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FIBA calculated the brand recognition and cache the “World Cup” already carried as international football’s massive four-yearly event when it switched its basketball equivalent from “World Championship” to the same name.

While some might consider it folly to have a basketball World Cup when soccer all but owns that name, as FIBA Secretary General Patrick Baumann explains it, it makes perfect sense.

“In the US market, they don’t understand what ‘world championships’ are but they do know about the World Cup,” Baumann told me, the Americans – as regular winners of the international event – an important component now for selling the World Championship.

Given the US identifies its NBA Championship winner as the “world champion”, American confusion and general indifference is understandable.

“From a marketing and corporate perspective, the FIBA World Cup made sense, even if our friends at FIFA have established the name,” Baumann said.

While this year’s men’s world championship in Spain will be FIBA’s first official World Cup – and therefore clash (in name) with the 2014 FIFA World Cup – it will be the only time that occurs.

After the 2016 Rio Olympics, qualifying for the FIBA World Cup will follow similar lines to FIFA’s World Cup qualifications.

“From 2017, we will have a totally different competition system with the Asian and Oceania (zones) playing together in a home-and-away system to qualify for the World Cup,” Baumann said.

“And that will be staged in 2019, moving it away from the year of FIFA’s World Cup to get it space of its own and a role of its own.”

The 2019 FIBA World Cup also will act as a qualifier for the 2020 Olympics, which, in 20-20 hindsight, also makes sense.

Home/away matches against Asian teams instead of just the biennial Oceania clashes with New Zealand, and putting meaningful Boomers games on home soil toward World Cup qualification should excite Australian basketball fans.

Swiss-born Baumann, 46, was in Australia for “a congress of the basketball family of Oceania and a weekend of meetings of the Oceania family.”

Fluent in five languages, Baumann hasn’t quite mastered “spin” yet, very ready to answer any question honestly and candidly.

“I’m not 100 per cent sure how that works,” he said when asked about USA Basketball’s recent decision to charge foreign players completing their US college scholarships $150 to return home without impediment.

Considering from Australia they left without club or Basketball Australia clearances, to now have to pay $150 (or $200 for “faster processing”) to return appears little more than a blatant and unconscionable money-grab.

(Congratulations too to BA for jumping on the bandwagon to collect $50 of its own to complete the return “process”).

“In theory, there’s a role for USA Basketball to inform countries that (returning college) players are free of contractual obligations,” Baumann explained.

“We’ve been telling them that normally a letter of clearance is free of charge.”

Baumann said the World Cup this summer was the big event for men in 2014.

“The Women’s World Championship also should be an exciting time for Australia as a good (Opals) performance would be expected in Turkey,” he said.

“The Women’s World Championship also will become the World Cup, as of the next tournament in 2018.”

Unlike the men moving to 2019 for their next World Cup, the women’s World Cup still would be held in the even years between Olympics.

Baumann also says FIBA is excited about its growing 3-on-3 agenda.

“It’s a novelty but we are pushing it heavily,” he said. 

3-on-3 will be associated with the next FIBA Youth Championship and Baumann believes it is “an exciting development for basketball”.

He also assured that fears Oceania would be swallowed up by the Asian Zone were unfounded.

“There will continue to be Oceania tournaments,” he said, citing junior qualification series.

“As of 2017, to qualify for world events, Oceania will play with its Asian counterparts.”

TOMORROW: NBL Hall of Famer, MVP and dual-Championship winner Al Green has been axed by Woodville as its SA State League coach. Al speaks up exclusively here.