Jayson Tatum and Team USA had their final tuneup before the Olympics on Sunday night, an 83-76 win over Spain. Tatum started off cold, but recovered somewhat and did other things to help the team on his way to a 6 point, 6 rebound, 5 assist night. Here are five thoughts from the game.
MOVE. THE. BALL.
A lot of the postgame talk I heard used language like “complete win,” but that’s not what this was at all.
At halftime, a lot of the chatter was about whether the United States would even medal in Tokyo. The team was cold from the field and the offense was stagnant. Tatum had a team-high TWO assists at the 7:00 mark of the third quarter. Team USA had six.
They racked up 16 from that point on. Tatum finished with five. The Americans, who were down by nine at one point, pushed their lead into double digits.
The ball moved extraordinarily well in the second half, and that allowed the U.S. to take advantage of their talent when Spain overreacted to each pass.
“Our pace was better offensively,” Gregg Popovich said of his team’s second half. “I thought we got in a little bit of mud and their physicality set us back on our heels a little bit in the second quarter. But the pace improved in the third quarter so we were able to get the ball up the court a little quicker. Shared it better. And thusly, we ended up with more open shots.”
Tatum doing to the little things
Tatum was quiet in the first half but he made a lot of noise in the second by finding his way into a facilitator role. Suddenly Tatum’s extra passes were turning into points, or at the very least into secondary “hockey” assists and ball reversals that softened up the Spanish defense.
Tatum later did a wonderful job cutting and working the baseline against the zone, finding the holes in the D to get himself layups. It was almost a return to the basics for rookie-season Tatum who needed to find ways to get himself some buckets when the jumpers weren’t falling.
People talk about the adjustments players are making to the FIBA rules, but it might be tougher for some guys to adjust to their FIBA roles.
“Maybe you'll have one or two shots in the first quarter when you usually have like five or six in the first five minutes of the game,” Spain guard Ricky Rubio said. He should know. Few players have bigger swings between their NBA performances versus their FIBA games. “You have to be ready for that. But there's a lot of hand checks that is called different in the NBA than in FIBA ... there is a lot of physicality, I would say, that it is played different.”
Which leads me into
Let’s get physical...
Part of the United States' late charge was their embracing of that physicality that you’re probably sick of hearing about to this point. The Americans got away with things that would be called fouls at basically any other level of play. The running joke online was that half the U.S. squad would have fouled out of an NBA game by the middle of the fourth quarter of this one.
An old coach used to tell me that on the first time down the floor on offense, find your defender on the block and slam into him as hard as you can when you post up. If they call it a foul, you know it’ll be a closely-officiated game and you should adjust. If they let it go, then it’s party time.
Team USA should give that game a whirl. They might be surprised where the line is.
USA is going to struggle if they don’t make shots
The first half of this game was a perfect illustration of the frustration that can easily seep into this team’s offense.
So beyond the obvious “you probably won’t win if you don’t score points” the headline suggests, There’s a tendency his team needs to break when things aren’t going well. Tatum’s night is a great example of this. Once he flipped his focus to being more of a distributor and not worrying about whether his shot was going in, he became one of the most important players on the floor.
The lesson here is not just ‘move the ball’ or ‘be more physical.’ It’s ‘play the right way and don’t get too caught up in the fact that you’re Damian Lillard or Kevin Durant or whichever big star you are on your team.’ Don’t devolve into heavy iso stuff or else things will get bad.
There is still the matter of the guys in the Finals
Team USA can use Khris Middleton, Jrue Holiday, and Devin Booker, but they are basically going to go from the final whistle of Game 6 or 7 to a private flight to Tokyo.
For all the chemistry issues Team USA is having, they’re about to add more to the mix as they try to figure who can do what and for how long.
“They get in the day before the (first) game. So maybe it'll hit ‘em two days later, and they'll be okay for the game,” Popovich said. “Maybe we should play them a little bit in the first half and see what they're like. In some ways, it might depend on if everybody else is healthy. And if they're not, then they gotta play. So we've gone over lots of scenarios. But we haven't figured it out yet. That's for sure.”