The well-deserved Americans Jennie Simms and Alyssa Baron were recently recruited to Israel's national team.

Baron, maybe also Simms if she has time to be ready to play, will be part of the European Championship qualifying squad that faces Sweden.

This means that Israel now has three naturalized American women in its national team, as Alexandra Cohen was included previously.

"FIBA is a circus"

Regardless of whether they get two or three on the field, the Americans can extinguish Sweden's hopes for the EC playoffs.

The teams meet both Thursday evening and in February.

- It is absurd that Israel can suddenly play with two or three naturalized players when the rule is that you cannot have more than one naturalized player.

To compare FIBA ​​to a circus would be to insult circuses, says Rajacic.

How does this affect Sweden's chances of reaching the EC?

- I thought that Sweden had a good chance of going all the way to the European Championships, before we found out that Israel would strengthen.

I have seen the track record of these players and there is no doubt that they will be key players in Israel's national team right away.

FIBA makes fun of national team basketball and opposes Swedish basketball.

The association strongly critical

FIBA has not given any detailed explanation to SVT Sport, but has stated to the Swedish Basketball Association that its general secretary has approved "special circumstances" - a decision that cannot be appealed.

- We have asked FIBA ​​what happened and received the answer that the general secretary made an individual decision, without involving any committee.

We think this is really bad and Israel is also already qualified for the EC as host country, says the association's general secretary Fredrik Joulamo.

Sweden was already in a bad position after the initial qualifying loss against Latvia and now at least two victories are required in the three remaining matches to get to the EC.

- We haven't received all the facts, so we really don't know everything about this.

But we think that basketball's naturalization rule has been far too liberal from the start, says Fredrik Joulamo.

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