After becoming an Olympic sport at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, the United States has struggled at men’s 3×3 basketball.
While the women’s team won a gold medal during the first tournament and bronze medal this year, the men’s team has not enjoyed that same success. They did not qualify during the first Olympic cycle and finished second-to-last during pool play during the 2024 Paris Olympics.
It is a dramatically different sport than five-on-five basketball played in the NBA, but there are several reasons why U.S. men’s basketball hasn’t looked very good in this format.
Here is more from Brian Windhorst about why this happened (via ESPN):
“If you want real talk about it, I’ll tell you why … FIBA doesn’t really want the U.S. to do good at 3 on 3. They really want that to for countries that can’t field five on five teams. So they do all these things. They have all these different layers and layers of things you have to do to qualify. I don’t just mean the team. Kyrie [Irving] can’t just show up and play.”
Even though NBA players are allowed to complete, per NBC, two rostered players need to rank “within the the top 10 of their country” and the other two must “rank within top 50 of their country” to meet eligibility rules.
The goal is to only have athletes who regularly compete in FIBA 3×3 events. Windhorst explained that FIBA “doesn’t care about ratings” and they prefer “growing the game elsewhere outside the U.S.” instead. FIBA doesn’t make it easy for Team USA to send its best players.
Emily Kaplan added more with her reporting (via ESPN):
“The qualification system is points-based by player and team, rewarding those who play in more tournaments, which mostly overlap with the WNBA and NBA schedules. Similar guidelines do not exist for 5-on-5. Put simpler: Players must go out of their way to compete in 3×3.”
All of the best basketball players around the world play in 5×5 tournament. But it’s much harder to become eligible for the 3×3 tournament.
According to Kaplan, on the women’s side, for example, TCU’s Hailey Van Lith has played in 25 different 3×3 events to get “on the Olympic radar” so she could qualify for this tournament.
Meanwhile, these events happen concurrently with the NBA (and WNBA) seasons. It’s not necessarily due to a lack of interest that this roster has no NBA players, and unless the rules change, it’s unlikely we ever see an NBA player step on the 3×3 court during the Olympics.
