Team USA... It's time for the truth.

[Fresh8]

You are correct...it's not the players we send to the Olympics.... well America sends. They got talent, easily the most.

Everyone needs to understand that the USA players dont use their skills in the International game. As Coach Brown said, the NBA Basketball is about stamina and athletic ability while international basketball is about startegy, teamwork.

It's about the team game which the USA hasn't connected on yet. I'm a bit confused bout wahat you werote... can u please tell me why u think the US lost???

[Sauru]

i can tell you why they lost. in america its all 1 on 1 or maybe 2 on 2, in world comp you can shut down 1 player if need be and force the rest to do something. americans dont know how to move without the ball which is what is needed to win in a team game.

i can only hope that this brand of team first basketball makes its way back into the nba. until it does i will say that the teams of the 80's would beat anyone we call champions now, and that includes the bulls of the 90's(flame away if you must)

[Fresh8]

Well I thought i said that...but ur correct

[Matt]

USA moved the ball around well, but compared to all other teams it was still poor. They didn't have anybody on the perimeter to punish teams and make them play defence. We all saw the ball go around and then nobody wanted to shoot it, instead they drove inside.

let's see, basically we had a team that does all the same things offensively and no real defensive stopper. I think a Michael Redd, Richard Hamilton or Brent Barry would have changed things for the better. Let's face it, AI's and Stephs defense was poor at best. USA also gambled a lot on steals, something that Euro teams don't do much of, it payed off, but when it went wrong they just gave up easy points.

[DipSetVC]

"Whenever we lose in America, we look for someone to hang, and I think that's pretty childish, frankly."

- Team USA Assistant Gregg Popovich

"Instead of knocking our guys or our league, we should place the praise where it belongs — on our opponents."

- Team USA Head Coach

[DipSetVC]

There you go again with the excuses, they just beat you plain and simple and that's that. How did you beat yourself?! Just let it go man! You mean because you couldn't guard the high pick and roll? They were running circles around you guys.

[Sauru]

we definetly didnt beat ourselves. we just were not as good of a team as them. 1 on 1 our players are far superior but 5 on 5 we are not the best team. hell we are lucky to even have a chance at the bronze.

[VCFAN]

I agree Sauru, 5 on 5 we can;t play as good, but 1 on 1 we are far superior. Also many of these players on teams like Argentina have been playing together for years so they know how to work together. The players on the USA team were just put together a couple weeks before the tournament. Nobody really knows each others game well so that was the biggest problem.

P.S Why doesn;t the NBA draft some of these great players from Argentina, Luithewania, Italy, or Spain.

[emadhn15]

even if USA played as a team, they would still lose. ARGENTINA > USA. PERIOD

[GloveGuy]

I'm actually going to put the blame on the selection committee. They didn't assemble an actual team. They took 12 superstars(some A-List, some B-List), a hall of fame coach, and thought they could actually send them to Athens.

Pretty much every team they played had two or three players who could shoot from long range. Team USA had zero shooters and the other teams realized this, so they played packed in zones, forcing the US to take shots they couldn't make.

One or two shooters could have made all the difference and I truly believe that. That is why I blame the selection committee for Team USA's failure to win gold.

[#12]

I'm actually going to put the blame on the selection committee. They didn't assemble an actual team. They took 12 superstars(some A-List, some B-List), a hall of fame coach, and thought they could actually send them to Athens.

Tim Duncan is the only superstar

[Jay-Peso]

I'm actually going to put the blame on the selection committee. They didn't assemble an actual team. They took 12 superstars(some A-List, some B-List), a hall of fame coach, and thought they could actually send them to Athens.

Tim Duncan is the only superstar

That's a matter of opinion. I think AI, TheKing, and couple of others are superstars IMO.

[GloveGuy]

I'm actually going to put the blame on the selection committee. They didn't assemble an actual team. They took 12 superstars(some A-List, some B-List), a hall of fame coach, and thought they could actually send them to Athens.

Tim Duncan is the only superstar

Superstars. Marquee names. Number one scorers. Dunk Contest participants.

[Alcoholic]

USA's bronze medal win performance was a good one IMO. Their players did what they needed to do- play defense, and hit their shots. Iverson knocked down some key shots, and Marion (with his 'interesting' shot form ) hit some great 3 pointers and long range jumpers. They were getting steals every other turnover, and converting them. When Lebron James went right up on that one guy (I think the guy with the long hair), the guy still made the 3, and there was nothing much Lebron could do (it was a real quick release). No doubt their life would have been much easier if the selection committee picked a better team. I blame the selection committe for this.

[Sauru]

i have said that all along, we need roleplayers. if detroit proved anything this year its that teams win when they got players who do thier job. you dont need 12 scorers on the court, you need a couple scorers, shooters, defenders,rebounders, hustlers, passers, you get my point. i have to agree with gloveguy here, the selection commitee dropped the ball bigtime. everyone wants to blame the guys who didnt come. what if shaq came, shaq dont defend in america for the nba title wtf would he play D overseas? kg would have helped alot but who cares, he didnt want to go so move on. there were plenty of good players left to pick and they just picked the biggest names available. wtf was okafor doing on this team anyway? carmelo cried his way onto the team.

[Andrew]

But the formula had worked before in 1992 and 1996. Even with the talented teams that other countries are fielding at the moment, I think the original Dream Team would have been just as impressive today. There wasn't any problem sending 11 stars and Christian Laettner because they were all from a generation of players that had much more respect for the team concept.

They also had players who were part of winning teams that understood how to win. They found a way to share the ball in ways that they normally wouldn't on their NBA team when they would be expected to be scoring most of the points.

Team USA 2004 features a roster that boasts only two NBA championships, and both of them belong to Tim Duncan. Three of the players have never been to the playoffs and only two can be considered players that lead their teams deep into the playoffs. Two players have never been past the first round. Four players have appeared in the playoffs only once.

This isn't a team with a lot of experience competing at a high level for a coveted honour. This isn't a team stocked with players who are talented basketball players in both the physical and mental sense. For the most part, they seem to lack the Know-How and attitudes that allowed Dream Teams from years past to co-exist and play as well on the court as they were expected to on paper.

Is this really the fault of the players? Yes and no. For many of them, it is something they will learn as they progress through their NBA careers. Even with big names pulling out or declining invitations, there are still team-orientated players who know how to win and can fill all the roles on the team.

[Alcoholic]

You forgot to mention one of them hasn't even played 1 NBA game yet.

[Andrew]

Indeed. Laettner hadn't played a single game in the NBA either, but with the other 11 players (10 of whom have since been recognised as being among the 50 greatest in NBA history) it didn't really matter. Selecting Okafor as the token rookie/college representative was unnecessary.

[Tuomas]

But if you honestly believe that when we have 12 guys better than Manu Ginobili (Argentina's best player. I suppose you can make a case and say Ginobili would is better than Okafor or something like that, and I'd be inclined to agree, but you get the point...), and we lose to a team like that, it's because we fucked up, pure and simple.

Ginobili was by far the best player on the court... he is a great player on the international floor and he could add the NBA drives and that was... 29 points? How much did AI or TD score, huh? I honestly think that manu has better court vision than f.ex. Lebron... Ginobili is underrated as a player. In the game vs USA, he didn't have to even go to his 3pt shots, and he still got that 29 points on the dreamer team.

And the skills USA possesses... well, they can go on a game of 1 on 1, but the best players in the wourld should have the ability to play as a team, to take each one's own role, and when I look back what happened, no-one did that. Maybe Duncan, but he was lame as anyone in USAs lineup.

[bchogan]

I'm sick of all this garbage about how the international teams are so much better than the US team. First of all, Tim Duncan was right, FIBA sucks. The refs are lousy and the whole gameplan of every "successful" team is based on hurling up significantly closer threes. It's like the NCAA tournament, where any team can get lucky and win one game by knocking out a better team that has better players. If you look at teams that are successful anywhere in the world, in any league or any level, you'll see that teams whose gameplan involves jacking up threes doesn't amount to long term success (i.e the Mavs). You'll win a few games that way, but you won't be a champion in the long haul.
Second, the US team wasn't put together well. Most of the players on the team were too similar in their style of play to be an effective team. It wasn't well balenced. It's like putting together a lineup of Shaq, Patrick Ewing, Dikembe Mutombo, Hakeem Olajuwon and Wilt Chamberlin all in their primes and excpecting them to destroy their opponents, just because they're all Hall-of-Famers. It doesn't work that way.
Another thing that bugs me is how much the US is training atheletes from other countries to play against them. In basketball, there are not only international players that are in the NBA, but players that went to college in the US (the same applies to other olympic sports as well). Not to mention US coaches either coaching international teams (Donny Nelson & Del Harris) or running camps and clinics for international players. I don't have a problem with this, but it goes to show how much the US still dominates the sport of basketball. And if people don't acknowledge this, they're fools to think that international ball could even exist without the US.
Getting back to the players themselves, when's the last time a complete player has emerged from international play? Yao's a guy that can be considered a good defender as well as a good offensive threat, but he's freakishly tall, and still has a ways to go. Most European players come into the NBA by being able to shoot the lights out and not not much else. For example, Dirk Nowitski could be a complete player yet is really only a shooting guard in a center's body. Peja's another that has been mentioned as one of the best in the NBA, but he's primarily a shooter as well. I'm not tying to diminish these player's skills, but they're just examples of rather one dimensional players that have come out of Europe. I could name many more, too, but I digress.