Yikes
And other things
I donât know if USA has the practice time to work on hard hedging but the switch everything defense is tough when you have Gobert there to swallow offensive rebounds.
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Iâll keep saying it until it happens but team usa needs a management and coaching reboot. This is not a one year thing in the popivich era.
Yeah pop has been a miserable national team coach.
I think the bigger issue is that the US relies on a commanding talent gap to win because we constantly roll out teams of amicable strangers against teams with significantly more cohesion, and while we are still vastly more talented, itâs shrinking.
Three of our five guards joined the team for the first time 4 days ago! Why they didnât swap out one of the finalists for like Trae Young is beyond me.
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This team still has a massive talent gap, coach k was blasting teams in world cups playing kenneth faired serious minutes. Not buying the talent thing. I mean compare this team that dominated the world cup
to this years
That being said, Jrue seems built for international play. The more physical game doesnât phase him at all. He was USAâs best player today.
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Faried was good back in 2014. Considerably better than JaVale McGee at any point in his career, at least.
This team is just a weird one and having a short gap between last NBA season and this and a shorter gap than normal between the end of the season and the Olympics has to have some of these guys pretty gassed. Middleton and Holiday were busy getting sauced at the Bucks parade about half an hour ago.
That and having 6â9" Bam as your only legit(ish) big was not the way to go.
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I want to blame Pop and I do think heâs made some missteps. But ultimately all the hand wringing over rules and roster issues but really itâs coming down to a couple things: 1. Durant and Lillard are not playing well, 2. This team may as well be strangers.
On the first, that can change and hopefully will change. And may be all they need to get them to win gold.
On the second, itâs basically the root of any other issue you want to bring up. 3 rotation players on this team just showed up 24 hours ago from a cross world flight! The rest have been practicing for 2 or 3 weeks in Las Vegas of all places with an incomplete team. No wonder the defense has holes at times or theyâre not connected on offense.
Every tournament the US has a different team, especially so since 2016. Thereâs been no consistent US team in any tournament since then. Meanwhile these other teams have in many cases decades of experience together. That makes up a big but not as big as usual talent gap
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I guess KAT was ineligible because he played for the D.R. national team as a teen. He wouldâve been option #1. However, for all their flaws, even Andre Drummond and DeMarcus Cousins wouldâve been better options at C than JaValle. Jarrett Allen is a better call. Itâs weird.
Allen is a FA and probably said no. Cousins and Drummond are not good and would not solve anything. Better to triple down on Bam and Dray and that style than putting those guys out there IMO.
France. Fâing France. Fire everyone involved.
France is good
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No. Fire everyone.
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Cousins still has offensive skill and eats space. Drummond is just better than McGee.
I saw that Jerami Grant didnât play. Maybe because he was still coming off Covid protocol?
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After they got Durant this team what put together like me at a fantasy football draft. âGot McCaffrey! Bring me 9 beers and weâll just fill the rest in!â I also never win fantasy football.
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I would love a UMHoops fantasy football thread at some point
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But the rest of the world is much better. Todayâs French roster had 3 more NBA players than in 2014, and two of those are fully formed versions of guys who were 21 then (Gobert, Fournier).
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France has some decent talent but they have undergone a lot of turnover recently. Gone are guys like Parker/Diaw/Pietrus. You can talk about the world getting better but the USA should still beat this France team.
There are some foundational errors that need to be fixed on top of all the other issues already out there. There no âpoolâ of players anymore. They are together before they actually play in the Olympics for two weeks (which isnât enough) and it was basically half of the original roster was actually there with Beal, Love, Booker, Holiday, and Middleton missing time. LaVine and Grant also missed time. I want to say that Nigeria was together for a month before beating the US in exhibition while the US had two practices.
FIBA rules really mess with the players. 40 minute game, five fouls, and different traveling rules. Lillard, LaVine, Grant, and Adebayo have never played with FIBA rules.
The U16-U19 rosters and playing style are another issue. Itâs basically press, overwhelm the opponents physically, and play nothing but iso. They win gold, which is obviously important, but they arenât held accountable because the college coaches are recruiting most of them and/or Nike is involved and they wanted catered to.
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I donât know how you cure the âpoolâ. Who can say to the U19s: we expect you to be ready for call up until youâre 23? How do you enforce (I canât imagine Nike would)? Which leads to the bigger dilemma: how do you herd 12 NBA cats onto the same court on a regular basis for a couple years? It seems legitimately impossible.
But this yearâs team is pretty underwhelming. So far.
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