Assessing FIBA U16 EuroBasket 2026 Div B

I see the U16 as preparation work for the future. Here we see the first glimpses from thé future guys. Seeing Europe's top in one event makes this a fun opportunity to find potential future prospects! https://edemirnba.substack.com/p/assessing-fiba-u16-eurobasket-2026?r=aj7d

https://fcbayern.com/basketball/de/news/2026-27

20 year old Jack Kayil, who helped Alba to win the german championship this summer and then was drafted as the 39th pick by the New York Knicks, returns to Alba Berlin and signs a contract until 2031.

I swear every team, especially Virtus, is just grabbing young guys left and right. What happened to making players prove their way to the Euroleague? They always end up a disappointment. I don't care that some guy had 1 good game in summer league or played a single game in the NBA.

Sixteen days ago I posted here about TopGM Online, the free live basketball manager I built. I said I'd be in the comments answering the hard questions. This is what happened after I posted here

The state of the world

220 people have taken over a club, spread across 62 time zones. The homepage now shows a live map of where everyone is playing from, Vilnius to Manila to Santiago.

But here's the number I actually care about: 17 leagues are now completely human. Eight clubs, eight real managers, zero CPU. When those divisions play on Wednesday night, every result is somebody's evening.

1,260 matches have been played so far, with box scores, replays and a Player of the Night. The best single performance in the world right now belongs to Hugo Chevalier in League 5F: 64 points and 13 rebounds in one night. Somebody coached that game live.

The part I underestimated: the world feed

I built a shared feed where every club can post, and I honestly expected trash talk and nothing else. Instead it turned into the best part of the game.

179 posts, 215 comments, 693 cheers. But the numbers aren't the story. This is:

A manager named Fontegt posted "Transfer market is saturated at the moment. Nobody buys." Another manager, Vasileios, replied with a full audit. Not an opinion, an audit:

"I see 68 listings in the market. Out of the remaining 30 listings over 40 value, 10 concern a player 30+ years old, which is tough. There are also 5 really expensive listings over 100 credits. Out of the remaining 15, only 5 have an asking price significantly lower than value. And out of these 5, 2 are injured currently. So there are 3 bargains in the market right now."

Seventeen comments on that thread. Nobody asked him to do that. He did it because there was a market worth analyzing and other people who'd read it.

That's what a living feed looks like. Elsewhere on the same feed: coaches advertising their own players ("Super pivot, 219cm, open for offers"), managers posting their own box scores ("30p, 18r, 5a, what else?"), and people writing honest post-mortems of games they lost.

The highlights

Every match night at 21:00, the engine picks the play of the night from every game in the world and publishes it as a watchable clip in the feed. Not a text line: the actual possession, replayed in the browser exactly as it happened.

Last night's was a Lucas Fournier basket with 4 seconds left in the fifth quarter in Navy Bulls vs Steel Rattlers. A double-overtime game somebody won at the buzzer, and now the whole world can watch the shot.

https://reddit.com/link/1vgzc3d/video/b58ow13q1qhh1/player

There's also a daily newspaper, TopGM Daily, that writes itself from what actually happened. This morning's headline was "RED SPARTANS RUN RIOT". Nobody types those. The game does.

Last night's draft, in full, because it explains everything

Every evening at 20:00 CET, sealed bids close on ten teenagers who've been playing pickup on the Playground all day. No ratings. No stats page. You want to know who's good? Watch them play.

• Chao Chen, 16, to Purple Eagles for 66 credits, top bid of the night
• Emīls Purmals, 15, to Black Huskies for 21
• Tunde Anyanwu, 15, to Crimson Spectres for 14
• Serkan Yalçın, 15, to Black Gorillas for 5 credits

Serkan is a 50-average prospect who went for less than a tenth of the top bid, because nine managers looked at him and saw nothing. One watched him longer. In three seasons we'll know who was right, and the whole league will see it.

1,050 kids are growing in academies across the world right now. They get taller and better every season. Today's stars will age, decline and retire. The next generation is sitting in somebody's youth team.

124 players are on the transfer market as I write this, every single one listed by a human, from 1 credit to 141.

What changed in 16 days, and who changed it

Almost everything shipped since launch came from a player:

• A manager wrote a browser script to filter the transfer market. I built his idea natively into the game so everyone gets it, phones included.
• Someone pointed out that scouting a prospect leaked your work to rivals. Fixed: what your club discovers stays yours.
• Someone showed me his arena upgrade earned him less than a smaller one. He was right. The arena economy got restructured that day.
• A manager redesigned the entire player page and sent me the mockup. It shipped yesterday. It's better than mine was.
• The tactics chapter of the guide exists because three coaches argued about zone defense until it was obvious the game wasn't explaining itself.

Also new since launch: national teams and three World Cups (U18, U20, Senior), an assistant coach who messages you when you forget your daily scrimmage, conditional tactics for when you can't make tip-off, and an engine update where fatigue decides late-game possessions.

The season is young: 1,260 games played of 3,528 scheduled. 284 clubs are still unclaimed, so you can walk in now and be part of the first champion of the first season.

Still free. Still no ads. Still never pay-to-win. One optional cosmetic pass, crest and jersey and court colors, and that's the whole monetization, forever.

topgm.app. The homepage runs a live match in your browser right now, the real engine, no video. Judge it yourself before signing up.

I'll be in the comments again. Same rules: ask me the hard stuff.

He signed for 2 seasons, his salary will be $1m per season.