How the New European Format Affects NBA draft prospects

There are going to be some significant changes to the format of European international basketball in 2016-2017. Previously, the international competitions have set up much like the Champions League and Europa leagues in soccer — there’s the Euroleague competition, which featured 24 teams competing in a round robin, and the Eurocup, which featured 36 teams playing a similar format. After teams were eliminated from the Euroleague regular season, they slide down to the Eurocup, similar to soccer.

This format did pretty well to showcase the top flight of European clubs from across the continent, particularly because it allowed for the most recognizable clubs and the best clubs to consistently showcase against each other. This is because Euroleague allows for permanent membership to the competition for certain historic clubs, such as Maccabi Tel Aviv and CSKA Moscow.

That format changed in November, when Euroleague voted to change to competition structure. The Euroleague will now feature just 16 teams playing a home/away round robin with each other, instead of the four pod and Round of 16 format of previous years. Likewise, the Eurocup will adopt the previous Euroleague format, with 24 entrants from 10 different leagues. While the Eurocup will still keep the previous qualification system based on domestic league standings, the Euroleague will now feature a more permanent structure: 11 full-time members, three domestic champions, the Eurocup winner and one wild card.

These changes come from the announcement of FIBA’s new Basketball Champions League, which will begin play this fall as well. FIBA and Euroleague, long at odds about the direction of international competition in Europe, finally came to a major head in their power struggle, with FIBA attempting to lure away top Euroleague clubs with the promise of increased revenues and exposure. The war of words and actions has been very public and, for lack of better terminology, very petty. Michael Long of SportsPro has a very solid breakdown of what’s happened and what it all means for both sides, and how this could end up being quite negative for European basketball.

From an NBA perspective, the major takeaway from this fiasco is that there will be change coming to how international NBA prospects can be scouted. Scouting overseas is already a challenge for NBA scouts, as international trips are often time-consuming, and it can be challenging to get the proper access to players. It’s also a bit of a challenge to keep track of players from afar, due to their participation in multiple competitions and the influence of international agents. With yet another international competition on the table, it could be a positive from the NBA’s perspective, as it will offer further exposure for guys who may not have gotten a chance to play on this big of a stage. For example, among the teams chosen for the Champions League are Serbian club Mega Leks, which was the home for three 2016 NBA draftees, and French sides Strasbourg and Le Mans, which are the homes of 2017 NBA Draft prospects Frank Ntilikina and Jonathan Jeanne, respectively.

While young players rarely get extended time in this type of competition, getting spot time to evaluate them against better competition than they will see regularly in their domestic leagues helps to better give an idea how the player might translate to the NBA level. It also allows for comparison between prospects in games they may play against each other. For example, we will get to see how Jeanne and Mega Leks forward Alpha Kaba compare when the two teams play in the FIBA league, which helps determine how both guys will play against NBA-level length.

This isn’t totally a good thing for NBA scouting, though. Much like the entertainment aspect of things, we don’t know how competitive this FIBA league is going to be, or how seriously the teams involved will take it. This league could very well end up as the CBI Tournament of Europe, a league for leftover squads who don’t have the talent level to compete with Europe’s elite, and a consolation prize for teams who can’t make the Eurocup. If the quality of play is like that of what we’ve seen from Euroleague and Eurocup over the past few years, then that’s great. But if it’s a shambolic mess of a tournament that teams mail in to concentrate elsewhere, then what are we actually getting out of it?

The ramifications of the past year of reformatting on European basketball are very unclear. Short term, we know that it potentially creates more exposure for young prospects, and that it should make the Euroleague and Eurocup competitions more competitive and entertaining. Long-term, the possibilities are pretty much all over the map, in good and bad directions. We have no idea if the FIBA league will gain significant traction, or how this new format of Euroleague will go. Euroleague could be coming closer to the creation of a permanent standalone league, or this could be an NBA/ABA situation, where the two leagues fight for power to the detriment of both. Either way, it’s fairly sure to create a bump in exposure for the international prospects of the 2017 NBA Draft, which is a bonus from our perspective.