2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup mock draw I

With only the EuroBasket left to decide Europe's 6 berths in the 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup, and with 7 quarterfinalists guaranteed to get in, that means only one unlucky team would not go to Spain outright. There are also four wildcards, but on 2010 three of them are on pot -- more on pots later -- so we can assign placeholders form them in the meanwhile.



In 2010, FIBA laid down the criteria for their seedings:

• The groups of the first round are balanced in terms of sporting competitiveness.
• The draw ensures that in each group, there is a balanced representation from the five continents. In the case of the draw for the 2010 FIBA World Championship, that will result in having a maximum of 3 European teams in any one group and a maximum of 2 Americas teams in any one group.

In 2013, FIBA Europe actually based their seedings for this year's Eurobasket on actual tournament results, and with actual stats used:

The 24 teams are ranked according to their results in the last FIBA Europe competition they participated and are divided into 6 seeding pots

It'll be interesting if FIBA per se does release the basis of the seedings (if any) they'd use for the draw. Or they can use FIBA Asia's pure draw method, that had Iran, China and Korea on one group. Good thing three teams qualify to the next round.

In either case, we can deduce FIBA's 2010 seedings:

Line 1 USA, Argentina, Spain, Greece
Line 2 Serbia, Slovenia, France, Turkey
Line 3 Brazil, Puerto Rico, Canada, Australia
Line 4 Croatia, Russia, Lithuania, Germany
Line 5 New Zealand, China, Iran, Angola
Line 6 Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, Ivory Coast 

Basing on that, we'd get: 

• Line 1: Olympic champion, Americas champion, top 2 in EuroBasket 2009
• Line 2: Next best 3 teams from Europe and the host
• Line 3: Rest of the FIBA Americas teams, and Australia
• Line 4: European wild cards, and the best team from EuroBasket 2009 not yet in Lines 1 to 3.
• Line 5: New Zealand, top two FIBA Asia teams and the African champion
• Line 6: World Cup noobs and the non-Euro wild card

Now how are we going to apply this to 2014? We have some issues:

• The FIBA Americas champion, Mexico, is a "World Cup noob".
• Hosts Spain are almost sure to be in Line 1, whether or not they progress far enough in EuroBasket 2013.
• We might see more than 2 wild cards outside of Europe
• There 5 "World Cup noobs": Dominican Republic, Egypt, Korea, Mexico and Philippines. Senegal is a borderline "noob" since they missed 2010 but made it in 2006.

Now I don't know how FIBA will handle this, with the Mexico case being quite hard to handle. But it is quite easy to remedy actually. Here are my prospect seedings, with the assumption that there are 3 European wild cards

1. USA, Spain, best Euro team except Spain, Argentina
2. Next 4 best Euro teams
3. Mexico, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Australia
4. European wild cards, last Euro team
5. Iran, Angola, Senegal, New Zealand
6. Philippines, Korea, Egypt, non-European wild card

Argentina gets in Line 1 for finishing 4th in the 2012 Olympics.
So if we'd draw from these pots, we can get these:

(In this table, "EUR" is a placeholder for a European team, "EUR WC" is a wild card from Europe, and "x-EUR WC" is a wild card outside Europe.)

Group A	Group B	Group C	Group D
Spain EUR Dominican Republic EUR WC Senegal Korea	EUR EUR Australia EUR WC Angola x-EUR WC	United States EUR Mexico EUR Iran Egypt	Argentina EUR Puerto Rico EUR WC New Zealand Philippines

Guess what is the "Group of Death"?

We'd be doing a few more mock draws after the EuroBasket later this week, right before the FIBA Central Board meets in Buenos Aires in November 23-24 to determine the wild cards, right after the Buenos Aires meeting, and another right before they draw in February (which they would have hopefully released the seedings).