New Zealand's solid core of experienced internationals, Pero Cameron, Kirk Penney and Phill Jones are on course to play in their third world championships with the Tall Blacks.
A pre-championship squad of 12 players was named in Albany on Sunday after three days of trials and will leave for a European tour on Monday evening. It will play matches and mini-tournaments in Croatia, Slovenia and Turkey with matches also against Russia, Serbia and Jordan during the series.
New Zealand, ranked 13th in the world, is in the same pool as Spain (3), Lithuania (6), France (15), Canada (19) and Lebanon (24) at the world championships with its first game against Lithuania on August 28.
Cameron, now a player-coach with the Wellington Saints in New Zealand's national basketball league, will captain the team.
The squad is: Pero Cameron (captain), Kirk Penney (vice-captain), Lindsay Tait, Jeremy Kench, Alex Pledger, Benny Anthony, Mika Vukona, Michael Fitchett, Thomas Abercrombie, Casey Frank, Phill Jones, Craig Bradshaw.
Coach Nenad Vucinic kept the door opened for high-performing players to force their way into the team by refusing to describe the squad as his world championship side.
There was a slim hope that another stalwart, NBA player Sean Marks would be over a shoulder injury, but it was only a slim hope, Vucinic said.
It had been a difficult squad to pick he said and the selectors had agonised over their choices, even up to the moments before the decision was made. Anyone of the 23 players in the trials could have made the side and he was delighted with the efforts put in by all the players who attended.
The tour, and the championships, were not times to be developing players, that effort had been made over the previous two years, Vucinic said.
"There's a lot of players here in this 12 who came from that and we are very happy to have some of the older players as well there," he said.
Vucinic said the pre-championship tour was to prepare as best the side could for the world championships.
"If you remember last year I think we played 10 games in the lead-up to the Oceania series against Australia and we lost eight of them but we managed to win the series.
"We don't place too much emphasis on the pre-tournament games but we certainly won't be going into those games with the intention to lose," he said.