Paris 2024 men's basketball draw: Bring on Wemby and the Games, Japan coach says
Victor Wembanyama. The world champions, again.
Bring them on and the Olympic Games, Japan men's coach Tom Hovasse said on Wednesday (20 March), a night after the draw for the Paris 2024 basketball tournament was held.
Japan were drawn with hosts France, world champions Germany who they faced at the FIBA World Cup last year in Okinawa and a yet-to-be-determined team from the 2-7 July Olympic Qualifying Tournament in Latvia.
“Wemby’s gigantic and a great player but if we focus too much on him we won’t win,” Hovasse said of the 2.24m centre with the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs who is the leading candidate for Rookie of the Year.
“We’ll have to see how they put their squad together. Maybe (Rudy) Gobert and Wemby will play together, maybe they won’t. Not sure how they’ll come out against us but Wemby is an interesting player for sure.
“I love the challenge, the match-up. How our pace, our team-first basketball will stand against him and their team. I love this kind of challenge.
“We want to shock the world at some point. I think this team is capable of doing so.”
The Japanese men had not qualified for the Games since 1978 until last summer, when Hovasse’s team finished as the highest team from Asia at the World Cup where they lost to eventual champions Germany 81-63 in their opener.
Ahead of the tournament, Japan played France in a warm-up friendly, going down 88-70. But a Wembanyama-less France went on to suffer a debacle at the World Cup, crashing out in the group phase.
Hovasse said the scouting which Japan have already done on France and Germany will come in handy, adding that as good as they are, the two teams are not invincible.
Hovasse expects France to be fired up in front of the home crowd as they try to rebound from the World Cup, but he also sees a chink in their armour with the potential in-house chemistry issues.
“We played Germany, France last year so for the most part, we’ve done the scouting, we know their roster which helps a lot,” he said.
“Germany outplayed us in the first half but we fought back into the game in the second half. So while Germany are the world champions, I think our players will have some confidence against them.
“France are at home and it goes without saying that they’ll have advantages - like us last year at the World Cup. They won silver at the Tokyo Olympics but then finished 18th at the World Cup.
“It’ll be interesting to see how they try to put the pieces back together. We need to find out what their issues were. But they’ll be locked in for Paris because they disappointed last year.
“They’re good. They have talent. How they can come together as a team is the question.”
Hovasse also likes the way the schedule has panned out. Japan play Germany first on 27 July in Lille, followed by France three days later and the unknown qualifier last on 2 August.
“We don’t know which team will come out of Latvia but Germany could still be hung over from winning the World Cup so it’s not bad to play them first because they gradually got better last year,” the American said.
“And France in the second game isn’t bad either because the arena will be crazy in their first game. But should France lose the first game, they will be scrambling. I like our order of play.”
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