FIBA World Cup: 5 players from outside the NBA that could make an impact

With the 2019 FIBA World Cup fast approaching, here are a few players from outside the NBA to keep an eye on.

Seemingly every time basketball goes into international play, there are a few players not in the NBA that leave their mark on the tournament. Anyone who watched the 2014 FIBA World Cup will remember the outburst from Milos Teodosic leading Serbia to a defeat in the championship game against the US. And then he did it again in 2016, leading Serbia to a silver medal, losing to the US again. Teodosic would go on to turn that success into a few years with the Los Angeles Clippers.

But Teodosic is hardly a large outlier. The 2016 Olympics saw Real Madrid’s Facundo Campazzo, then of UCAM Murcia, as a key piece to the last gasp of Argentina’s Golden Generation. He outscored fellow older Argentine teammates Manu Ginobili, Luis Scola and Andres Nocioni en route to a quarterfinals berth where, due to a combination of an incredibly difficult group, some bad tiebreaker luck and a Spanish team on the warpath after some early upsets, they drew the US team, which ended in a more predictable fashion than 2004.

And you can keep counting examples of that. Mantas Kalnietis, Miroslav Raduljica, Nando de Colo — those just names for the top flight teams. Even guys for teams that struggled, like Nigeria’s Ike Diogu and China’s Yi Jianlan, were noteworthy.

Therefore, it seems reasonable to expect that as we approach this year’s FIBA World Cup, some player that’s not currently in the NBA will make his mark on the tournament. Here are five candidates to do just that.