Coming Soon: World Cup of Basketball?

[Waffles]

From Yahoo! Sports:

NBA hoping to generate more revenue with World Cup of Basketball proposal

NBA commissioner David Stern has been vague on the league?s motivation for pushing to enter an under-23 team for future Olympics and shifting the sport?s biggest stars to participation in the world championships, but the change of course is largely motivated by financial benefits, league and international sources told Yahoo! Sports.

For months, the NBA has been discussing an end to the Olympic basketball Dream Team movement and delivering its superstars to a proposed rebranding of the world championships called "The World Cup of Basketball."

For the use of its most marketable players, the league office and many NBA owners are determined to create a financial partnership with FIBA for a World Cup that would allow the NBA to significantly share in the windfall of revenues.

"The owners would be a lot more comfortable letting star players play internationally if they?re sharing in the revenue," one league source told Yahoo! Sports.

The article goes on to detail a proposal from Mark Cuban to cut FIBA out altogether and just make it an entirely NBA-run event.

I like this idea, even if it's a money-grab. It makes some sense to me for basketball's premier international competition to be standalone event rather than a component of a larger one.

[NEW.ERA]

It'd be fun.

But it'd be like a United States vs. Spain/France/Argentina final every year. Lithuania, Russia, Germany could be fun as well, and with Steve Nash in charge of the Canadian Basketball team now, we might be more competitive. Who knows, I'd actually watch it.