Nigeria’s national basketball team, D’Tigers, have been drawn against Uganda, Rwanda and Mali in Group B of the Africa qualifiers for the 2019 FIBA World Cup in China.
The Champions of the continent in 2015, will be bid to reach the 2019 FIBA World Cup as one of five African Countries from a pool of 16 teams housed in four groups.
Nigeria, who has only previously qualified for two editions of the World Cup Event in 1998 and 2006, was among four countries seeded for the draw in Guangzhou, alongside Tunisia, Angola and Senegal.
The qualifiers will hold from November 2017 to February 2019.
The qualification procedure will go thus:
The first round of the qualifiers will be held in late 2017 and early 2018.
Division A teams will be split in groups of four, to be held in a home-and-away round-robin.
The top three teams in each groups will advance to round two, and last placed teams will play the best Division B teams to qualify for the next season’s Division A.
Round two of the World Cup qualifiers will be held in late 2018 and early 2019.
Teams will be split in groups of six, totaling four groups in Europe and two in the other qualifiers.
Teams will carry over the points from round one, and face another three teams again in a home-and-away round-robin. The best teams in each group will qualify for the World Cup.
Starting in 2019, no wild card qualification will be held, and the Olympic champions will not directly qualify to the World Cup.
Packaged by Lanre Olabisi
