Here in Croatia I would say that the basketball Olympics are still more important than the World Cup, but the soccer World Cup is infinitely more important than the Olympics soccer.
The big difference is that in soccer when there are international qualifications for the World Cup all major soccer leagues have a scheduled 1 week or 2 week break, so all players can participate. In basketball however the FIBA World Cup qualifications clashed with NBA schedule, and even Euroleague schedule. So none of the NBA players and Euroleague players participated. If you think your D-team didn't do well, imagine Croatian D-team with no depth whatsoever. This means the qualifications were absolutely abysmal and the games were a joke (in one game our team shot threes 1-27 and lost by only 2 points). Croatia didn't even qualify this time around and we could have a team with Bogdanovic, Saric, Zubac, Hezonja (and Bender lol).
Basically for most European teams the players playing in the qualifications don't actually play in the final tournament which is absurd. What kind of motivation can these players have, knowing that even if they do win they will most probably be replaced for the final tournament? Now because of this we couldn't qualify directly for the Olympics but instead need to play in the Olympics qualifying tournaments, where we face the same problem of NBA schedule clashing with those games, so it is quite possible that this generation of Croatian players might never play together for the national team again.
