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USA basketball's loss to Lithuania looks even worse after all the Noah Lyles ridicule – CBS Sports
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Noah Lyles was not wrong. Yes, when the American sprinter, who just won three gold medals (100M, 200M and 4 x 100 relay) at the World Championships, called out NBA champions for self crowning themselves as world champions, a bunch of NBA players, including Kevin Durant to Damian Lillard, Draymond Green and Bam Adebayo, rushed to ridicule his ignorance.
But in fact, the only ones who look ignorant are those who got so caught up in their own insecurities and egos that they missed Lyles’ entire point. Lyles wasn’t saying the NBA doesn’t harbor the best players in the world. Any fool knows the NBA is the world’s premier basketball league.
As Lyles merely pointed out, that still doesn’t qualify a league comprised entirely of North American teams as a worldwide competition.
NBA players react to Noah Lyles saying: “The thing that hurts me the most is I have to watch the NBA Finals & they have ‘world champion’ on their head. World champion of what? The United States. Don’t get me wrong. I love the U.S. at times but that ain’t the world.” pic.twitter.com/HmlAPIEFG0
What is so hard about this to understand? The best hockey players in the world play in the NHL, but they don’t make the implied leap to world champion for their best team. They’re the Stanley Cup champs. Not the world champs.
The world’s best soccer players play in Europe, but the winner of the Premier League or La Liga doesn’t deem itself a world champion. That title is reserved for the winner of the World Cup. Again, pretty simple logic here.
Speaking of the World Cup, FIBA basketball’s version is happening right now, and a funny thing happened to the Americans on Sunday: They lost to Lithuania, which claims just one NBA player on its roster. Tyrese Haliburton had three points. The same Tyrese Haliburton who mocked Lyles’ intelligence for the audacious suggestion that to earn the title of world champion, you have to … you know … compete in an actual world competition.
“I really don’t understand the point of it because the NBA is the best league in the world. It wasn’t the most intelligent response.”
Tyrese Haliburton weighs in on Noah Lyles’ “World Champion” comments 🗣️
(via @ZakkasGeorge)pic.twitter.com/fLV6I3gXpV
Before any of you start with the dumb arguments again, yes, I’m aware that Lithuania beating an American team comprised mostly of tier-two NBA players in no way suggests that the best players and teams don’t compete in the NBA. And yes, it’s an understandable leap to make that if the best players in the world are competing for a title, the winner of that title would be considered the best in the world.
Again, that’s not the point.
By the way, did you notice that the only NBA players attacking Lyles were Americans? There is so much arrogance woven into this. Evan Fournier, who has played 11 seasons in the NBA and also enjoyed great success as a member of the French national team, didn’t seem to have a problem with what Lyles said.
“If you participate in the World Cup or even the Olympics and you win, you have the right to call yourself world champions. The way I look at is NBA champions… It’s just a title.”
Evan Fournier on Noah Lyles’ recent comments
(via ESPN)pic.twitter.com/SEkRi7UEvu
Call it semantics, but it is what it is. World champions are crowned on world stages. This goes for baseball, too. The Houston Astros won the “World Series” last year, but I didn’t see any countries outside the United States and Canada fielding a team.
Seems to me, now that I think about it, that a baseball competition called the World Baseball Classic was specifically created to determine the sport’s world champion.
The Olympics, to Fournier’s point, would be one another one of these stages. When and if the American men’s basketball team wins an Olympic gold medal next summer in Paris (which is no lock), the players who make up that roster can rightfully call themselves 2024 world champions.
Indeed, this current American team could still go on to win the World Cup in spite of the loss to Lithuania, and if it does, it can call itself the world champions. For now. That will still have nothing to do with the NBA.
For the NBA, this just makes some of the league’s best players look silly. If you’re going to go clowning a guy for stating that an NBA champion has not earned the right to call himself a world champion, then you better not turn right around and lose to Lithuania. Even with your B-team guys.
Would the Denver Nuggets, the current NBA champion, beat any other non-national team in the world in a seven-game series? Probably. Hell, they would probably beat all the national teams, too, save for the USA and so long as they could keep all their foreign players in their uniform.
But again, none of that is the point. At the 2023 U.S. track and field championships, Cravont Charleston won the men’s 100m final. Lyles won the 100m at the world championships. Care to guess which one is considered the world champion?
Yeah, it’s Lyles. Who was right all along.
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