LAS VEGAS — When the Croatian national team arrived for the N.B.A.’s Las Vegas summer league this month, the players knew they would not dominate squads with big-name prospects. They were just hoping to avoid getting mopped off the court.

“I was afraid we would get destroyed,” said Veljko Mrsic, the team’s coach.

But by the time Mrsic huddled with his team before a game against the Oklahoma City Thunder last week, Croatia had proven itself worthy of inclusion with a pair of close losses. Mrsic had a team that moved the ball on offense and played beefy defense. He could also sense that his players wanted to test themselves against some of the best young players in the world, even if basketball was just one part of this 6,000-mile journey to the center of the summer hoops universe.

The Las Vegas summer league is many things — casting call, reunion of sorts for the American professional basketball set, junket for the N.B.A. and its hangers-on. For Croatia’s national team it was like one of those loosely chaperoned summer tours for privileged American teenagers.

A country of about 4 million people, Croatia has seven players in the N.B.A., including Ivica Zubac, a center for the Los Angeles Clippers who was among the high-profile spectators for some of the team’s games. Its most famous basketball exports are Drazen Petrovic, who died in a car accident at 28 in 1993, and Toni Kukoc, who played for four N.B.A. teams over 13 seasons. None of the current N.B.A. players competed for Croatia at summer league, clearing the stage for lesser-known teammates in the national program.