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. It’s possible USA Basketball had crunched the numbers and tape, but one wonders exactly how sophisticated the matchup data was for Tatum not playing against Ognjen Dobric for Serbia but perfectly countering Nuni Omot for South Sudan.
Photo by Garrett W. Ellwood/NBAE via Getty Images
I’m not privy to all the details, but usually, basketball teams don’t toss NBA champions and league MVPs around the rotation like they’re one of those Chinese yo-yos getting hurled around a stage by your friend Eric at the 5th-grade talent show. Generally, the end-of-the-bench guys are just happy to be there, and if they log zero minutes but fourteen sideline-towel-spins and nine air-guitar shreds, that’s a solid day’s work.
But those players usually don’t end up starting the next game, and are also usually not named Jayson Tatum or Joel Embiid. These rotations just look funny, simply because USA Basketball recruited a team with way too many good players and not enough minutes to play them all. On a normal basketball team, that would be all well and good, but having the “DNP – CD” tag go on Jayson Tatum just doesn’t sit right with anyone.
But we have to remember that this team isn’t about winning, since that’s going to happen anyway. It’s about sending the right message, and it’s turning the Olympics into a LeBron James-captained redemption arc for the failures of USA Basketball at the recent FIBA World Cup, when they unceremoniously lost to Germany.
These Olympics are about what James has given to the sport, what Durant has given to USA Basketball and why Stephen Curry doesn’t have a gold medal yet. There’s plenty else to choose from, too: Kawhi Leonard dropped out. Jaylen Brown is tweeting the head-scratching emoji. Anthony Edwards might be Michael Jordan and Derrick White is a really nice guy. Tatum is like the ninth most interesting story on this team, so it’s no wonder he’s not exactly the top priority to play.
For the USA Basketball team, striving towards “victory” is irrelevant, not compelling and therefore bad business. Any outcome other than gold would be a national embarrassment given the talent mismatch, so reporters and media members focus more on the rotations and on making up reasons why a Tatum DNP matters in a game Team USA won by 26.
This is going to drive me insane. If we’re just focused on winning, then let’s drop these narratives about who played and who didn’t when any combination of five players on the roster will automatically be better than the opposition and just concentrate on beating them.
If it’s actually about these narratives, though, then I guess we’d better continue our analysis of this non-issue and I’d better continue not really enjoying Olympic basketball. But I’d rather not do that.
