The D'Tigers of Nigeria have crashed out of the 2023 FIBA Olympic Pre-qualifying tournament following a second consecutive defeat, this time to Mali.
Nigeria will not participate in basketball at the Paris 2024 Olympic games as the D'Tigers have crashed out of the pre-qualifying tournament.
The D'Tigers lost scandalously 68-77 to Mali which sealed their fate and knocked them out of the 2023 FIBA Olympic pre-qualifying tournament having initially lost 93-87 to Senegal in their opening group game.
Nigeria have now crashed out of the tournament hosted in Lagos, at the Eko Convention Center after two bad games and will not be going to the Olympics in 2024.
An embarrassing fourth-quarter collapse was ultimately responsible for the defeat to Mali as the D'Tigers actually started this must-win game on the front foot.
A narrow first quarter tilted in Nigeria's favour at 17-15 but the D'Tigers established dominance in the second quarter, 26-23 to take a five-point lead into halftime.
In the third quarter, Nigeria consolidated their advantage with Daniel Utomi playing some great basketball to ensure that the D'Tigers led by eight going into the fourth.
But this was where the game took an ugly turn as Nigeria inexplicably lost their momentum, the D'Tigers failed to score a single point over six minutes into the fourth quarter while Mali went on a 16-0 run.
They would finally get on the board in the final quarter with just over 3 minutes to play making one of two free throws but by then the visitors already had a seven-point lead.
Nigeria continued to make silly errors and force shots and the opposition continued to punish them and were up 72-62 with two minutes on the clock.
D'Tigers would go on to make only two of their 20 attempted field goals in the last quarter which proved to be their undoing as Mali shot a sky-high 80% from the field to close out the game.
Despite the horrific ending to the game, UC Iroegbu led the game in scoring with 26 points, followed by Daniel Utomi who had 16 but the Malians did well enough to spread the points with four players scoring double digits.
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