\u201cI am here to qualify for the World Cup and play in it with Italy.\u201d Saliou Niang clearly outlined his ambitions in an interview with Matteo De Santis of La Stampa ahead of Italy\u2019s qualifiers against Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.<\/p>\n
Subject to NCAA eligibility clearance, the 22-year-old views a potential season at LSU as an important step toward the NBA. \u201cChoosing college comes from my desire to keep improving and become a more complete player. My relationship with Cleveland is close. I could have gone there this summer, but we are working on a path that will prepare me for the big leap.\u201d<\/p>\n
Niang also discussed the increasing visibility of athletes of African descent in Italian sports. \u201cSeeing so many Afro-Italians achieve important results is a beautiful thing. I hope this trend continues and normalizes something that is already ordinary in countries such as France and Germany.\u201d Born in Dakar and raised in Italy from the age of two, he added: \u201cI have always felt Italian and have never experienced racism.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Italian forward discusses his national-team ambitions, a potential move to LSU and his relationship with the Cleveland Cavaliers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":512071,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_spbk_hide_featured":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[379,401],"tags":[],"rumors":[],"typology":[],"posizionamento":[],"class_list":["post-512072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-italbasket","category-ncaa"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/5\/2026\/08\/Saliou-Niang-1-1.jpg","digistream_id":0,"digistream":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512072\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/512071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512072"},{"taxonomy":"rumors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rumors?post=512072"},{"taxonomy":"typology","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/typology?post=512072"},{"taxonomy":"posizionamento","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posizionamento?post=512072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}