FIBA Basketball World Cup qualification the 1994 FIBA World Championship in Canada. This setup continued until the 2002 FIBA World Championship in the USA which were also the Olympic champions; the supposed berth for the Olympic champions were instead given to Americas, the USA's home zone. In the 2006 FIBA World Championship in Japan that saw the field expand to 24 teams, with four invited teams popularly called as "wild cards" were invited by FIBA. This setup will last until 2014, when FIBA announced that they were renaming the competition as the "FIBA Basketball World Cup". In 2012, FIBA announced that the supposed 2018 world
1998 FIBA World Championship 1998 FIBA World Championship The 1998 FIBA World Championship was the 13th FIBA World Championship, an international basketball tournament held by the International Basketball Federation and hosted in Greece from 29 July to 9 August 1998. The tournament was contested by 16 nations and the matches were played in two venues in Athens and Piraeus. Because of the National Basketball Association lockout and unlike the previous championship, the USA Basketball Association was unable to send a team comprised from NBA players, thus causing the American national team roster to be comprised out of professional basketball players playing in Europe and