09/16/24
July 28, 2024
SportsFilter: The Sunday Huddle:
A place to discuss the sports stories that aren't making news, share links that aren't quite front-page material, and diagram plays on your hand. Remember to count to five Mississippi before commenting in anger.
I'm thinking that the players for South Sudan live elsewhere around the world, playing pro basketball? Europe and China, perhaps?
posted by NoMich at 03:45 PM on July 28, 2024
It seems that Luol Deng and others are committed to working with kids in-country, so hopefully a homegrown training system will be developed that can build on what the current national team has already accomplished.
If the South Sudanese men's Olympic team were to stop playing right now, they have already laid the foundation for great potential future progress. It's remarkable to have people talking about a sporting legacy in a country that's not even 20 years old.
It also doesn't hurt to have a host of 7 foot people going about menial tasks in daily village life that don't yet know that they are walking around with elite level physical attributes in the eyes of the international hoops community. The tallest dudes on the continent fueling a nascent national program.
I remember when Ben Simmons entered the NBA draft. He was seen as a desirable freak. If he's still in the league a few years from now and some of these South Sudanese players show up with post-Wemby ball skills, Ben will be considered an ordinary end-of-the-bench practice player.
posted by beaverboard at 10:00 PM on July 28, 2024
To me, it's a miracle that anyone from South Sudan is in decent health, adequately nourished and ambulatory, let alone that the country is able to field a truly competitive national men's basketball team that has made its mark in international tournaments and is definitely worth watching at the Olympics.
The nation doesn't have an indoor basketball gym, and the roster is loaded with refugees from the long running civil war. Global Finance rates it as the poorest country in the world, but it's the top team in Africa and leads all the FIBA stats categories among African World Cup qualifiers.
They're in a bitch of a group at the Olympics. All the other teams are ranked in the top ten internationally, but South Sudan just clobbered Puerto Rico. They have a chance to advance out of that group, which also includes Serbia and the USA, who barely beat South Sudan in a recent warmup game.
The Jamaican bobsled team was a captivating story, but under the circumstances, the against all odds success of the South Sudan hoops team is off the charts. And they're really just getting started.