DENG FREED TO PLAY FOR GB!!
08/28/2008

EXPECT an official announcement from British Basketball on Friday morning but Basketball 24/7 can tell you - Deng is back!

After two crazy weeks of lobbying and tireless work negotiating with insurance companies, BB have come up with the premium - understood to be around £250,000 - that allows Luol Deng to play in this summer's European Championship qualifiers.

The Chicago Bulls ace was on a Transatlantic flight late Thursday, heading to London, although time will not allow him to join up with the GB squad on their current visit to Turkey.

Deng will complete some formalities over his paperwork and the Bulls still have to officially put pen to paper to give their approval to the plan.

The minute Deng, 23, was left off the NBA's group insurance policy, the agreement between the NBA and FIBA that requires all international players to be released to play for their countries went out of the window.

And even though GB have now insured Deng's back against injury, the Bulls can still technically veto him playing.

However, Chicago have given their verbal commitment to release Deng and their signature to the agreement should be a routine matter.

GB also, of course, have to lodge the money with the insurance company's bank and wait for it to clear, which could add another day to the process.

But all parties appear optimistic that there is no danger of Deng missing the opening tip in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, even if he will not have had chance to practise with the team.

The successful outcome of this sad saga marks a major triumph for BB and a sign of how far the sport's administration has come in this country following the dark days of previous national governing bodies.

It marks a masterstroke in organisation and has avoided a potential disaster for the programme and the sport in the UK.

Had Deng been unable to play this summer or, as had been feared, in other summers to come, GB ran the risk of relegation from the A Division of the Euro Championships in 2009.

And had that occurred, the earliest GB could have been promoted back to the A Division would have been the summer of 2011, meaning the team would not have had time to fulfil the minimum requirement needed to play in the 2012 Olympic Games.

British Basketball talked openly of those fears at the start of this week and that message seems to have got through to UK Sport, the governing body which distributes funding to Olympic sports.

It is not known exactly how the additional insurance money has been found - and it represents a large chunk of the £1.5 million annual budget that BB uses to run four programmes (men, women and two under-20's).

Performance director Chris Spice has been in in depth talks with UK Sport over the last fortnight, however, and it appears likely that some shuffling of budgets has accomplished a winning result with BB possibly borrowing against future funding to make a dream a reality.