Team USA seemed to be going through the motions in the late third and early fourth quarters of their opening exhibition against Nigeria Saturday night. Gregg Popovich had gone away from most of his regulars and started dipping into the select team players, Saddiq Bey and Darius Garland, who were promoted to fill out the end of the bench for now.
Then Popovich seemingly decided it was a good time to see what his closing group could do. He reinserted his starters and let them go to work. What resulted provided a lesson for the United States team, and for Jayson Tatum.
“When they got into us physically, we reverted to NBA ISO one on one,” Popovich said after the game. “That's not going to get it done.”
The Americans did the very American basketball thing of putting on their capes and diving into hero ball. And while that works from these guys on their own teams, it’s not going to fly on a FIBA court. The rules are a bit different, and their star power carries less weight with the officials.
So while Pop tries to fix what ails his newly assembled USA men’s national basketball team, Tatum can look at what happened and take from it a couple of valuable lessons. And if he’s not going to see them himself, Ime Udoka would do well to pocket them and bring them back out later.
Tatum, to that point, had played well. He was reinserted with about six minutes to go, having scored 15 points on 4-7 shooting to that point to lead the Americans.
He finished the game with 15 points on 4-7 shooting.
“Throughout the game, there were certain points where it felt like we were taking turns, instead of just moving,” Tatum said after the game. “We got a lot of great isolation players but still, we're going to have to play together and figure out what works best with certain guys out there and getting other guys easy shots instead of for ourselves.”
So once again, an underdog team playing with a lot of motivation and moving the ball beat a super-talented team that tried to close out a game with individual play. It seems to work often, mostly because the isolation team relies so much on one guy to make a shot, rather than moving the ball around to get the best possible shot in a possession.
Frankly, this sounds like something I could have been writing about this past season’s Celtics, who often devolved into isolation and paid the price for it. Udoka, who is part of the USA staff but a former member of the Nigerian national team, can carry the results of this isolation effort with him into the season for whenever the Celtics fall back into these bad habits.
But more than that, Udoka can carry Tatum’s stat line in this game with him too as a reminder of what it’s like to wait your turn down the stretch and never get a chance to get a good look at a shot.
When USA went iso, Tatum barely got a touch.
Tatum is fourth in the hierarchy of stars in Team USA’s starting lineup. Kevin Durant eats first in this group. He’s the unquestioned best player on the floor at all times right now. After KD, it’s “Dame Time” late in games. It’s hard to imagine many people getting votes before Damian Lillard when it comes to crunch time shot-taking. Then, Bradley Beal can big brother his way past Tatum and pull rank in the St. Louis relationship without Tatum saying much of anything, which leaves the Boston Celtics superstar fending for scraps at the clutch-time table.
It must not feel particularly great being on the floor knowing he’d been cooking a bit and leading the team in scoring only to watch other people get shots when the game actually started to matter. And while this is only an exhibition game that Tatum has probably already shaken off, the lesson of being a player fully capable of helping a team win only to not get touches and watch the team lose should resonate with Tatum.
There have been games last season where we watched Jaylen Brown cook, only to see his fourth-quarter shots disappear. Udoka can pocket the lesson from that Nigeria game for whenever Tatum gets a little too iso-happy down the stretch himself next season. Sure, there are going to be times when Boston needs Tatum to take over, and we’ve seen that if he focuses on attacking like he did against Brooklyn, he can be deadly. But Boston will need to focus on ball movement and creating great shots if they’re going to be successful next season.
I don’t want to overstate what happened in an ultimately meaningless game, but there is opportunity everywhere for a coach to emphasize something to players. This isn't some grand life lesson or something that will etch itself into Udoka’s coaching philosophy. What this is is a chance to add some weight to an important point being made as the Celtics try to be their best selves.
Tatum could have helped win that game but he never got the chance because other guys were isolating too much. If there comes a time where Tatum begins to shut teammates out because he’s too focused on his own game, this could serve as a gentle reminder to make sure the ball moves and that drawing attention and then kicking the ball to teammates can sometimes be more effective than taking on the world alone.
