3 months ? Lol. Maybe they can quit their day jobs and devout 12 months instead. You do realize these are actual human beings with lives outside of basketball right ? Again it’s easy when we just look at players as pawns in the sole purpose of entertaining us.
That 1.5 billion 2019 viewership is not impressive at all when examined, That’s an aggregate amount of all 92 tournament games, When averaged out its not a very impressive number at all when it comes to the entire planet, For example the championship game had 160 million viewers worldwide. That’s even less then the championship game of American football did worldwide. Lol.
This tournament has a low ceiling of growth mainly because the US the overwhelmingly dominant basketball playing nation in the world sees it as a secondary inferior competition and it always will. It will never compare in prestige to winning an Olympic Gold medal to Americans therefore it is destined to be a second tier event no matter how delusional the FIBA heads get.
For USA, 1 month is ideal... But not for other countries... Latvia, Finland, Angola, Philippines, Lebanon already start their training camp, Those countries can't afford to have only 1 month full training because their talent still below compare to powerhouse countries such as Spain, USA or France... They have to train early to be competitive when the tournament starts, they will bank on chemistry to cover the weaknesses of being less inferior talent against powerhouse teams... By the way, almost all of PRO leagues all over the world already finished their schedule, That means PRO players overseas outside NBA can join now to their national teams to start their trainings....
For viewership, 1.5 billion is already impressive if you compare the ratio of interest to the sport worldwide in the past two decades... 2006 FIBA WC only gathered 400 million viewers, 2010 FIBA WC only gathered 600 million and 2014 FIBA WC gathered 800 million... That means the interest of the fans watching the tournament is getting bigger and bigger, since the superstars of today's era are internationals, And i'm sure it will be increase this year, since the awareness of the basketball fans worldwide already known thru social media, most of NBA followers will also watch their idols' participation in the WC and also bettors and gamblers are there too ... By the way, American football or NFL is not popular overseas, When it comes to overseas popularity of American PRO leagues, Only NBA is recognizable by foreign fans... For sure, Serbian followers in Jokic's town in Somber and in Belgrade are now getting ready to parade once Denver finish their series today vs Miami... No other American pro leagues have huge foreign fans that NBA has...
For Americans, Olympic Gold in basketball still more valuable for them than FIBA, But not for foreign teams, especially Europeans... And with FIBA change the ranking system that FIBA WC has more ranking points than Olympics, Another medal less performance for team USA this summer will further drop their rankings lower than 2nd.. With 2.5 pts cumulative gathered by winning FIBA WC trophy while only 2.0 winning Olympic Gold... even USA gets another gold medal in Olympics, getting top spot in the rankings thru only Olympic Gold is not guarantee anymore...