At 2:00 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, in an 18,000-seat arena in New Belgrade, Nikola Jokic and Victor Wembanyama will face each other in national-team jerseys for the first time in more than two years.
They have met seven times in the NBA. Two of those tell you why this is worth your afternoon.
On Jan. 3, 2025 — Wembanyama's 100th game — Jokic went to the Sombor Shuffle on a winner-take-all possession. That is the turnaround, one-legged, high-arcing fadeaway launched from behind his head, the shot Giannis Antetokounmpo and Anthony Davis and Rudy Gobert and Chet Holmgren have all failed to reach. Wembanyama got to it. Jokic bailed mid-shot, flung a panicked pass, and San Antonio won.
Fifteen months later, on April 4 at Ball Arena, he got the possession back. A minute left in overtime, Denver up two, everybody cleared out. Jokic dropped his shoulder into Wembanyama, spun off his pivot, and shot a fifteen-footer over a ten-foot obstacle. It went in. Denver won 136-134. Wembanyama finished with 34 points, 18 rebounds, seven assists and five blocks in the loss.
Jokic brought up the old block himself afterward, unprompted, fifteen months later. He had not forgotten it. "I kind of threw it away, and we lost the game," he said. Writing it up for the Denver Post, Bennett Durando reached outside basketball entirely for a comparison and landed on a full-count at-bat between Ohtani and Judge.
Hold that thought.
Some context on who is getting on the plane to Belgrade. Jokic currently leads the entire 2020s in total points, total rebounds, total assists and total steals — regular season and playoffs combined, roughly 14,640 points, 6,680 rebounds, 4,880 assists and 775 steals. No player in NBA history has ever led a decade in four of the five major statistical categories. The previous record was three, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the 1970s. Only blocks got away from him, and that belongs to Myles Turner. In April he also became the first player ever to lead the league in rebounds and assists in the same season.
The decade has four years left and the scoring margin is thin — he passed Jayson Tatum only recently — so none of it is final. But that is the player. The most statistically dominant man of his sport's decade is spending the third week of August in Belgrade, playing a game that does not count.
Because Thursday is not an NBA game. The last time these two did this wearing Serbia and France, it was a warmup in Lyon in the summer of 2024 — Serbia won 79-67, Jokic went for 20 and 12, Wembanyama had 14 and 10 — and the two countries never actually crossed paths at the Paris Olympics that followed.
Thursday's game does not count either. It is an exhibition, arranged so two national teams can shake off the rust before the part that matters starts a week later.
Wembanyama flew to Serbia anyway. So did Rudy Gobert and Evan Fournier. The French federation named Wembanyama captain for the trip — his first appearance in the jersey since the 2024 gold-medal game, after a blood clot in his shoulder cost him the end of a season and all of EuroBasket.
He is 22, has just signed one of the largest contracts in the history of his sport, and is spending the middle of August in Belgrade for a friendly.
Basketball spent fifteen months building a road. Baseball spent fifteen months building a waiting list.
The math nobody puts side by side
The games in Belgrade are the warmup for Window 4 of the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2027 qualifiers. From above, that system looks like this:
80 national teams in the qualifying process, drawn from 212 member federations
Six windows across fifteen months, November 2025 through March 2027
Home and away, every group, every round — first-round results carry forward into the second
32 places in Qatar: twelve from Europe, seven from the Americas, seven from Asia and Oceania, five from Africa, plus the hosts
Now baseball's road to Dodger Stadium in July 2028:
Six teams. That is the entire Olympic field.
The United States is in as host.
The Dominican Republic and Venezuela qualified through the 2026 World Baseball Classic.
Two more come out of the 2027 WBSC Premier12 — one to the best-placed Asian team, one to the best-placed team from Europe or Oceania.
The last spot is decided at a final qualifying tournament held no later than March 2028: two teams from the Asian Championship, two from the European Championship, one from Oceania, and the winner of the Africa Cup. No team from North or South America is eligible for it.
Twenty-four players per roster. One hundred forty-four athletes total. Two groups of three, then a quarterfinal round — a six-team tournament with a quarterfinal round.
And baseball is not a permanent Olympic sport. It was approved as one of five optional additions for Los Angeles. The sport's international governing body has to make the case again, from scratch, for every Games. The IOC, under a new president, is openly reconsidering whether any sport should be permanent.
How To Watch
All times Eastern.
Serbia vs. France — Thursday, Aug. 20, 2:00 p.m., Belgrade Arena (exhibition)
France vs. Serbia — Sunday, Aug. 23, 12:00 p.m., CO'Met Arena, Orleans (exhibition)
France vs. Slovenia — Thursday, Aug. 27 (Group L, qualifying)
Serbia vs. Iceland — Friday, Aug. 28, Belgrade Arena (Group J, qualifying)
Sweden vs. France — Sunday, Aug. 30 (Group L, qualifying)
Italy vs. Serbia — Monday, Aug. 31, Pesaro (Group J, qualifying)
Streaming: FIBA's Courtside 1891 service now lives on DAZN, and it is priced like an afterthought rather than a premium sports package — $49.99 a year for the Ultimate tier, $44.99 for Standard, or $13.99 and $11.99 respectively month to month. That covers the 2027 World Cup qualifiers, the 2026 Women's World Cup, and Spain's Liga Endesa. TNT Sports holds U.S. English-language rights to the tentpole events — the 2027 World Cup itself — but not these qualifying windows. In France both friendlies are free-to-air on La Chaine L'Equipe. No Serbian or regional broadcaster had been confirmed as of Tuesday.
Fifty dollars for a year of watching every basketball nation on earth try to reach Doha. Hold that number; it comes back later.
If you happen to be in Belgrade: the Serbian federation put a second batch of tickets on sale Monday after the first sold out in a week, running from 800 dinars in the cheap seats to 35,000 for front-row courtside.
Wait — does baseball even do friendlies?
Barely. And the exception proves the point.
Baseball's only real national-team exhibitions come in a two-week window every four years, when World Baseball Classic squads tune up against major league clubs at spring training sites in Florida and Arizona. We covered every one of them in March — Italy at the Cubs in Mesa, the Netherlands at the Orioles in Sarasota, Nicaragua at the Cardinals in Jupiter. Wonderful, strange, deeply enjoyable baseball.
But look at what those games actually are: national teams playing club teams, as preparation for a tournament that exists once a presidential term. There is no standing calendar of country-versus-country baseball. No August window. No Serbia hosting France because it is Thursday.
Meanwhile, on Sept. 29, the United States men's national soccer team will play Chile at Energizer Park in St. Louis at 8:00 p.m. Eastern — one of four fall friendlies, the opening of a new cycle pointed at 2030. It is a nothing game with everything around it: a sold-out building, a national broadcast, a city that considers itself a soccer town. The NBA is taking regular-season games to Paris. The NFL has been shipping games overseas for the better part of two decades.
And look at what basketball did with its own midseason exhibition. In February, in Inglewood, the NBA All-Star Game was played as USA against the World — LeBron James in a Stars-and-Stripes jersey, Wembanyama guarding him in a World All-Stars uniform, a Canadian flag on the shoulder of the guy defending the other side. The league took the one weekend a year it fully controls and rebuilt it around nationality, because nationality is where the interest is now.
Baseball's All-Star week had a Home Run Derby on Netflix that was a genuine event, a game almost nobody will remember, and a Field of Dreams game that was the best thing on the calendar. Three good ideas, none of them about which country anybody is from.
Baseball's international calendar is going the other direction. The Mexico City Series happened in April, Diamondbacks and Padres at Estadio Alfredo Harp Helu. The London Series, Yankees against Blue Jays, was called off. And the initial 2027 schedule contains no international regular-season games at all — because overseas trips require agreement between the league and the union, and there is no agreement to be had until the labor situation resolves.
Which brings us to the story we have been following here for two winters running.
Juan Soto signed the largest contract in the history of professional sports. Among its provisions: a luxury suite at Citi Field, four premium seats behind home plate, team-paid security for his family, a road hotel suite, a full no-trade clause. What is not in it, apparently, is the one thing he actually asked for.
In December 2024, we reported that Soto had gone on Dominican radio and said he'd asked Steve Cohen directly for permission to play ten games for Tigres del Licey — the team that drafted him in the first round of the 2017 LIDOM rookie draft, in the city where he grew up — and that Cohen had said yes. Not that season. Someday.
A year later, we reported the sequel. Licey's Audo Vicente told reporters in Santo Domingo that Soto had asked four separate times in two weeks to play in the 2025-26 season, and that the answer from New York kept not arriving, and then arrived as no. By late December the club said he had clearance to serve as designated hitter if Licey made the playoffs. He never took an at-bat. He spent Game 7 of the LIDOM final in the dugout as an honorary member of the team, losing his mind over walks.
The highest-paid athlete in the history of sports, asking four times for permission to play ten games in his hometown, and watching the final from the rail.
Wembanyama flew to Belgrade for a game that does not count, and nobody had to ask anybody.
Meanwhile, in the desert
Here is where the argument gets complicated, and it should.
The 2027 FIBA World Cup will be played in Qatar, Aug. 27 through Sept. 12. A country of roughly three million people, most of them not citizens, that hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2022 and built most of the infrastructure to do it. Basketball looked at that and said yes. The whole qualifying apparatus — eighty nations, six windows, the games in Belgrade this week — funnels into Doha.
Baseball's answer to the Gulf is not a governing body. It is a startup.
We spent launch week in Dubai for the first full Baseball United season, played from Nov. 14 to Dec. 14 last year at a ballpark cut to Yankee Stadium's dimensions in Ud al-Bayda, outside the city. Four teams: the Mumbai Cobras representing India, the Karachi Monarchs representing Pakistan, the Arabia Wolves and Mid East Falcons representing the UAE. All of them playing in Dubai, because Dubai is where the ballpark is.
The rosters are the interesting part. Six Indian players on Mumbai, including Akshay More, India's first professional starting pitcher, who went three innings on one hit in the first series win in league history. Four Pakistanis on Karachi. Fourteen Japanese players on the Falcons, among them Munenori Kawasaki and Hiroyuki Nakajima. Two Filipinos. Mariano Rivera and Barry Larkin among the founding stakeholders; roughly twenty MLB legends attached in some capacity.
The rules are stranger still — a golden "moneyball" that doubles the runs on a home run, a "fireball" that ends an inning on a strikeout, designated runners, a home run derby to break ties after nine. Cricket's T20 logic applied to baseball, on the theory that a region learning the game from zero may as well learn a more exciting version of it.
About three thousand people came opening night. Pavin Parks homered on the very first pitch thrown in league history. The Falcons won the title. Co-founder Kash Shaikh has since moved on to Perfect Game. This November the league takes a set of events to Cancun with the Tigres de Quintana Roo.
So baseball is going to new places. Genuinely, and with real local players, in a market cricket and soccer already own. It is simply not MLB doing it, and it is not the WBSC, and none of it feeds the six chairs at Dodger Stadium. India and Pakistan are not qualifying for the 2028 Olympics. That is not the point of Baseball United and nobody pretends otherwise.
But hold the two pictures next to each other. Basketball spent a decade building a pipeline that ends with the world's best players in Doha. Baseball's Gulf presence is four teams sharing one field, funded by retired Yankees, inventing its own rules because the existing ones were not exciting enough to import.
One of those is a system. The other is an act of faith. Both are worth watching. Only one of them scales.
Find your country
Twenty-four European teams survived into the second round of FIBA qualifying. Strip away the jerseys and a surprising number are also nations with a live stake in baseball's Olympic future. Pick one and follow it through both sports.
Group K — the European baseball map, wearing basketball uniforms
Poland, Croatia, Germany, Latvia, Netherlands, Israel.
This is the group to watch if you care about baseball at all. The Netherlands is Europe's most decorated baseball nation, home of honkbal, front end of a Curacao pipeline that has sent Xander Bogaerts, Jurickson Profar and Andrelton Simmons to the major leagues. Read our explainer on what honkbal actually is, and our coverage of Honkbalweek Haarlem 2026.
Germany is not a baseball blank either — the Baseball-Bundesliga has run for decades, the national team came within two runs of a WBC berth in Tucson, and Regensburg hosts the 2027 European Championship. Israel ran to the second round of the 2017 World Baseball Classic and reached the Tokyo Olympics. Any one of the three could end up in that March 2028 final qualifier, fighting for the last seat at Dodger Stadium.
Right now they are fighting each other for a basketball berth in Qatar. Poland went 6-0 in the first round and sits on top.
Group J — Italy, and the game of the window
Turkiye, Italy, Serbia, Lithuania, Iceland, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Turkiye is unbeaten. Italy is 5-1. Serbia, with Jokic, is 4-2 and third — comfortable but not safe, since only the top three advance. Italy vs. Serbia in Pesaro on Aug. 31 is the game of the window.
It also has the most baseball inside it. Five months ago Italy went 5-0 at the World Baseball Classic. Under Francisco Cervelli, who replaced Mike Piazza after a ninth-place finish at the 2023 European Championship, the Azzurri beat the United States 8-6, beat Mexico 9-1, and beat Puerto Rico 8-6 in the quarterfinals — the first baseball game ever carried on national television in Italy. They lost 4-2 to eventual champion Venezuela in the semifinals in Miami on March 16, Aaron Nola starting, Michael Lorenzen losing the lead in the seventh. Roughly seven million people watched in Italy, on a broadcast that started after 1 a.m. local. "We are no longer the Cinderella," Cervelli said afterward. We were in Miami for it.
Italy finished as one of the four best baseball nations on the planet in March 2026.
Italy is not qualified for the 2028 Olympics. Nothing about that run counted toward Los Angeles. Europe's only path runs through the 2027 Premier12, and if that misses, through a six-team last-chance tournament in early 2028. A country can beat the United States, beat Puerto Rico, and finish in the final four, and still be nowhere
Group L — France, Finland, and a bat-and-ball game you have never seen
France, Finland, Estonia, Slovenia, Hungary, Sweden.
France is 5-1 under Frederic Fauthoux — a record built entirely without Wembanyama — and hosts Slovenia on Aug. 27, with Luka Doncic absent from the Slovenian squad. We have argued before that Wembanyama is the bridge French baseball needs, and nothing this month has changed our mind.
But the country to look up is Finland, second at 4-2, and the only nation in this entire qualifying field with its own indigenous bat-and-ball sport. Pesapallo is a Finnish invention — the pitcher stands beside the batter and throws the ball straight up, the basepaths zigzag, and it has been the national game for the better part of a century.
Finland plays France twice this cycle. Somewhere in that arena is a kid who grew up swinging at a vertical pitch.
Group I
Spain, Ukraine, Montenegro, Portugal, Greece, Georgia. Spain tops the group at 5-1 and hosts Portugal on Aug. 28. Spain's baseball federation is among the oldest in continental Europe and its national team is a regular in European Championship play.
Why Belgrade, specifically
If you want to understand what baseball is missing, the best available testimony comes from an American basketball reporter who went to Serbia last winter and came back sounding like a convert.
ESPN's Brian Windhorst spent a December weekend at the Belgrade Derby — Partizan against Red Star, the fixture Serbians call the Eternal Derby — and devoted most of a podcast episode to describing it. He ranked it alongside Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals and the 2024 Olympic gold-medal game as one of the three greatest basketball events he has personally attended.
His account: away supporters locked into the upper deck an hour before tip and held there long after the final buzzer, so the two sets of fans never meet. A wall of whistling loud enough to be physically uncomfortable when the visitors take the floor. Lighters coming out of the stands at the officials. Lasers in shooters' eyes — a player was granted a re-shoot on a free throw because of one. Flares, smoke, riot police lining the concourses. No beer sold. Partizan came back from fifteen down and won. He said he never once felt unsafe and would go again tomorrow.
He also stopped by Mega Basket, the small gym where Jokic played as a teenager, and heard the story of how the Denver Nuggets found him: a scout kept turning up in Belgrade, and when a former NBA player asked why, the answer was that there was a kid at Mega who might end up one of the best players who ever lived. The reaction at the time was disbelief.
Now hold that against a Tuesday night in a half-full major league park in August.
And yes, there is baseball in Belgrade
This is the part an American basketball writer would never think to look for.
Serbia has a national baseball team. It is small, it is stubborn, and it has survived sanctions, war, and a country that changed names three times. It fields diaspora players alongside domestic ones, it has traveled to the United States for exhibition games, and Major League Baseball has run development camps in Belgrade to find and grow players. Croatia has a program too, one that spent the pandemic figuring out how to keep a season alive at all.
None of that is going to produce an Olympic berth. It is not close. But it means that on Thursday night, in a building holding 18,000 people screaming about basketball, there are almost certainly a few dozen who also know what a 6-4-3 is — and who learned it from a coach working with equipment donated from six thousand miles away.
Jokic himself is not a stranger to the game. During the Nuggets' 2022 training camp in San Diego, he and three teammates sat in the front row near the Dodgers dugout for a Padres game. Everyone but Jokic wore Padres gear.
He is the captain of Serbia this week, playing under coach Dusan Alimpijevic, with Bogdan Bogdanovic absent from an 18-man roster that includes two senior-team debutants.
This is not an argument that baseball fans lack passion. Anyone who has been in Santo Domingo in January, or the Tokyo Dome for a WBC pool game, or Hiram Bithorn when Puerto Rico is playing, knows better. It is an argument about architecture. Baseball has that passion. It has almost nowhere to put it between World Baseball Classics.
The part that should worry baseball
Everything above assumes major leaguers actually show up in Los Angeles. That is not settled.
Rob Manfred said in February that the sides were closer than they had been, that he sensed "a lot of momentum towards playing in L.A. in 2028," and that the remaining issues with the players' association were solvable. LA28 has already moved the baseball schedule earlier — July 13 through 19 — to shrink how far the season must bend around it. MLB has floated an extended break running July 9 to 21 with the All-Star Game on July 11.
All of which requires the league and the union to sit in a room and agree on something.
The collective bargaining agreement expires Dec. 1. A lockout is broadly expected; the union's leadership has described one as close to certain. And the two parties who need to settle insurance, rosters, housing and a reshaped All-Star break for 2028 are about to spend a winter — possibly longer — trying to break each other over a salary cap.
We already know what that does to baseball's international footprint, because it has already happened. London is gone. The 2027 international schedule is blank, and it is blank specifically because the labor talks have not resolved.
If the fight swallows 2027, the Olympic side deal is the quietest thing it takes with it. And baseball's case for staying in the Games past 2028 rests almost entirely on Los Angeles being best-on-best. A tournament of replacement-level rosters in a half-empty Dodger Stadium is not an argument for permanence. It is an argument for the IOC to do exactly what it did after Beijing.
The ballpark at the center of everything
Olympic baseball will be played at Dodger Stadium. The Dodgers are the club at the center of the cap fight — the exhibit the other owners point to. Their owner spent the past twelve months on both sides of the capped/uncapped divide in American sport, buying and then agreeing to sell the Lakers at a record valuation.
And Tarik Skubal, the best pitcher alive, whom Los Angeles acquired at the deadline for Zyhir Hope, River Ryan and Brady Smith, reaches free agency at the end of this season — which is to say, at almost exactly the moment the lockout begins.
Every thread runs through one ballpark in Chavez Ravine.
What Belgrade is actually about
Nobody will remember Thursday's score. It is an August exhibition between two teams who cannot meet again in this cycle — Serbia is in Group J, France in Group L, and their paths do not cross before Qatar.
But Jokic and Wembanyama are there, in the middle of the offseason, in front of a sold-out arena, because their sport built a structure where showing up in August is worth doing. Eighty countries, six windows, home and away, everybody's games meaning something all the way down.
Baseball has the World Baseball Classic, and it is thriving — Venezuela beat the United States in a March final that drew more than ten million viewers, the largest audience the tournament has ever had. What baseball does not have is a road. It has a bracket that empties into six chairs, a governing body that must re-apply every four years, and a labor fight that could knock the whole thing over before the first pitch in Los Angeles.
Wembanyama said something this month that ought to be printed on a banner somewhere in Cooperstown. Asked about being back with the national team after two years away, he told BasketUSA: "I don't miss the NBA at the moment, but I do miss FIBA."
The reigning Defensive Player of the Year, coming off a Finals run, on a $252 million extension. He misses the international game. It exists often enough for him to miss it.
One last thing, and it is a small one. Chess follows Wembanyama around — Washington Square Park in New York two winters ago, a board at the NBA's Summer House in Paris this month, where he sat across from a kid and got a real game out of it. And a clip made the rounds recently of JJ Wetherholt and Jordan Walker bent over a board in the Cardinals' clubhouse, doing exactly the same thing.
Same game, same silences, two sports that barely speak to each other. Nobody in either photograph needed a translator. Nobody needed permission, either.
To be clear about what baseball is missing, because it is not games. There are fifteen major league games tonight. There is baseball tonight in Japan and Korea and Mexico and Taiwan, in the Dominican summer league, in Australia's offseason academies, in Regensburg and Rotterdam and Dubai. August is not an empty month.
What is missing is countries.
Not one of those games is Italy against the Netherlands. Not one is Serbia hosting anybody. Baseball's national teams are switched on for two weeks every four years and then put back in the box for another two hundred, and everything that gets built in those two weeks — the seven million Italians watching at one in the morning, the kid in Palermo who found a bat, Cervelli's whole argument that his country should take this seriously — has nowhere to go afterward. There is no next game. There is a wait.
Basketball does not have that problem, and Thursday is why. Two of the best players alive, in the middle of their offseason, flying to Belgrade for an exhibition nobody will remember, because their sport built a calendar where showing up in August is worth doing. Eighty countries. Six windows. Home and away. Everybody's games meaning something, all the way down.
Baseball has the players. It has the passion, in more countries than most Americans could name. It just has almost nowhere to put a flag between March of one year and March of another.
The 2027 Premier12 is fifteen months away. That is Italy's next chance to matter. Fifteen months.
World Baseball Network will follow the FIBA World Cup qualifying windows against baseball's Olympic qualifying picture through to Los Angeles in 2028. Same countries. Two sports. Two completely different ideas about what a road to the Olympics should look like.