Olympic basketball is supposed to be fun. But right now, I’m not really having fun.
It’s fun fan-casting a dream team of players for Team USA, as is wondering if Anthony Edwards or Devin Booker should start or what the ideal big rotation is. It’s a tradition to hear that Kawhi Leonard is too injured to play, write articles about cryptic posts on social media about who got snubbed, if they’re mad about it, or if they hate their teammates now and if it’s actually Grant Hill’s fault.
It’s all in good fun, but none of it is about basketball. Because for USA Basketball, Olympic basketball isn’t about basketball. For the other 11 basketball teams in this tournament, it’s about basketball. But for this political party we call USA Basketball, winning basketball games has somehow become a second priority behind the exhausting and unoriginal bigger fish we all somehow ended up frying: stupid, invented and downright uninteresting narratives about Jayson Tatum and Joel Embiid.
Recently, at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, Tatum played zero minutes in the team’s first game against Serbia. Then, after head coach Steve Kerr received approximately seven trillion questions about it, Tatum started the following game against South Sudan, logging four points and 17 minutes. Meanwhile, Joel Embiid had roughly the inverse game log, starting the Serbia game but landing a DNP against South Sudan. After the game, Embiid was named a starter for the next game against Puerto Rico.
Is this seriously what the Olympics are going to be about? Am I actually going to have to spend this entire long march to a gold medal hearing about Tatum and Embiid’s value like it’s mid-March in a normal NBA season? If this was actually about winning, then putting together a stable eight-man rotation would be priorities number one, two and three for Kerr and Co., and they had ample time to do so.
Instead, they’ve elected to flip-flop around like a pair of Birkenstocks to try to soothe the demands of angry fans who want this guy or that guy or these two or that lineup to get more or less or no playing time. It’s chaos, and morphing into some kind of beauty pageant to show off the latest basketball trends in the USA one at a time. And this chicanery is encouraged by the fact that they’re still going to win anyway because they’re just so much better.
Kerr claimed that the lineup changes were based on “matchups,” a term so vague it can cover all manner of sins….
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