Team USA Basketball head coach Gregg Popovich made a trip to Belgrade, Serbia as part of the Basketball Without Borders program. The longest-tenured coach in the league is plenty familiar with overseas faces and has made his NBA team, the San Antonio Spurs, a symbol of it — employing many talented internationals from players, to his coaching staff.
Serbia has taken a major step up in the last decade, becoming a dominant European nation in the sport. Most-recently, they faced Team USA twice in the Rio 2016 Olympics, including the championship game, which yielded a silver medal.
“From way back in the 80s, I could see that they were many foreign players who could have been in the NBA,” Popovich told Drazen Kanazir of EuroHoops “And now we are in the Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, which had a lot of players who have played and done well. The new crop of players here is Serbia is fantastic. They have done a lot of winning in U16 and in U18 tournaments. It’s still a huge sport and there will be many, many more from this area who will be in the NBA. Basketball is an international sport now. It started with American coaches doing clinics overseas and now there are good coaches and players all over the world. There isn’t one country which has a monopoly on basketball. It’s a wonderful sport for everybody.”
The international game has taken a major step up since the 1992 Dream Team had a smooth sailing and coasted to the gold medal, and now the influx of Serbian talent like Nikola Jokic, Nemanja Bjelica, Bogdan Bogdanovic and Milos Teodosic have made a splash in the league.
If Serbia's national team remains as talented two years down the road, it won't be long before they meet Spain, France, and the U.S. as some of the world's titans of basketball in the grandest stage of them all at the XXXIIth Olympiad.
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