Lauri Markkanen with Team Finland travels now to Croatia, for the match on Sunday. Finland has now already won Group C (as there is no way Slovenia can get ahead anymore), while Crotia is in a desperate situation; they not only need to win, but win big, and at the same time Slovenia has to win Sweden.
Due to the quirky points method in the WC qualifications round all matches are important, except the match es against the teams which didn't get through to the next round. Effectively, if the coach of Finland is certain Croatia can't win with a big enough margin, while Slovenia at the same time wouldn't absolutely rout Sweden, it might mean Lauri will see a more limited role (essentially, why put the burn on Lauri when the game pretty much is garbage time?). Then again, if Sweden gets steam-rolled by Slovenia, and Croatia goes absolutely wild in front of their home-crowd, then Finland absolutely would need an absolutely superb game from Lauri.
Croatia was yesterday overrun by Doncic&Dragic and the rest of Team Slovenia. The final score was 97-69 in favour of Slovenia, and it would have even a bigger difference if Slovenia didn't take their foot from the gas-pedal in the 4th. Mario Hezonja seemed to be the only one in Team Croatia who played with pride to the end, while Bojan Bogdanovic for example didn't seem to find his rhythm at all during the match (seemed like he and Ivica Zubac had serious problems with adjusting to the FIBA version of rules (compared to NBA, offensive fouls and travelling are actually called by the refs, while on defense hand-checking is an absolute no-no under FIBA rules).
One thing for Sunday is pretty clear, Lauri Markkanen and Team Finland will have a heckuva tougher game vs Croatia than what they had yesterday vs Sweden. Not only does Croatia have a handful of NBA players to field, but they are playing a desperate game in front of their home-crowd; as mentioned, they don't just need to win, they need to win BIG to have a chance to go through to the next round.
For Lauri this is personally a chance to gauge his current situation against actual NBA players. Team Finland will also have a couple more practises together with Markkanen, so the team might actually be able to support Markkanen better; then again, the other Team Finland players are not used to play against NBA players, so it might get ugly real fast for Finland.