Good Morning It’s Basketball - World champions of what?
World champions of what?The United State men's team loses twice more to finish fourth in the World Cup. It's the same old story, and only Olympic loss next summer can lead to the necessary jolt.Good morning. Let’s basketball. Praying Hands; Albrecht Durer; 1508 Back in October, Netflix released a documentary called The Redeem Team. It documented USA Basketball’s effort to reinvent its senior men’s team program after the failures of the 2002 FIBA World Championship in Indianapolis and the 2004 Olympics in Athens. I wrote a lengthy review of the documentary that included a broader assessment of Life After Redemption for Team USA men’s basketball. Pardon me a brief quote.
Eleven months later, Team USA just dropped three of its final four games in the 2023 World Cup in Manila to finish out of the medals for the second straight time. It lost to Dennis Schroder and Germany on Friday morning, and to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Canada on Sunday. This is the rudderless norm for Team USA men’s basketball. Wait, did I say Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Canada? Well, Shai did have another excellent game. But this was Dillon Brooks’ moment. Thirty-nine points for Dillon the Villain. This is proof of what I was saying about the rest of the world catching up. Brooks is not an All-NBA player. But Canada has an All-NBA player in Shai. And then it has a bunch of legitimate NBA players around him: Brooks, R.J. Barrett, Dwight Powell, Kelly Olynyk, Nickeil Alexander-Walker. Germany brought four NBA players — Schroder, Franz Wagner, Mo Wagner, Daniel Theis — one of whom could be an All-Star soon (Franz). The rest of those rosters are generally filled with high-level talent. This version of Team USA, meanwhile, didn’t have a single 2022-23 All-NBA player. There were nine American All-NBA players this year. Two of them (Jayson Tatum and Damian Lillard) played two summers ago in the Olympics. Two more played in the 2019 World Cup (a 7th-place finish) but not the Olympics (Donovan Mitchell and Jaylen Brown). Two of them have multiple Olympic golds (LeBron James and Steph Curry). Another has a single Olympic gold (Jimmy Butler). Two others (Julius Randle and De’Aaron Fox) have not appeared for Team USA in international senior level play. This is the interesting conundrum the USA Basketball program, led by Grant Hill, finds itself in. ... Keep reading with a 7-day free trialSubscribe to Good Morning It's Basketball to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.A subscription gets you:
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