LONDON --- Before the emperor of basketball makes an entrance with his security detail and wing-tipped yes men into the arena here, David Stern should have taken a good long look at an old grudge quarterfinals game between Russia and Lithuania. As the NBA tries to play God on Olympic basketball, pushing FIBA to legislate change that will render this magnificent spectacle irrelevant, Stern should be forced to confront the collateral damage of his failing movement.





“I would hope that the countries would be in an uproar about this,” Russia coach David Blatt told Yahoo! Sports on Tuesday “Who is one country to determine for everyone how international basketball should be played, and particularly how the Olympic Games should be managed? It’s not supposed to be like that. If it’s a global game, it’s a global game.”

[ Photos: Team USA basketball goes for gold ]





Stern has been met with an increasing level of resistance about his and the NBA owners’ desires to turn the Olympics into an under-23 tournament and send the league’s superstars to an NBA-FIBA partnered World Cup of Basketball. So much resistance, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Stern use this trip to England to start backpedaling to spare himself one more indignity in these sad, dark final years on the job. Stern should tell the owners that he’s parking the issue and leaving it to his eventual successor, Adam Silver.





Stern will soon meet with FIBA secretary Patrick Baumann, who told the Sports Business Journal that he needed to hear many more details from the NBA before bringing an under-23 tournament idea to the 200-plus countries in membership. If the NBA doesn’t get what it wants out of a financial partnership with FIBA in a World Cup tournament, Baumann sounded dubious over the NBA’s chances of financing its own non-sanctioned global event.

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“Everybody’s free to organize a tournament,” Baumann told SBJ. “Whether the rest of the world will participate is their choice. If (the NBA is) to distribute billions and billions, then maybe they might participate. If it’s to retain all the benefits for themselves, my guess is the rest of the world won’t participate.”

The rest of the world is dubious, and has low tolerance for Stern’s bully tactics. On the eve of the quarterfinal round where the United States and Australia play, the Russians and Lithuania were indignant over the NBA’s desire to crush Olympic basketball. Blatt resurrected a program out of the rubble and transformed it into perhaps the second-best in the world now. Lithuania is the Indiana of European basketball, and fought its way into the Olympics through a qualifying tournament before losing to Russia in the quarterfinals on Wednesday.





Now, Russia is the No. 2 seed in the tournament, and Lithuania pushed the United States to the brink in a 99-94 loss in preliminary play. Lithuania’s coach Kestutis Kemzura loves a global basketball climate where he could lose to Nigeria in June, watch them lose to Team USA by 83 points and still somehow come so, so close to beating the Americans. The world keeps getting smaller, Kemzura says the gap keeps closing and he wants Lithuania to keep taking its best shot at the United States’ superstars. He wants to beat the best, wants to beat the USA and wants it on the biggest stage in the world: the Olympics.

Lebron James drives the ball against Renaldas Seibutis during the Men's Basketball Preliminary Round (Getty Images) More

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