The Argentina national basketball team represents Argentina in basketball international competitions, and is controlled by the Argentine Basketball Federation.
Argentina is the only national team in the FIBA Americas zone that has won the quintuplet crown: FIBA World Championship (they won the first edition, in 1950), Olympic Gold Medal (2004), FIBA Diamond Ball (2008), FIBA Americas Championship (2001 and 2011) and Pan American Gold Medal (1995). They have also won 13 South American Basketball Championships, as well as many youth championships.
The Argentine representative was also the first to defeat a United States national team with a full squad of NBA players. They did so by 87–80 in the 2002 FIBA World Championship held in Indianapolis. In that tournament, Argentina came second behind Serbia and Montenegro, losing the final in overtime.
Due to the series of good results since the beginning of the 2000s (decade), Argentina reached the first position in the FIBA Men's Ranking at the end of the 2008 Olympic Games.
Read more about Argentina National Basketball Team: Current Roster, Past Rosters
Famous quotes containing the words national, basketball and/or team:
“Ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man are the only causes of public misfortunes and of the corruption of governments.”
—French National Assembly. Declaration of the Rights of Man (drafted and discussed Aug. 1789, published Sept. 1791)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)
“giving a nod, up the chimney he rose.
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle,
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.””
—Clement Clarke Moore (1779–1863)