Twice in a year the UAE has hosted a world Under 17 sports event.

Last fall it was the Fifa U17 World Cup.

This month it is the Fiba Under 17 World Championship.

Fiba is the international sanctioning body for basketball.

And this basketball tournament has been more interesting than was the soccer tournament. Even though the latter had more teams and lasted longer.

Something about basketball makes it more interesting to watch, at this level.

Let’s see if I can figure it out.

–Basketball is a more intimate sport. In person or on television. You feel like you get an idea of what players are like because you can see facial expressions.

–Basketball players, at 17, already can accomplish most of the athletic maneuvers that older players can. And might even be more accomplished at them. When you are 16, you have an adult anatomy, but you don’t have the adult muscle mass or some of that extra 1 or 2 percent of body fat … and these whippet-lean kids jump like crazy, and they are extraordinarily quick, too. More so than they will be at 21, let alone 31.

–The U17s are not as sophisticated, and the notion of future riches is there but not so close they are warped by it. But they have been taught a lot of the stuff their older brothers are doing in college or the NBA. Spacing the floor, driving and kicking, shooters camping at the three-point line. Watching the game, you have a sense of a fairly high level of tactical awareness with an extremely high level of athleticism. These guys have been coached.

–Basketball produces teams with significant differences in their approach to the game. The Philippines and Japan have speed but almost no height. Serbia and Italy are whole teams of 6-6 guys who are not as quick. China seems to value height so much they seem to lack guys who can handle the ball. Puerto Rico seems a little like a knockoff United States.

–The players are still approachable. Many of the U.S. guys, and several of the best of many of the other teams will soon be playing professionally. (Angola has a pro league, for goodness sake.) But their heads still fit inside most door frames. They will chat about stuff.

All the games are televised, and the first four days of this had four games at two gyms in Dubai, and the games unrolled … bang bang bang bang. And we all got to play amateur scout, predicting which guy will be a Big Thing in a few years.

This is only the third Fiba U17 championship, but the MVP in 2010 was Bradley Beal of the U.S., and he already has earned more than $8 million playing in the NBA. The MVP from the 2012 tournament, Khalil Okafor, is about to enter Duke as a top recruit. (The U.S. won both tournaments without any trouble.)

(Here is the U.S. roster, and some of these guys are already well-known on the prep level, and more will become well known.)

The U.S. has played four games to reach the quarterfinals of the 16-team tournament, winning by an average of 47.2 points per game, a number augmented by their 122-38 victory over Japan tonight.

The leading scorers in the tournament, at this writing, are a couple of guards who clearly are the best players on their teams.

The U.S. team has been very careful about parceling playing time; seven guys are averaging 10 points per game or more, led by the 6-11 center Diamond Stone (his real name), who is averaging 14 points and 11 rebounds per game.

So, yeah, some of these guys are going to be making scads of money sometime soon, and the fun is picking out which ones will do so.

One last thing? I like to see Americans come over and show how good they are at something that doesn’t involve explosions. This time shows up and, holy mackerel, nearly all of them can dunk and play at 100 mph. Makes me kinda proud that we can get a dozen prep hotshots to play together with such high levels of skill.

The U.S. has never lost a game in the U17 championships. That won’t last forever, of course. No other country has remotely as many basketball players spending all day on the game as does the U.S.  But someone will beat them someday.

Could happen here. Australia has a 7-foot center, Isaac Humphries, who is averaging 21.5 a game. Puerto Rico is unbeaten, and they beat the U.S. at the 2004 Olympics, which I imagine the kids have been told about. The Euros are solid.

Anyway, this tournament is fun. The level of play is far higher than I anticipated, the games go past in a flash, we get to see lots of athleticism and not so much cynicism.

The public here, Indians and Pakistanis and Arabs, don’t much care about this. At all.

But I think it is great fun. They can have this tournament here every two years, far as I’m concerned.

Note: If you want to see lots and lots of coverage by The National’s Jonathan Raymond, you can start here and follow the links.