Now that the USA coaching staff is set for the next two summers, next comes the fun part.Who are the players going to be?USA Basketball formally announced men’s national team head coach Erik Spoelstra’s staff for the 2027 FIBA World Cup in Doha and 2028 Los Angeles Olympics: Oklahoma City’s Mark Daigneault, Detroit’s J.B. Bickerstaff and Gonzaga’s Mark Few. Their appointments were reported Tuesday by The Athletic and other media outlets, subject to approval by the USAB’s board of governors. The board gave its consent Thursday.“Building a staff is similar to building a team. You want character, intelligence, but you also want different approaches and different perspectives and different styles,” said Grant Hill, U.S. men’s national team managing director, in an interview with The Athletic. “I am really excited and look forward to these four men working together, problem solving and collaborating.”How J.B. Bickerstaff invests in his playersHunter PattersonWith the coaching staff set, Hill, USAB director Sean Ford and Spoelstra will spend the next nine-to-10 months identifying, recruiting and perhaps even making some tough cuts to fill out a 12-player roster of young American NBA stars (or rising stars) for the World Cup.Actually, those discussions have already begun. Whereas Team USA has won five consecutive Olympic golds, the last two World Cups (2019 and 2023) have not gone the Americans’ way. The challenges that make the World Cup harder on USA Basketball still exist.But there is reason for hope, and even optimism, that the team the U.S. sends to Qatar next summer will capture American fans’ attention and, of course, win.“You got a lot of young guys who want to be a part of it, which is great,” Hill said. “I think it’s actually an exciting time. I think we’ll have a chance to have a good … I think we’ll be good.“I think we will be big, we’ll be really good defensively,” Hill continued. “I think we’ll have shooting. … I think we’ll be fine. We’ll have an opportunity to win.”To the casual U.S. fan, Hill’s rhetoric may be confusing. Have a chance? What? Shouldn’t the best, deepest, richest basketball-playing country have more than a chance to win a World Cup?Well, again, the World Cup is harder for the U.S. Beginning in 2019, FIBA, the international governing body for basketball, moved the World Cup from two years prior to the Olympics to the year before. A two-year commitment has been much, much harder for USA Basketball to sell to top American stars than it has been for the other great basketball countries with NBA stars like Germany, France, Serbia and Canada, to name a few.The Americans finished seventh in 2019 in China, and then fourth at the 2023 Cup in the Philippines. Reading back the rosters from those teams, a fan might think, “Wait, there were a bunch of stars on both rosters.” While that would be true today — Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown and Donovan Mitchell were on the team in 2019; Anthony Edwards, Tyrese Haliburton, Jalen Brunson, Austin Reaves, Mikal Bridges and Jaren Jackson Jr. were on in 2023 — those same players were mostly rising stars with little experience at the time.