re: New age limit for 2016 olympic basketball

American NBA players don't sign different contracts than foreign NBA players.

If the NBA accomplishes what it wants, no NBA players over 23 would be playing in the Olympics. Obviously the rules wouldn't apply to Spaniards playing in Spain, Greeks playing in Italy, etc. So the Spanish, Greek, and Australian teams would be weakened less by the rules by than the Americans, but everyone would be sending sub-optimal teams, except for the countries that have no NBA players to start with (Tunisia, Angola, etc).

And in theory, the FIBA World Cup will be the true championship, and it would run after the soccer World Cup on the calendar year, every 4 years. Stern wants to make Olympic basketball as meaningless as Olympic soccer, which shouldn't even be an event anymore.

There are a lot of scenarios possible, and no sportswriter has chosen to explore them yet. I guess they prefer doing mindless shite like arguing about whether LeBron can close without using any advanced statistics.