The men's basketball competition at the Olympic Games has always been a high-profile global sporting event and occupies an important place in the basketball game. Since the 1936 Berlin Olympics, men's basketball has been included in the official Olympic sport. So far, the Olympic basketball competition is divided into two categories: men's basketball and women's basketball.
There are a total of 12 teams participating in the men's basketball team. The 12 places are available in two ways, one is through the World Cup, for example, at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, eight of which were allocated at the 2019 World Cup.
The other is through the Olympic qualifiers, where teams from all continents compete fiercely for the remaining few tickets.
1. The host country automatically qualifies: As the host country, the country's men's basketball team automatically qualifies for the Olympic Games.
At the men's basketball World Cup, seven quota places will be allocated to the teams with the highest rankings in the World Cup rankings from each continent. Specifically, there are two seats each for the Americas and Europe, and one each for Africa, Asia and Oceania. It is worth mentioning that due to the poor performance of the Chinese men's basketball team in the 2023 Men's Basketball World Cup, it failed to qualify for the Paris Olympics.
3. There will be 4 quota places for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, and each qualifying event will consist of two stages, divided into the first stage of qualifiers and the second stage of qualifiers.
In the first stage of qualifying, 40 teams will compete, based on previous FIBA World Cup qualifiers, including 28 teams that played in the second round of the FIBA World Cup Qualifiers but did not qualify for the main tournament, and 12 teams that played in the first round of the FIBA World Cup Qualifiers but did not qualify for the second round.
In the end, these 11 teams joined the host country in the Olympic men's basketball competition.
The men's basketball tournament at the Olympics usually features 12 teams, which are divided into three groups of four teams. Each group will play a single round-robin format, which means that each basketball team will play once against the other three teams in the group. At the end of the group stage, the top two teams from each group and the two best third-placed teams from each group will advance to the semi-finals.
It is worth noting that a similar format is used in women's basketball. In addition, for the sake of fairness, no more than 2 European teams can be in the same group, and teams from other continents are not allowed to appear in the same group.
At the end of the group stage, the eight teams that advance will be drawn to decide the quarter-final matchups. The 3 group winners and the 2 group runners-up teams with the best results from the previous stage (1 team) will be placed in one and a half (Zone D), while the other 2 teams from the second place and the 2 third-placed teams will be placed in the other half (Zone E). According to the rules, teams from the same group stage in the group stage will not meet again in the quarter-finals.