The United States begins play today.
BONJOUR À TOUS !
The 2024 Olympic men’s basketball tournament continues on this Sunday! Here is the schedule of games.
Scores from yesterday
- Group A: Australia 92, Spain 80
- Group B: Germany 97, Japan 77
- Group B: France 78, Brazil 66
- Group A: Canada 86, Greece 79
Men’s Basketball Schedule for July 28
All games can be streamed on Peacock. Check NBCSports.com to see if a game is on television. Every game in the group stage will be at Decathlon Arena (or Stade Pierre Mauroy) in Lille.
Today’s games are in Group C. Times are in Eastern Time. Parisian or Central European Time is six hours ahead of Eastern Time.
- South Sudan vs. Puerto Rico at 5 a.m. ET
- United States vs. Serbia at 11:15 a.m. ET
So …. Why does Puerto Rico have their own team?
Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
The USA Basketball men’s and women’s national teams will play Puerto Rico in their group stage games, and this question seems to come up on the regular during international tournaments. Why do Puerto Ricans have their own team?
Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States. Puerto Ricans are American citizens. They can play for Team USA if they wish because of that. However, the simple reason why Puerto Rico has its own national team is because the IOC sets the rules on what territories and states can have teams, and Puerto Rico meets them in their eyes.
There are other territories of sovereign states that have their own national teams. For example, Aruba is a part of the Netherlands, and Arubans have Dutch citizenship. However, Arubans don’t play for the Netherlands in many sports.
Countries and territories with limited international recognition such as Taiwan and Palestine also compete as their own teams because the IOC believes they meet the standard as countries. While the Palestinians compete as Palestine, Taiwan competes as Chinese Taipei instead of as “Taiwan” or their legal name “Republic of China” due to most of the world recognizing the People’s Republic of China (or mainland China) as China. That was agreed to in 1979 with the Nagoya Resolution.
Countries with effectively full international recognition also may use modified names. North Korea is in this camp. In general, when most of the world is talking about Korea, they are referring to South Korea, or the Republic of Korea and their IOC code is KOR. But North Korea’s IOC code is PRK, which refers to the People’s Republic of Korea. Their full name is Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
And this also explains why the United Kingdom doesn’t have its own Olympic team, where it competes mostly as Great Britain, though athletes in Northern Ireland could play for Ireland instead. And in other sports, the UK’s “countries,” or constituent states like England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own teams in soccer.
Why haven’t the women’s basketball teams played yet?
Don’t worry. The teams with Mystics players will start playing tomorrow. That said, the tournament begins today with Group A on the women’s side:
- Spain vs. China at 9 a.m. ET
- Serbia vs. Puerto Rico at 3 p.m. ET
Enjoy the games everyone!