2023-24 G League Ignite
132 · 2026-07-17 · medium
Thursday's official announcement regarding the USA Basketball coaching staff for the upcoming international cycle was a real cold-light-of-day moment for me. I clearly recall purchasing a can of vegetable soup several years ago, checking the expiration date, and thinking 2027 is a long way away. Well here comes 2027, and yes, it's still buried in my cupboard. For the FIBA World Cup in Qatar, and then the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics, Erik "Coach Spo" Spoelstra will be assisted by Mark Daigneault, J.B. Bickerstaff, and UMPFN's very own Mark Few. Who will play for them? That's anyone's guess, but bringing back the 2025 U19 squad in its entirety is what I would do. What will wind up happening next year is the same thing that happened at the 2019 and 2023 FIBA World Cups: a random wax pack of "max-contract" NBA "superstars" that doesn't medal, but it won't matter because Olympic hosts don't have to qualify. One year out, the staff at nytimes dot com slash athletic already has a pre-fabricated excuse: when FIBA changed the calendar in 2019 to put the World Cup a single year before the Olympic Games, that made it difficult for the poor, fragile Americans. "A two-year commitment has been much, much harder for USA Basketball to sell to top American stars than it has been for the other great basketball countries with NBA stars," according to someone named Joe Vardon. I've been on about this before, but Paris 2024 was Team USA's Little Match Girl moment, one final happy Christmas party before freezing to death... and a team with an average age of 30.1 barely beating Serbia and France demonstrates exactly how cold it's gonna get, baby. The only way out of the ultimate humiliation, a currently-theoretical loss in the Los Angeles 2028 quarterfinals on home soil, will be to pretend that it never happened; that's the way the United States dealt with the 2002 FIBA debacle and 2004 Scream Team, and how the United States deals with pretty much all world events nowadays. So, other than tearing off the Band-Aid two summers ago, was there anything that might have been done differently? Was there some historical hinge point, some alternate path with more assured national team stability? I am so glad you asked. G League Ignite began in 2018 as G League Select, a program for elite prospects. After giving five-star 18-year-old Jalen Green half a million dollars in 2020, it set off alarm bells across the NCAA, and its impact on the dawn of Genesis EvangeNIL is a subject that could never fit in a puzzle game. Ignite became a national punchline as soon as SEC whodats were making $500,000 for cutting crypto promos. Meanwhile, nobody was looking at what the program was actually doing, who they were actually playing. The squad that did America's dirty work before the 2019 FIBA World Cup was G League Select. The program was intended as a national academy for international competitions, but USA Basketball's way of saying thanks for qualifying was cutting ties afterward. Ignite also played in the 2023 FIBA Intercontinental Cup and finished fourth. But by then they'd run out of available players, because there was too much capitalism going on in college. The 2023-24 version of G League Ignite was one of the worst professional basketball teams I've ever seen, losing 32 of their 34 games in the league formerly known as D. "I'm proud of the contributions we were able to make to that ecosystem," said head G Shareef Abdur-Rahim as he shut the program down for good, a mere four months before the start of the Paris Olympics. "With the changing environment across youth and collegiate basketball, now is the right time to take this step." While you're doing this puzzle, I'm off to go ponder what could and might have been for American basketball, all while eating a nice cold bowl of vegetable soup.