Potential breakout players of the 2015 FIBA Asia Championship - Part 1

*This post originally appeared on my column on FIBA.com.

The biggest continental tournament in this corner of the basketball world, the 2015 FIBA Asia Championship, will unfold in about two months. This will determine the Asian team to qualify automatically for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Needless to say, this tournament is going to be big, so I have taken it upon myself to shortlist some of the players to watch out for. In the first of a two-part series, I take a look at some of the in-betweeners, the guys who are not yet too old, but not quite so raw. These are the guys who might inherit the leadership roles and scoring cudgels of their respective teams as early as this year. These aren’t the guys who are up-and-coming, these are the guys who should break out now.

#FIBAAsia2015: The TOP FIVE FIBA Asia Small Forwards Right Now

Less than two months remain between now and the 2015 FIBA Asia Championship in Changsha, China. As of this writing, most of the perceived title contenders have already begun training for the all-important competition that will reward just one country with an outright berth in the 2016 Olympics in Brazil. 

As a run-up to that tournament, I will be posting a series of articles focusing on key players with whom we need to be familiar. These range from the newcomers, the breakout ballers, the tried-and-tested veterans, the local stars, and even the naturalized players. Naturally, we will also look at the top cagers per position, which is what we will do here.

In the previous post in this series, we looked at the TOP FIVE FIBA Asia Shooting Guards. These are the players who more commonly known as the best snipers in the continent.

In this post, we will look at perhaps the most crowded position in FIBA Asia, at least in terms of sheer talent. There are just so many big names and great players who play small forward. This is mainly because, prototypically, a small forward is one of the heavy-hitters or scorers of a basketball team. The reason for this is that SFs, or swingmen, usually have a good combination of size, quickness, and shooting – all of which are extremely important especially in the international game.

Without further ado, I present to you my TOP FIVE FIBA Asia Small Forwards right now: