Sports Ignorant -- U.S. Men's Basketball Team Rethought

Hey, I'm going to invent a new category of post, "Sports Ignorant", to cover sports. I realize not everyone is into sports, especially the foxy la-la-ladies in the audience, so the title will have to serve as a warning: This post will heavily involve discussion of sports, so if you don't like sports, go read some other, more girly blogs like "world of knitting" or "cleaning supplies discussion". Just kidding.

Made up of NBA "stars", The U.S.A. Men's basketball team just won the bronze at Athens -- a total failure in the eyes of many Americans. There are a whole bunch of reasons for this failure, but I'm here to say that lack of effort on the part of the US team was not one of them. They had effort, all right. It was like watching a bunch of Don Quixotes out there on the court, trying their hardest to prove that basketball is not a team sport, despite the obvious fact that it is. It's like they just didn't know how to play the game. And that's a sad commentary on American basketball, with all the hyping of stars who don't know the fundamentals, like, let's see: passing, shooting, running plays, defense. You know, the little things.

If anything, we should be shocked and relieved that they got any medal. It's a testament to their tremendous athletic ability and mental toughness that they didn't just give up after the opening loss to Puerto Rico, or the semifinal loss to Argentina. And hey, if the refs would have been fair, they may have even won that game and gotten to the gold medal game -- All without ever figuring out how to attack a zone defense or how to stop the other team's shooters from getting open looks. When you think about it, these guys overcame odds, man. They overcame their own lack of training and almost pulled it out with sheer dumb effort. Now that's American.

But there are indeed people to blame for this fiasco, and make no mistake about it: the US not winning the gold in basketball -- a sport where they have probably 180 of the top 200 players in the world -- is a fiasco of Enron proportions. Let's run these people down, from most-blameworthy to slightly-blameworthy. No, I don't mean like with a truck, I mean like in a list. Sheesh.

1. The wussies, scum, and lazy greedy players that decided not to play in the game. Team sport or not, a team with Shaq, Kobe, McGrady, Garnett, Ray Allen, and Jason Kidd added to Duncan and Iverson doesn't lose a game. Doesn't even come close. I understand its a time committment, and the owners don't want you to go, but come on. The good part of this is the convenient built-in excuse when we lose -- our best players weren't involved. Of course, you don't see players from other countries do this (with the notable exception of Serbia, who didn't have Peja and consequently lost to fricking China, otherwise known as Yao Ming and the Midgets, and were kept out of the final 8) because they have national pride, rather than the pride of NBA greatness and wealth. Why serve your country when you can nurse that injury back to health for the next NBA season, where you will proceed to play at half-speed until the playoffs, especially on defense, and then lose there because the NBA and the refs want an LA-Phily series? Is being on the Miami Heat or New Orleans Hornets more important than being on the US team? In a time when the US needs good publicity, and a source of national pride again? But what do you care -- you don't see any profits from it, so why go? Grr, that's why.
2. The insane madmen who put this team together for NBA marketing purposes, rather than international basketball success. There were no point guards. None. How do you put a team together without point guards? They had exactly one shooter, a raw 20-year old who spent all of his time watching from the bench (more on this later) and presumably playing playstation in the swank hotel, and whose range was just a bit less than the international 3-point distance. They had no centers, except the guy with no NBA experience and no chance of getting on the court because of the coach and the politics of the team. Yes, you heard me. Emeka Okafor should have played more. I may be the only one who thinks so, but it's an opinion that I was forced to come to after seeing him dominate the zone-infested world of college basketball for the last 2 years. The guys who did get to play were nearly exclusively NBA-style one-on-one athletes, who needed man-to-man defenses, clearouts, and a 24-second shot clock to succeed and who hadn't been called for travelling since high school. Of course, that was only a couple of years ago for some of them, which was another problem. I mean, come on -- Marbury(a total hongo if there ever was one), Marion(excels against one guy but sucks against a zone), Jefferson (nothing without Jason Kidd), Amare Stoudamire (too young and totally lost), Wade (can't shoot, not a point guard), Boozer (no D, lack of character), LeBron (too young, can't shoot) -- this is what we go to war with? Against teams that play zone until you make them stop playing it? The sad thing is, we could have come up with a team that wins every game by 20 even without Shaq and Garnett and the rest. But we needed to be smarter. We needed to pick point guards and shooters and big guys who clog the middle and can pass well. The only player on the team that I would have kept is Duncan. Maybe Lamar Odom, but he would be down far, far on my list. The rest can spend the summer nursing injuries, and if the Olympics was any indication, they could make some extra money as bricklayers.
3. Larry Brown, who had the monumental task of molding these ill-fitting players into a winning team against all odds. But wait, the team makers threw him a bone -- the one shooter he has on the team -- Carmelo Anthony. The dude has proven he can hit the 18-foot jumper, but he doesn't get off the bench. 'Melo then gets frustrated, and mouths off to the press, which gets him on Brown's bad side, and ensures his continued presence on the bench. The whole thing boggles the mind. And another thing: do you realize career overshooter Stephon Marbury was second on the team in terms of minutes per game? You give every single one of his minutes to LeBron, and they probably win the gold. Not saying LeBron is that great an international force at this stage, but he's not going to shoot his team out of a game like Marbury did. He also gives you better defense simply because he's taller and he's not Marbury. That dude sucks. Larry Brown can't see this? And where was Okafor during the Olympics? You have no centers except the dominant one sitting on the bench and you don't play him because he's too young? At some point you have to ask, "Did Lar-Bear put his own personal coaching philosopies and prejudices (namely, he hates young players) over winning the gold?" LeBron, 'Melo, Emeka, and enquiring minds want to know. Scratch that, we already know. At least he has his NBA title to keep him warm.
   
4. The other teams in the tournament, who figured out how to play the US the second the team was announced and it had no Michael Redd on it. Oh, by the way, if they pick him for the team, the US wins the gold, too, unless Brown keeps him on the bench. Anyway, the other teams played the zone, and on offense did foreign and exotic things like passing and shooting and picking and moving without the ball and running plays. It was sick, wasn't it -- watching Manu Ginobili, a guy from a country without an actual economy, schooling US supahstars on the finer points of the game, as if James Spaulding was really named Jaime Spauldini, a goat farmer who thought up a game where you throw a goat's head into a goat basket, and called it Goat Ball, later revised to basketball when they removed all goat traces from it? Yes, it was.
   
5. The refs, an NBA gangsta culture that rewards bad behavior, and the AAU are just 3 of the other things that share a bit of blame. But it really is all of American basketball culture. We need to change things pronto or the we may not make the next Olympics at all, and then basketball will fulfill its destiny and become baseball, and the NY Knicks will win every year, and nobody but Spike Lee and his ilk(Knicks fans) will watch the NBA, and the Olympic qualifying team that loses will have underacheiving dudes like Tim Thomas and Steve Francis on it. To sarcastically paraphrase that one band from back then, what a wonderful world this will be.