FIBA World Cup 2019: Previewing Group D

Italy

The Italian national team is the third team in Group D. The team qualified through the European qualifiers, winning their first-round pool against the likes of the Netherlands, Croatia, and Romania going 4-2 in their group.

In the second round, Italy edged out Poland and Hungary to finish second in their pool to Lithuania. That was enough to qualify for the FIBA World Cup for the first time since 2006.

Italy has had its woes in the past as a national team, including three straight Olympics missed. They placed seventh at EuroBasket 2017 and were knocked out by Group D foe Serbia in the quarterfinals.

Italy is near the middle of the pack for the World Cup, sitting at 13th in the official FIBA rankings.

The qualification came during the NBA regular season, so Italy was without two of their best players: Marco Belinelli of the San Antonio Spurs and Danilo Gallinari of the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Both Belinelli and Gallinari will start for the Italy team that has a reasonable shot of making it out of this group.

A glaring problem when they played Serbia in EuroBasket 2017 was rebounding, where they were out-rebounded 44-19 by the Serbian side. They were bullied inside, allowing 44 points in the paint and 25 second-chance points.

That was the main difference in a 83-67 defeat. As with any national team though, there are a lot of new faces for the World Cup.

Along with bigger names like Belinelli and Gallinari, captain Luigi Datome will start at small forward. Datome has played for the national team since EuroBasket 2007 and got injured during the 2015 competition. Datome is healthy this time around to bring veteran leadership to the team.

Italy will kick off the FIBA World Cup against the Philippines on Saturday, then play Angola on Monday, rounding out Group D competition against Serbia on Wednesday.