The Olympics can be pretty boring in terms of basketball, especially if you are American. Watching the worlds biggest stars just dismantling other nations can be pretty boring, other than some resilient nations such as Serbia or Spain which get beat but with a little effort. In an effort to maybe increase competition and certainly make the whole Olympics more appealing to the youth, the International Olympic Committee is currently discussing adding a 3v3 tournament to the list of events.

The Olympics in general are currently going towards more youth-oriented events, with skateboarding and sport climbing already confirmed as new events. Patrick Baumann, FIBA President, talked to the Associated Press about the new basketball event to be added to the Olympics.

“It would certainly be a perfect fit,” Baumann said. “The best urban team sport is 3-on-3 street basketball. It’s really a 10-minute sprint, no coach, so you need to take the right decisions.”

When Baumann talked about the street basketball being the best urban team sport, he actually mentioned recently re-opened Rucker Park as a good example of the sports popularity in the world, and he is right. There are millions of 3-on-3 streetball tournaments in the world each year, and they reel millions of young people to play and compete, which is amazing. The worlds best streetball teams are not exclusively American, so there could be more competition and more competitiveness is, ideally, what we want as fans of the game.

One of the problems is that this tournament would mean more athletes, and the IOC put the cap at 10,500 athletes, even though there is a bit of room to go over that number. However, this would mean around a hundred men and women, and that means a reduction of the number of athletes in other sports.

So, there is a huge process for this idea to become a reality, but the idea itself is really great. There would be more competition, a different, shorter and even, it can be said, more fun format to watch, so it would be amazing to see if this does happen.