Team USA loses another Olympic basketball tune-up, this time to Australia
Once is a fluke, twice is a trend.
As I said, every fourth Olympics. Here we are.
Basketball team made up of a bunch of dead-tired, moderately interested millionaires loses exhibition tune-up to exhibition tournament that nobody really cares about.
FIFY
They’re so passionate about the sport.
USA needs a better mechanic for these tune ups.
Patty Mills in an Australian jersey might be the best player in the world.
I think getting Jrue is going to help quite a bit. This US team has nothing but turnstiles defensively at the guard position.
Unfortunately Dario Saric just tore his achilles or something in game 1 of the Finals. He's not playing basketball any time soon.
The Brian Scalabrine experiment comes to mind
I wasn't going to watch it even before they decided there would be no fans.
Now I'm really not going to watch it. I'm going to not watch it as hard as I can.
International ball is getting better and better. Sure, our guys might not be doing their best, basketball is kinda like Soccer when it comes to nationalism. Sorta.
Seeing guys like Goulliard??? who is in the NBL lighting so called greatest players in the game up, is a sad sight to see. The NBA is a soft league with too much of an emphasis on 3's, shots from 30-35ft away. Also, no defense is being played. They will probably do fine once they get a couple defenders, but the last two games have been embarrassing. They play Argentina tonight.
Serious question, who is on this team right now?
Bam, Draymond, Grant, Durant, Lilliard, Beal, Lavine, Tatum are the main guys. After the finals, Booker, Holiday, and Middleton will be joining.
For this game ... Durant, Dame, Beal, Jerami Grant, Draymond, Tatum, Adebayo, Lavine. Also looks like some of the select players got minutes -- Darius Garland and Keldon Johnson had stats. Looks like Love sat out.
Serious question, who is on this team right now?
After seeing the roster a month ago....I was surprised by the Nigeria loss, but not this loss to Australia. Although, most of Nigeria's roster is composed of Americans. This US Team, when compared to the world teams is perhaps 5th-6th best, maybe!
A team with Dame, Durant and Beal on it and you have them as the 5th best?
Interesting take. Let’s see what happens once the games count.
Genuinely hope I am wrong.
USA has the best roster, but a horrible mix of talent. It's mostly just volume scorers. I'd rather they just rolled out there with Dame/KD/Bam on the first unit, Jrue/Draymond/Beal second unit and fill the rest of the units and bench spots with supporting role caliber players like PJ Tucker, Jae Crowder, Mikal Bridges, Joe Harris, Marcus Smart, Robert Covington, Mason Plumlee, etc.. It gets redundant to have a bunch of guys who are volume scorers. You need a spot up 3 shooter who can defend, some gritty wing defenders, some pick&roll lob threats. Having eight 25+ PPG scorers only works if you have zero bad shooting nights, bc there's no defense or rebounding to pull you through an off-night. If KD and Dame are on the floor, you've got the "scoring" aspect covered.
Yeah, they're down a couple of guys but it's still a roster that works from an All-Star perspective but lacks much size and defensive focus, which we've seen exploited now twice in a row. Could they just try to outscore everyone and hope they get enough stops to hold on? Sure. But that puts a ton of pressure on your offense to keep firing on all cylinders and also makes it easier for the opposition to gameplan.
I honestly think this group is going to miss the medal stand and we'll see a return to a more coherent team structure in 2024.
This is just 100% inaccurate. They are the most talented team but not the best team. They haven’t played together for weeks let alone years like the other teams. Showing up isn’t enough. They can win the golf if they get on the same page based on talent. But there is a lot of work to do.
But have most of the other teams been playing together for that much longer? I'm not sure. A lot of those teams are pieced together with players from disparate leagues too, aren't they?
Nowadays all the good teams have NBA players. This isn’t like the Cold War era when the Communist teams played together all the time. That excuse needs to be retired.
It’s just been a weird year and we don’t even have our entire team together yet because of the NBA Finals.
They have to golf too? Where’s Curry?
Holiday will be shutdown when he gets on the team in a week or so. He’ll be the best pure PG on it too and can send Lillard to the super 6th role prob.
Middleton and Booker will help a lot as well.
The team still has no size up front and may get exposed, but this team at full power is the best since 2012.
Croikey!
Well, I've heard there are like 3 Detroit Pistons on the team...
Unfortunately, the wrong ones. This team doesn't need Grant and Bey. They need Plumlee and Beef Stew.
Oh no! We suck again!
Australia has some legit players on their team. Joe Ingles, Patty Mills, Matisse Thybulle, and Aron Baynes all play solid minutes in the NBA. Matthew Dellavedova is on the team too. All of those guys can play solid to spectacular defense. Thybulle might be the best international defender in the world right now since Giannis isn't playing for Greece this year.
If these two teams play 10 games, USA probably wins 7 times. This team lacks defense, especially on the interior. They only have one true center and Kevin Love on the bench. That's going to come back to bite them when it matters.
Losing a tune-up game? This is an OUTRAGE!!
Consecutive tune-up games!
For the first time since we started using pros!
Make the Olympics U-23 basketball and develop a World Cup for basketball that fits the NBA calendar, where guys aren't opting out for well-deserved rest.
Also, bring back Melo and watch him go 8 for 12 from 3 and carry this team to a gold medal.
There is a FIBA World Cup and it’s usually played in the late summer in August/September. The only issue with it is that outside of 1-2 tournaments in it, the US sends a B team essentially.
It’s seen as the little brother to the Olympic tournament still as well. Hopefully time will change that, but right now it garners little attention from the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIBA_Basketball_World_Cup
The Olympics is established as the competition for international basketball. You can't put that genie back in the bottle.
This year is just weird because of the NBA season delay. Normally, most NBA players' seasons are over by the start of June, and the Finals usually by June 15.
They also played poorly in the World Championships in 2019, so this is starting to look like what happens when the US takes a break caring about these games and they send a bunch of tired, pretty-good players. I assume they'll finish off the medal stand at this point.
Pretty good players? I assume you don’t mean KD or Dame who are top 10 players in the world. Tatum is top 20. Talent isn’t the issue. It’s lack of practice.
Who's the 4th-best player on the team? Beal? Grant? LaVine? I mean, they have two people you'd credibly believe are "centers" and one is Kevin Love, who didn't play at all yesterday.
Yes, they have 2-3 players who are in the top-10/15 in the NBA. But overall it's a team of pretty good players that are tired and haven't played much together but also not overwhelmingly talented compared to their opponents. For example, here's the 2016 roster - that's a much better roster in terms of depth and overall player quality.
I was unaware that KD, the best player on the planet at this moment, was merely "pretty-good"
First off, KD is not the best player on the planet. He's a top 5-10 player and a fabulous offensive talent, but he's never been better than average as a defender and he's absolutely worse than that now.
And more generally, the team has KD, Dame, and Tatum as top-20 players. The 4th-best player is...Beal? Grant? LaVine? Defense-only Draymond? Here's the box score of yesterday's game, and that absolutely doesn't look like a team loaded with elite talent. It looks like a team of pretty good players with 2-3 "elite" players. So yeah, I'm comfortable saying the team is full of pretty-good players with a couple of tired stars.
I can't name one elite player on Nigeria or Australia, yet they had no problem with us.
I'm not surprised TBH. What the USA team is lacking compared to the competition right now is a cohesive team. All these other countries have teams that have been playing together on the international stage for years. The US team is just a mix of isolation players with some "glue guys" mixed in.
This team is a lot like the '04 team - they look great on paper but just can't get it together as a team.
The '04 team wasn't that great on paper. That was the year that most of the team opted out due to security concerns (and Larry Brown decided to make LeBron and Melo pay their dues). We had a serious shortage of outside shooting that year.
A sign of the times.... modern youth are disinterested, too.
I quickly scanned the box score, but Andrew Gaze apparently didn't get any PT for Australia. I thought for sure that he would've been good for at least a few token 3-pointers.
My "no direct evidence to back it up but there's probably at least some elements of truth to it" assumption is that the USA team is comprised mostly of NBA all stars who have spent very little time playing together (on the same team), probably closer to none at all, and aren't so much a team as they are just five superstars on the court playing individual ball just trying to out-talent the other team.
Meanwhile, these other teams (I'm assuming) probably play together a lot more, have a more cohesive team identity, and like most every other team in the world, I imagine they get fired up to play team USA because they are perceived as having the best players in the world and they want that chance to knock off the best.
It's probably like how most everyone approaches playing Michigan or ND. Your opponent is always going to be fired up, you're always going to get their best shot simply by virtue of who you are.
The opponents are absolutely psyched to play USA but it's also a roster that doesn't have nearly as much talent as past years and is also waiting on 3-4 more players to come over from the NBA Finals (assuming they call come and are healthy). And while the other teams have played with each other more than the US team, teams like Australia also have a good number of NBA players so the talent level isn't as pronounced as it once was. And in Australia's case they're also short Ben Simmons, who is probably the best player they have.
It's time to take all efforts and show good results next time. I think that such a strong competitor should be a motivation to be better.