Team USA basketball: LeBron James to play point forward at Olympics, with Stephen Curry off ball, per report

Team USA plans to start LeBron James at the Paris Olympics and use him as a point forward, with Stephen Curry playing primarily off the ball, The Athletic’s Joe Vardon reported Friday, citing two sources with USA Basketball. The coaching staff will get its first look at this in Las Vegas, where training camp will begin on Saturday and Team USA will face Canada in an exhibition game next Wednesday.

One of the many virtues of Team USA’s stacked roster is that everybody can create offense. After stops, coach Steve Kerr will surely empower the team to push the ball and look for easy scoring opportunities, rather than looking for a traditional “point guard” to set things up. The implication here, though, is that, at least with the starting group, James will more often than not be the one who brings the ball up in the halfcourt.

Which, sure! I mean, does it really matter who initiates the offense? Another one of this team’s virtues is that everybody — James included, thanks to his enormously improved spot-up shooting — can also play off the ball. Kerr is the guy who unleashed Curry as the most dangerous off-ball player in the history of the sport, so it’s not surprising that he wants to use Curry this way. 

It’s not surprising, either, that Kerr wants to take advantage of James’ ability to read the game, put people in the right places and target mismatches. A word of caution, though: Don’t take this to mean that Curry is not going to run any pick-and-rolls.

“I’ve talked to both of them about this idea of being together after going against one another with such high stakes over the years,” Kerr told reporters during a press conference on Zoom last week. “They obviously fit really well together. I think the idea of Steph playing off the ball and LeBron pushing it in transition, that’s pretty intriguing. And obviously Steph will play on the ball as well and LeBron has become such a good shooter, but they’re both so good at so many different areas of the game. I think they’re really excited to compete together for the first time and to find, over the course of practices and the friendlies, to find some of the nuances that they can really exploit and explore, too, just to see where they can have an impact for each other.”

Kerr and his coaching staff — Mark Few, Tyronn Lue, and Erik Spoelstra — met in Chicago for what he called a “mini-retreat” leading up to these coming weeks of…