Spain overtakes USA for No. 1 spot in FIBA males’s hoops rankings

For the primary time in 12 years, USA Basketball is just not atop the world males’s rankings.

FIBA, the game’s governing physique, up to date its rankings Friday, and Spain moved into the highest spot, a sliver forward of the U.S.

The four-time defending Olympic champion People moved into the highest spot after successful the FIBA world championship in 2010 and had been there since.

“It isn’t precisely a brand new title and it most likely cannot be maintained for too lengthy, but it surely’s one thing so distinctive, prestigious and historic that I really feel tremendously happy with everybody who … have contributed to it,” Spain coach Sergio Scariolo tweeted Friday.

FIBA’s rankings had been modified in 2017 to a system that takes outcomes from the latest eight years under consideration. Meaning the U.S. is not reaping the advantages of the 2014 World Cup title however continues to be seeing the Olympic gold medals gained at Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo factoring into the rankings. The U.S. completed seventh on the 2019 World Cup.

Spain gained the final World Cup, plus the EuroBasket title earlier this yr. The EuroBasket win was Spain’s fourth in its final six appearances on the continental championship, all of these wins coming beneath Scariolo.

Spain is simply 1.1 factors forward of the U.S. males now, main 758.6 to 757.5.

The subsequent 10 spots on the planet rankings had been unchanged. Australia is third, Argentina — which was No. 1 earlier than the U.S. took that spot in 2010 — is fourth, adopted by France, Serbia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Greece, Italy, Germany and the Czech Republic.

The U.S. continues to be ranked No. 1 in girls’s basketball by an almost 200-point margin over China. The People rolled to gold on the girls’s World Cup this yr, additional cementing their spot atop the record.

USA Basketball additionally holds snug leads atop the worldwide boys’ and women’ rankings.

FIBA’s most up-to-date rankings embody the lads’s nationwide groups from 164 nations and 118 girls’s nationwide groups.