Team USA dropped its second-straight exhibition game, this time a 91-83 loss to Australia. Jayson Tatum was off in this game, shooting 4-12 in just under 27 minutes. Damian Lillard led the Americans, who led at the half and seemed to be in total control.
The second half was a different story.
Team USA fell apart in the third quarter and watched its lead turn into a deficit. While they regained the lead in the fourth on a Tatum layup, the Australians out-executed the Americans down the stretch.
Here are a few thoughts from the game.
This is not ideal, but it’s not the end of the world.
There is going to be a fair amount of freaking out and one of my favorite things is fighting freakouts with perspective if at all possible. So let’s try to treat this appropriately.
- This is not ideal. The talent level on Team USA is high enough to win. So yes, even though this is an exhibition, I get that there’s some disappointment in the loss.
- This is a team trying to get back into playing shape in a short amount of time. Three of their players are still playing in the NBA Finals, which is ridiculous. Normally, the Finals would have ended in June and there would have been a month of guys resting and getting together for a camp after summer league.
Here’s Gregg Popovich summing that up and actually feeling encouraged by the game.
More run tomorrow versus Argentina at 6 PM ET on NBCSN.
— USA Basketball (@usabasketball) July 13, 2021
🇺🇸 #USABMNT x Road To Tokyo pic.twitter.com/1vP5iYq9Mb
- This is a team that has never played together before, which normally hasn’t been much of a problem, but the international game is better than ever, and the lapses that come along with a team lacking cohesion, regardless of talent level, are simply more costly.
“We're not just gonna come out here, roll the ball out and beat these teams,” Damian Lillard said. “We got to play the right way, compete, and we got to come out here to win and do everything to give ourselves our best chance to win. If we don't, we can be beat.”
That leads into ...
The international game has caught up
As noted by the Nets Daily Twitter account, the basketball world is changing. The MVP this year came from Serbia after two years of the MVP coming from Greece. The Defensive Player of the Year is French. Three of the five first-team All NBA players and two others from the second and third teams are from other countries.
Not only do these teams have NBA talent, they are loaded with good NBA talent.
“We played USA in the quarterfinal 2008, I remember coach threw me in for a couple minutes at the end. It was like an intimidating, more of a nervous feeling,” Australia’s Joe Ingles said. “Where we walk into these games last, however long, few years and -- not just Team USA, you can put any team in front of us and we expect to win the game. That’s been built over years and years of hard work.”
Go back to 1996 and the original Dream Team was winning by 40 and getting asked for autographs by opponents. Those days are long gone. And not only are these teams coming in believing they can beat Team USA. They are doing it by leaning on things they’ve done for a long time. That’s why Patty Mills again morphed into “FIBA Patty” and closed out the Americans.
“I didn't diagram plays for Patty at the end,” Aussie coach Brian Goorjian said. “We've been together for three days, they just do ... when it came down to the crunch in the last two games, they just know where to go. And they know who to go to. And they've done it for 12 years.”
Team USA got frantic down the stretch. They played fast and didn’t really know who to go to. Australia played under control and found Mills in situations where he could score.
This is going to be the rough part of the next few weeks for Team USA. They’re going at this trying to create cohesion in a lab like a synthetic diamond. The rest of these teams have created their cohesion with the pressure and time of a real diamond. Popovich hopes no one will be able to tell the difference. They did look dazzling at times in the first half, but they looked more like a cubic zirconia after halftime.
Tatum had an off night
Pop mixed up the starting lineup and brought Tatum off the bench.
“The starting lineups don't mean anything,” Popovich said. “We're just trying to put different combinations together just to see how they work. Because these guys have never played together before. So it's important during this preliminary phase to see what we got.”
Tatum looked out of rhythm the whole night and he barely could get any of his jumpers to fall all night. Even after a couple of layups, where he did display a nice bit of aggression, it didn’t lead to any kind of stretch where he caught fire.
He finished with eight points while missing all six 3-pointers he took.
He did move the ball well, which was nice. He finished with four assists, which was second on the team behind Draymond Green. It was just an off night.
It’ll be interesting to see what Popovich does for minutes tomorrow night as the United States faces Argentina on a back-to-back. That’s not something you normally see, and that would likely explain why guys like Keldon Johnson and Darius Garland got minutes.
Another officiating highlight!
I’m going to start campaigning very hard for some FIBA-style rules changes after this tournament.
Early in the game, Ingles turned the ball over and then reached in to foul Zach LaVine, who had picked up the loose ball and started to take off. It’s a play we see every game in the NBA to prevent run-outs and fast breaks. Grant Williams loves giving this foul.
As far as NBA strategy goes, it’s smart. The play stops, the defense gets set, and if you’re smart about your fouls, it’s generally harmless in the grand scheme of things.
However in FIBA, that’s an unsportsmanlike penalty, which results in two shots and the ball for the other team ... and I LOVE IT!
I don’t give a damn about strategy in that moment. That’s a moment for the fans to get excited about a fast break and potential transition dunk situation. This is a momentum-builder that gets people in the arena charged up.
Why does the NBA allow moments like that to be stopped?
Sorry, team that just turned the ball over, but if you wanted to prevent the fast break, you shouldn’t have turned the ball over. You did, now you have to pay the price ... or you can get on your horse and try to make an awesome defensive play. Fans love those too.
The FIBA game isn’t perfect by any stretch, but some of these rules are so obviously bad in the NBA. I’m glad we’re getting another opportunity to call attention to them.
