Nigeria’ s women basketball team , D’ Tigress, have moved three places up and are now 16th best team in the world and first in Africa in the latest women’ s ranking released by FIBA on Friday .
The latest movement makes Nigeria the only African country to make the top 20.
African champions D ’Tigress garnered 329.2 points to place 16th and first in Africa .
World champions and Olympic gold medalists, USA, maintained their top- ranked spot with 835. 6 points, Australia are in second place with 714. 1 points, Spain third with 692. 7, Canada fourth with 641. 9 and France a close fifth with 639. 3 points.
The Afrobasket champions would hope to grab one of the two Olympic slots at the Africa Pre- Qualifying Tournament for Tokyo 2020 in Mozambique from November 14 to 17.
FIBA announced on their website that with the new women’ s competition system starting this month with the FIBA Women’ s Olympic Pre- Qualifying Tournaments in Africa , the Americas and Asia, it has launched the new system for the FIBA World Ranking Women, presented by Nike .
Moving from a competition - based system to a game- based one , the new ranking is based on results of games ranging from regional pre-qualifiers all the way to the FIBA Women’ s Basketball World Cup Final , including the Olympics as well as FIBA Continental Cups . The previous ranking was purely competition- based and only considered the final standings of tournaments .

Source: https://punchng.com/dtigress-move-to-16th-in-fiba-ranking/