Meanwhile, the country and especially the club who invested in developing these players still get screwed over financially. The least you could do is let them compete in international competitons (though to be fair, with Eurobasket, the World Championship, and the Olympics, there's probably one too many in there). And besides, a lot of international fans care far more for international basketball than they do for the NBA.
I'm not following your thinking. NBA players have an obligation to their multiple-million dollar day jobs -- period. Any player who is injured playing for any other team should not be paid for the time lost during their regular season. Even simpler, their employer should not allow them to play competitively for any other team -- International, Olympic or otherwise. If I had a second job and it caused me to be unable to perform my primary job, I'd be fired.
Let me explain myself better by looking at the example of Batum. His club invested a lot of money into finding him, developing and training him, and giving him playing time to make a name for himself. They also invest in plenty of other young players who won't succeed. After all, no player is going to develop on a one man team. Their tangible gains are a year or two of good play from him for a fairly low salary before they lose him for nothing (his contract expired, so the Blazers didn't have to pay a buyout fee) to the NBA. France likewise invests in basketball infrastructure and the maintenance of the league, only to see what could be one of their most marketable players leave while he's still a teenager. Where's their compensation? note - you could also rightly argue that Batum's success in the NBA leads to intangible gains for the club as well as country, notably when recruiting new youth players, but that's impossible to quantify. to directly respond to your post BBert, NBA teams know prior to signing a European player that he's very likely to want to play for his national team. They're well aware of the risks inherently involved with signing a Euro.
But what does the club that originally signed him get out of him playing for, in Batum's example, France?
I see what your saying, but that's like any company that I intern for claiming restitution because I went on to work for a fortune 500 company. Batum doesn't owe them anything. They helped him hone his game, and in return he has played for them, making them money. If an NBA team wants to include a clause that bans them from other leagues or forms of competition, that's their prerogative. They are paying these guys millions of dollars. They don't have to sign the contract, and they don't have to make millions of dollars. Nobody is forcing them to play in the NBA.
The French Basketball Federation runs the league, trains coaches, and I'm pretty sure helps fund grassroots youth development (ie teams for kids under 10, etc). The club's youth players also benefit from playing with the junior national team.
The company you intern at receives free labor in exchange for training you how to get coffee. Batum's club invested (sadly, I have no idea where to find out how much exactly) plenty of money into youth development for a small return. I'd bet that if you plot the returns a club receives against a player's talent level, you'd end up with a bell shaped curve (I'll pull out MSPaint if that doesn't make sense), where players with a medium talent level end up staying with the club for 5 years or so while the least talented are released and the most talented are snapped up by the NBA for next to nothing. It seems unfair to me that a club doesn't receive much benefit from their most talented "output." I would propose a system where the club that develops an NBA player receives, for example: $100k for every 82 games an international player plays in, $500k for each All-Star appearance, etc. It would have to be the NBA that pays this out of its revenue sharing pool so as to not disincentivize cheap teams from drafting international players. I bet this is going to be a big issue when Joakim Noah signs a new contract, it will be interesting to see how important playing for France is to him.
