'I dream about making my people proud' - NBA champion Jordan Nwora ready to help D'Tigers qualify for 2023 FIBA World Cup
Milwaukee Bucks forward Jordan Nwora wants to make basketball as big as football in Nigeria.
NBA champion Jordan Nwora was part of Nigeria's senior men basketball squad to the 2019 FIBA World Cup and the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
The 23-year-old Nwora in an interview with FIBA talked about the importance of D'Tigers qualifying for the 2023 FIBA World Cup.
D'Tigers made the headlines last summer in Las Vegas with an historic upset of the USA in a pre-Olympic friendly.
Nwora was with Milwaukee Bucks during their championship run at the time the game was played but made the team to Tokyo.
At the Olympics, Nwora was the team's leading scorer with 21 points per game shooting 48 percent from behind the 3-point line.
In the interview, Nwora explained that despite failure to progress from the group, Nigerians must not lose faith.
Speaking about his experience Nwora said, "I did learn a lot, so much that it is hard to really list everything. It was one of the most amazing learning experiences in my young life so far. I am so proud to have been part of that campaign. We were able to work hard and build a very solid team, and we did grow a lot as players, but also as a team, despite not reaching the goal we had set before the beginning of the tournament. It's always a blessing to be able to compete against the best teams in the world, and to be playing at FIBA level, which makes you adjust to a bit of a different way of playing basketball. It's always something that I enjoy doing, and I am looking forward to the next competitions to come. Sharing times with guys like Chimezie Metu, Josh Okogie and everyone on the team and the staff made me grow a lot as a player, that's for sure.
Yes, we gained confidence but mostly experience, too, because at this level, most of the guys of the (other) national teams have been playing together for a while now, so their chemistry is usually ahead of ours, as we have a lot of young guys and many new players on the roster last year. Winning that game against Team USA was a big moment, we can't deny it, and we have been building our confidence in games like this, but we have to keep working and win these games in competitions. I know that it will come, our time will come, that is for sure. We are putting all the pieces together and getting the hard work done in order to reach our full potential.
“PLAYING A WORLD CUP … WE WANT TO WIN GAMES, AND WE WILL BE AMBITIOUS."
"We had had hopes coming into the tournament and we didn't reach our goal, which was getting a medal. But as I say, you live and you learn, and we lost against very good teams, with a lot of experience and we are going to learn from this. We are still a young team, and for sure our confidence was high before the tournament, but playing in a competition is also different than playing friendly games. The level of pressure is different and those games have a very short margin for mistakes in order to win. We will learn and come back better, both as players and as a team."
Nwora explained that the team is young and turned their attention to qualification for the FIBA Basketball World Cup, to be staged in Indonesia, Japan and the Philippine in 2023.
He said, "We want to go there and keep showing our improvement. It's a very important competition, even more so knowing that the year after, it's the Olympics. We will have to have a good run in 2023 and punch our ticket for Paris 2024. Playing a World Cup is a perfect competition to improve, because you play against teams that you aren't used to playing against, and it's important to test ourselves, to see how much we have been improving by competing on the highest stage. We want to win games, and we will be ambitious."
Nwora also is enthusiastic about D'Tigers doing well at the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
He added, "We want to be at the next Olympics, too, there are no doubts about that. In order to keep improving and be on the highest stage, you have to qualify for every single big tournament, and both the FIBA Basketball World Cup and the Olympics are very important for us. We want to keep showing that we are the best team on the continent, and also prove to the world that Nigerian basketball will become a powerhouse, because we have all the ingredients to do so. That is our dream, and we are going to do everything to reach it. Our future is bright. Once we get our full team, down the line, we are going to be very, very good.
"I dream about making my people proud, the whole country, and make Nigeria one of the best teams in the world. We work hard for this and we have a lot or motivation and talent to do so. We just have to keep working hard and show growth year after year. We know that we will reach the highest level of world basketball."
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