SAN JUAN (William Rosario's Somewhere in the Americas) - Every big championship brings with it exhibition games or friendlies season.

This year, looking forward and prepping for the FIBA Basketball World Cup, a total of 143 friendly games will be played by the participating teams.

It is indeed a substantial number of matches for those who like to play fortune-teller and predict the fate of the 24 national teams that will tip-off the 2014 FIBA basketball World Cup next week.

The mistake is usually made in using exhibition games results to assess X or Y national team. Just for the sake of it, let's try to make sense of the World Cup landscape using that approach.

If we take the friendlies that have been played until today we can deduct that:
- Spain, the USA and Lithuania are better than everybody. Oh, and Serbia too!
- Argentina is no longer an elite team (certainly not at the level of the third ranked team in the world).
- Both France and Greece are still pretty good even without some of their key guys on the Spain 2014 roster.
- Mexico won't be able to hang with the European teams.
- The Dominican Republic may be the team most hurt by the absence of their NBA guy. Without Al Horford, their chances to even compete look to be slim.
- This Paco Olmos version of the Puerto Rico national team may be the surprise of the championship.
- With this stacked 12, if Brazil doesn't make a run for the whole thing this year, this will be their biggest basketball disappointment ever.

Now, those are not crazy conclusions. There's a chance that they all end up being correct. But I don't think it matters. Our best bet is to not be result-oriented.

If your line coming off of Puerto Rico's 97-87 win against Argentina last week is "did you see, Puerto Rico beat Argentina", well, you are looking in the wrong direction.

I saw that game and it looked like the typical "I know I'm going to face you for real in my group in less than two weeks, so I will hold back" approach. Hardly any set plays were run by Argentina and defense was generic for both teams but for a couple of possessions. They weren't showing anything.

The USA have done the same thing. If you see their two exhibition games so far, they play like an All-Star Game. Every possession is one on one, lots of careless transition plays and spotty defensive effort. And you know Coach K won't allow for those three characteristics to be there once the real competition begins.

Friendlies are friendlies. There are a couple of things that can be achieved through them, but they are way more on the side of personnel rotation, testing out different combinations and executing some sets here and there depending on the adversary. Wins and losses are not a priority.

Julio Toro, coach of the Puerto Rico national team in 2004 was then asked what he expected from a friendly against the USA and he said: "I would like to see that we can bang with them, play physical and compete on the boards; that we can make easy baskets; that we capture a satisfactory number of offensive rebounds; recover defensively to their shooters; and that we can rotate properly."

Puerto Rico lost that friendly in 2004 against the USA by more than 30 points, but then beat them for the first time ever at the Olympic Games. The 10-year anniversary of this milestone was recently celebrated.

In one of the interviews, Toro admitted that in that friendly he found out that the zone was going to be "a problem for them. They didn't have enough shooters to battle the zone. So we went into the zone in the friendly and as soon as we saw that it worked, we dropped it and didn't bring it back out until we eventually beat them with it in Greece."

So I don't buy results from the friendlies. I buy moments. When I see good two-three minute spurts from teams I look for what made those moments possible and that's what I take from them. That's how I evaluate teams prior to the big championships.

Ah…

Who am I kidding? What I really take from all these friendlies is how ecstatic we (the teams, media, fans) all are for it to begin. There, where the results will really matter.

William Rosario

FIBA

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