Explained: How Tall Blacks can qualify
The Tall Blacks enter a new World Cup qualifying system when they play South Korea in Wellington on Thursday night.
The game seemed to catch a few people by surprise, lost in the multitude of coverage and angst about the All Blacks, Kiwis and All Whites over the past few weeks.
The main question asked by a lot of people has been why is this game even on?
Well, world basketball’s governing body Fiba announced back in 2015 it would be delaying its World Cup cycle by a year to stage the next tournament in 2019 in China to avoid clashing with other major sporting events, notably football’s Fifa World Cup, which is in Russia in 2018.
At the same time, it announced a new qualification system. Rather than qualifying for the World Cup via final standings at continental tournaments such as the Oceania Championships, there would be a two-year qualification competition in each confederation, akin to Fifa’s World Cup qualifiers.
The change coincided with New Zealand and Australia moving into the Asia confederation.
The Tall Blacks drew South Korea, China and Hong Kong in group A for round one of qualifying. Each team plays the other twice, home and away, with the top three teams moving on to the second round.
New Zealand should have no issues there as Hong Kong were well beaten in all three of their matches at the Asia Cup in August. Korea beat a young New Zealand team in the third-fourth playoff at that tournament, while China were fifth.
What is tough is the short turnaround between games, with the Tall Blacks flying out on Friday ahead of their match in Hong Kong on Sunday.
The same occurs in February when they have a three-day break between matches in South Korea and China. It gets a bit easier next June/July, when they host Hong Kong and China at home in the space of three days.
That middle set of games looks the toughest, especially given wins in the first round of qualifying are important because points are carried over to the second round.
In that second round, to be played between September 2018 and February 2019, the top three from group A will be joined by the top three from group C.
The teams play home and away against the teams they did not play in the first round. So if New Zealand do make it, they will likely be up against Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, with India, the other team in group C in the first round, standing little chance of making it to the second round.
The top three teams after those games will qualify for the 2019 World Cup, while the fourth-placed team will playoff home and away against the fourth-placed team from the other second-round group for Asia’s seventh and final spot at the tournament.
While New Zealand’s route to the World Cup is tougher now - previously they only had to make the final at the Oceania Championships - the trade-off is guaranteed home games against high-level opponents.
Qualifying for the 2020 Olympics remains a tough proposition, although at least they don’t need to beat Australia anymore, as they used to have to do at the Oceania Championships. Now, they only need to make the World Cup and finish higher than Australia in the overall standings to take Oceania’s place at the Olympics.