USA Basketball's Navigation Through Olympic Games An Underrated Story

USA Basketball

Grant Hill, as managing director of Team USA’s men’s basketball program, has assembled perhaps the greatest collection of talent ever for the 2024 Olympic Games. And yes, that includes the original 1992 Dream Team.

Yet the Americans nearly lost to Serbia in Thursday’s semifinal round and, though vastly superior on paper, there’s a small possibility that they could succumb to the French momentum and home cooking in Saturday’s Gold Medal game.

Given the growth of the sport throughout the world, putting together and managing a USA Olympic team isn’t the walk in the Luxembourg Gardens like it used to be.

Though there’s that one more, um, hill to climb, hats off to Hill, along with Team USA Head Coach Steve Kerr, whose navigation of this process has been an underrated story. Hill, a co-owner of the Hawks who succeeded Jerry Colangelo as director in 2021 following the Tokyo Games, got the commitment to participate in this event from the NBA’s biggest stars, many of whom are on their last legs and would ordinarily be reluctant so soon before and after grueling seasons.

Take USA center Joel Embiid. Not only did he have the option to instead suit up for France based on his Cameroonian birthplace, which has earned him the enduring enmity of the French attendees, he was coming off an injury-plagued playoff run. Even after struggling to get his feet under him from the exhibitions through the three pool play games, the second of which he was “benched”, he’s been all in throughout the “process.” Embiid’s was just one of the egos Kerr has had to manage from not playing guys who are under $100 million-plus contracts for their day jobs.

Such ruthlessness from Kerr was necessary on Thursday, for Team USA was forced to scrape back from a 13-point fourth quarter deficit against a Serbian club that was having a 1985 Villanova kind of shooting night. In the final ten minutes, Kerr astutely dispensed with the egalitarian playing time allocation he had been utilizing and basically rode the five-man lineup of Stephen Curry, Devin Booker, Kevin Durant, LeBron James, and Embiid that had proven to be most effective that day. For the game, three players saw 10 minutes or less and two others—NBA All-Stars Jayson Tatum and Tyrese Haliburton—never saw any action. Anthony Edwards, the self-proclaimed “No. 1 option”, watched the entire final frame from his seat.

Fortunately, when crunch time arrived, Team USA asserted its dominance, closing the game with an 18-7 run over the final five minutes through a series of stupendous plays that had NBC announcers Noah Eagle and Dwyane Wade hyperventilating, even though they had seen such magnificence from those elite performers many times before.

Some will use the 95-91 victory as a way to knock this team. Let’s get something straight: The 1992 squad will go down in history as the most iconic for acting as the proverbial lighter fluid for elevating the game of basketball to legions around the world. The Dream Team’s competition, though, included just 12 players with NBA experience, the most prominent of which were Croatia’s Drazen Petrovic and Toni Kukoc. Hence, the U.S. was able to coast through the games, with Head Coach Chuck Daly never finding the need to call a single timeout.

Those Barcelona Games were instrumental in ushering this new age of international superstars whereby the top four vote-getters in the 2024 MVP race all suited up for other countries this summer, including the winner Nikola Jokic from Serbia. He was among the 69 players with NBA experience on the 11 non-U.S. teams in Paris.   

Some may believe that Hill and Kerr have the easiest jobs in America being in charge of a program that is on the cusp of its 17th gold medal in 20 Olympic years, including the last five Games. If Team USA’s disappointing fourth-place finish at last summer’s World Cup didn’t wake you up to the difficulties brought on by the changes in the basketball universe, maybe Thursday’s nailbiter will garner them some respect.  

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To those basketball fans I know who insisted that Olympic basketball wasn’t worthy of their viewing, you’re sure missing out.

This tournament has been fascinating, and I’m not just talking about Team USA. There have been so many wild stories, from the rise of a country I didn’t know existed in South Sudan to the French renaissance featuring two Knicks castoffs (Evan Fournier and Frank Ntilikina) and a former Nets Euro-stash (Isaia Cordinier) after they needed a bizarre four-point play with 10 seconds remaining to avoid the embarrassment of losing to Japan and it’s 5-foot 4 point guard in pool play. Riding the emotion from playing at home, France then went on to defeat previously unbeaten Canada and Germany in the knockout rounds.

As for the Americans, what has been your biggest complaint about NBA All-Star Games? That they’re a joke because the players don’t really try, right? Well, this tournament has showcased the league’s best on the same floor…and they absolutely care about the result. Just listen to the postgame social media clip of KD talking about how special it’s been to play for this team and in such a thrilling game.  

On Thursday, Embiid and Jokic, the league’s two best big men, engaged in a battle of wills. Do you know how many times you got to witness that marquee matchup over the last three regular seasons thanks to injuries and the dreaded “load managements”? Three games. (Note: There were many possessions where they were given other assignments or were switched off each other. In any event, seeing how hard James bodied up Jokic in the post down the stretch only further proves my overall point on the best-on-best nature of the Games.)

I’ve mentioned in a previous post about being traumatized as a child by the U.S.’s 1972 loss to the Soviet Union, so the Olympics have always had an outsized meaning in my mind. Still, even a more objective observer would conclude that those who hold disdain for this event are out of theirs.