MANILA (Enzo Flojo's Asia on My Mind) - Anyone who says the FIBA Asia Cup has diminished in significance is dead wrong because winning the FIBA Asia Cup is the only way to go down in history as kings of Asian basketball.

One has to understand that the FIBA Asia Cup is the only remaining continental basketball tournament in Asia involving national teams. There will be no more FIBA Asia Challenge, the quadrennial Asian Games do not carry any weight in terms of FIBA rankings and the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2019 Asia Qualifiers will not crown a champion. Once the top seven teams are known after the two rounds of competition in the Asia Qualifiers, that's it. There won't be any Quarter-Finals, Semi-Finals or Final. There won't be any podium spots for the seven World Cup-bound teams. No trophies. No medals.

To be undisputed kings of Asian basketball - and for four years at that - a team must rule the FIBA Asia Cup, with the next ones in 2021, 2025, 2029 and so forth. Countries who treat the FIBA Asia Cup as a glorified training tournament or as a jump-off point for "bigger" things will be missing out in a huge way, and this is something many teams probably learned the hard way this year in the FIBA Asia Cup 2017 held in Beirut, Lebanon.

A number of teams entered the competition with rosters that were missing some big names, and perhaps that played a factor in how well or how badly they fared. A number of fans sounded off on social media about their feelings when Australia, which came from FIBA Oceania, won the title. Some fans felt strange about the Boomers being called kings of Asian basketball for the next four years, but perhaps the ending would have been different had Yi Jianlian been around for China, Andray Blatche seen action for the Philippines, Zaid Abbas suited up for Jordan or had New Zealand fielded more of their elite players.

Of course, injuries took their toll on some squads. Chinese Taipei lost a few players who got sidelined after the Jones Cup 2017, and to a certain extent, the same can be said of India and Japan. Also, perhaps if Jordan and Qatar were able to iron out the eligibility of guys like Kevin Ware and Sammy Monroe, the landscape of the entire competition, especially in the knockout stages, would have been much different.

By tournament's end, it was crystal clear how different the FIBA Asia Cup 2017 was from the continental championships that came before it. The format was different, the level of competition was the highest ever and though there were no outright World Cup or Olympic slots up for grabs, the prize was an undisputed place in history as the first-ever Asia Cup champions who would carry that title for the next four years even after both the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2019 and Tokyo Olympics 2020 have ended.

What transpired this year was our finally seeing the new lay of the land for Asian basketball. There is only one path to the throne, one path to utmost glory, one path to be kings of Asian basketball, and it goes through the FIBA Asia Cup.

Enzo Flojo

FIBA

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