This whole conversation is disingenuous and condescending to NBA players. The best basketball players play in the NBA. If you want to call them world champs or not is irrelevant because there’s not a single foreign team that could beat the best NBA team. This Noah dude is just being a weirdo. I notice a lot of soccer fans are putting more batteries in his back. It has to be resentment because Americans don’t fukk with soccer like that.
Yeah, the whole thing is wild disingenuous. If the basis of his argument has always been that he's a real world champion because he competes against the best from around the world, then it applies to the NBA as well. Nicola Jokic isn't just kicking around a league in Serbia somewhere. The only time you're going to see Giannis playing basketball for anything even remotely Greek is the Olympics. Plenty of countries have FIBA teams manned mostly by NBA players.
Just because the league itself is centered in the US doesn't mean that the best players in the world aren't there or striving to be there.