Every four years since he was tasked with assembling U.S.A. Basketball rosters, Jerry Colangelo has maintained his own quadrennial tradition.

As reliably as the Olympics themselves, Colangelo emerges on a similar schedule, making the same well-worn plea on behalf of the team U.S.A.B. will send to the FIBA World Cup.

“I would like to keep the focus on who is there, not on who’s not there,” Colangelo, the program’s managing director, said in a telephone interview.

Because of a format change by FIBA, it has been five years, for once, since the sport’s last world championship. The tournament returns Aug. 31 in China, pushed back from its expected 2018 edition because basketball’s world governing body wanted its foremost event to be contested on a four-year cycle that does not clash with soccer’s World Cup.