2023 FIBA World Cup Preview: Who will win the gold medal?

Warm-up games are done and the 2023 FIBA World Cup tips off in the Philippines in less than 48 hours. 

Lauri Markannen’s Finland and Josh Giddey’s Australia are the marquee match-up for the first game. Italy will face Angola at the same time, hosts Philippines will face the Dominican Republic a few hours later and the opening day of action will close with the best game of the day: Canada vs. France. 

Team USA will play their first game on Saturday at 8:30 a.m. Eastern against New Zealand.

The first games are the opening phase of group play. The 32 teams in the tournament are split into 8 four-team groups. Teams will play the others in their group once from August 25th-Augsut 30th. 

The top two teams from each group — 16 total — will then advance to the second round of group play where they will face the two teams they did NOT face in the first round of group play. They will NOT play a team they already played. This phase begins on Aug. 31 and ends on Sept. 3.

The top two teams from these groups will advance to the single-elimination quarterfinals which will be played on Sept. 5 and 6. 

The semifinals will be played on Sept. 8 and the gold medal and bronze medal games will take place on Sept. 10.

We are going to break down all these groups for you: the countries in them, their NBA and notable players, head coach, and quickly summarize whether or not we think they’ll advance in the tournament. 

We’ll make picks and predictions for each phase of play in the tournament and eventually predict the medalists. 

The United States is still the favorite to win this summer, but the field is wide open. Let’s get started. 

*Note: The teams eliminated at each stage do break off into inverse loser brackets depending on where they got eliminated. To maintain our sanity, we are not going to make predictions about that.