really hammered that point home by logging a narrow 79 point victory in group play. For their three group stage games, the Koreans were outscored by a total of 151 points.
In 2002, Argentina snapped USA's 58-game winning streak in games played with professional players.
The downfall of USA Basketball began at the 2002 FIBA World Cup, where they lost for the first time ever at the tournament with professional players. They also lost to Yugoslavia and Spain afterwards, finishing sixth overall.
The tournament will be expanded to 32 teams and moved to the year after the FIFA World Cup beginning in 2019 to better mirror soccer's calendar.
Does this new format of 32 teams, group stages, and all the rest sound familiar? That’s because FIBA is deliberately trying to mirror FIFA’s success with their own World Cup. By moving it to the year after their soccer counterpart, it also means they won’t have the share the summer sporting spotlight.
Since professional players were allowed into the tournament, the only non-NBA player to win MVP was Yugoslavia's Dejan Bodiroga in 1998.
Admittedly, this is a bit of a tainted award; no NBA players were allowed in that tournament due to the lockout. That didn’t leave many viable candidates among the established pros.
The leading all-time scorer is Oscar Schmidt of Brazil, who averaged 24.1 PPG over 35 total games.
Inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013, Schmidt has one very famous admirer: Kobe Bryant.
No player has ever been named the MVP of the tournament more than once.
Pau Gasol could change all that this year, but will have stiff competition from Team USA if he wants to make a little bit of history.
