Tweet of the Day: Manu Ginobili

Leave a comment

The big game is not tonight. There is a game, yes, but it is not the big one. That’ll come Tuesday night when the Americans play Spain in Barcelona at the arena pictured in Manu’s tweet above.

What is notable about tonight’s US-Argentina game is that it is the only friendly the Americans will play against a team they are certain to face in the Olympics. The teams will meet again in a game that has meaning on the final day of first-round competition in at the London Olympics on Monday, Aug. 6.

The Americans’ other exhibition games have been or will be against teams in the other group (Great Britain, Brazil, Spain) and one team that failed to qualify (Dominican Republic). And as is customary in these friendlies, neither team will show the other too many of their best tactical schemes. That probably means the Americans will not play against a zone defense, even though teams have liked to use that against past versions of Team USA — and they will do so again in London until Team USA shows it can knock down shots from outside.

One thing to watch for tonight is a potential one-on-one matchup between LeBron James (profiled here in this item from yesterday) and Andres Nocioni. There is a competitive edge between the two, mostly driven by LeBron, who is not a huge fan of Nocioni, who has been a member of two Argentinian national teams that defeated prior versions of Team USA — once at the 2002 World Championship in Indianapolis, and once at the semifinals of the 2004 Olympics in Athens.

For another view of the inside of Paul Sant Jordi, click on the Twitpic below. There is a certain posture-challenged American reporter pictured speaking to Deron Williams.

For the Tweet of the Night from Steve Nash,click here.

 

Filed Under: Tweet Tagged With: , , , , ,

Will LeBron be King of the Hill in Barcelona?

Leave a comment

BARCELONA — The building pictured to your left is the National Museum of Art of Catalonia, which sits atop one of the highest hills in this Spanish coastal city. To get there from the plaza below, they have a series of outdoor all-weather escalators. You can use those, or you can climb about 500 steps.

Behind the museum is the Palau Sant Jordi, the modern arena where Team USA will play Argentina on Sunday night and Spain on Tuesday night. From the plaza outside the arena, you can gaze 360 degrees around the city, the beach in one direction and the mountains in the other.

It was in that arena atop that hill Saturday that the topic of conversation, as far as I was concerned, was LeBron James, NBA champion.

It has taken years and years for the words LeBron James and NBA champion to be used together in the same sentence without a pejorative disclaimer, and I wanted to get a reading from James one month after the NBA Finals concluded as to how that fulfillment has changed him.

We already know he is proud of himself, which he has let everyone know through tweets such as this one. Anyone who watched him closely on the night of Game 5 against the Oklahoma City Thunder can attest to the unabashed joy and sense of fulfillment he was feeling as the final minutes of that blowout victory ticked away.

And now, an ocean away and a month removed, the simplest of questions needed to be asked: How ya’ feeling, champ?

“It hasn’t changed me at all. I was able to accomplish a goal of mine, I’m very excited about that, but it hasn’t changed my personality or anything like that,” James told SheridanHoops.com.

Moments earlier, a member of the USA Basketball staff had told me exactly the opposite – that James was carrying himself with the pride of a champion, and the other players on the team were treating him with a new level of respect – the type of props earned among your peers only when you have a ring (or have one coming, to be pequito mas accurate).

But James was having none of it.

“I don’t know, not really. I don’t really seek out how people look at me or view me or treat me differently. I just be myself, and it doesn’t matter to me,” James said. “It’s always great when you can set out a goal and you can achieve it through hard work, and the best thing about it is you cut no corners, you don’t take every day off, and you just try to make your best effort. There’s always a fulfillment for that. You feel good about it.”

Modesty aside, James is a different man.

His teammates and coaches say so.

He has been leading with his actions and his words. He has been far and away the best and most productive player for Team USA in their three exhibition games to date. And you have to believe he is relishing the opportunity to go after Andres Nocioni when the Americans play Argentina on Sunday night – tipoff is 9 p.m. local time, which will be early compared to Tuesday night’s 10:30 p.m. tip against Spain (which easily defeated Argentina easily in Friday night’s tuneup in a small Spanish city near the border of Portugal).

James scored 30 points in front of President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in D.C. in the Americans’ 11-point victory over Brazil; he scored 16 on 7-for-10 shooting in Wednesday night’s 40-point victory over Great Britain; and there is no doubt he will bring his A game Sunday night against Argentina, a team that defeated James and the Americans in the Olympic semifinals in Athens, Greece in 2004 – sparking James’ distaste for all things Nocioni.

But that was practically a lifetime ago, and James rarely played for that version of Team USA as coach Larry Brown used Richard Jefferson as the starter and Shawn Marion as the first backup at the 3.

James was a kid then. He had more hair and less of a forehead. He was brash and bold, not worldly and demure.

He was a follower, not a leader.

But things have certainly changed.

James is one of four players on this roster born in 1984, with the only others who pre-date him in that department being Kobe Bryant (1978) and Tyson Chandler (1982). But when it comes to Team USA experience, he is the elder statesman, having been around the world with the team since before coach Mike Krzyzewski and managing director Jerry Colangelo took over way back in 2005.

(RELATED CONTENT: Team USA will have 7 starters; Love is 10th man)

His passport has been stamped in Germany, Serbia, Turkey, Greece, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Macau and China during his travels with the national team. He hasn’t seen it all, but he has certainly seen a ton – everything from the lowlight of an 18-point loss to Puerto Rico in the opener of the 2004 Games to the highlight of Team USA’s 118-107 point party in the gold medal match against Spain four years ago with the Redeem Team.

What is fueling him now?

“This is a team that not only wants to get better, but win gold again,” James said. “A lot of people think we can’t do it, challenging our size and saying we don’t have enough on our team. But we do, therefore it’s a challenge. I’m motivated, I’m very motivated. I can’t wait to get the games under way.”

Krzyzewski said James’ growing maturity has manifested itself on the court, in the locker room and in team meetings.

Remember, this is a player who was so green and full of himself when he went to Japan with Team USA in 2006 that Bruce Bowen (who ended up getting cut in Korea) actually turned to him on the team plane as James was barking out demands and told him, “Have you ever heard of the words ‘Please’ and “Thank You’?”

James needed that type of guidance then.

Now, he is providing it.

“Well, in ’06 there’s really no comparison. He was still learning the game. He was 21 years old,” Krzyzewski said. “In 2008, at 23, he was outstanding, and today he’s great. There’s not an aspect of the game that he can’t do or understand, and his leadership is off the charts, and I don’t think people realize just how smart he is about the game.

(RELATED CONTENT: Diary of the Uncredentialed, Edition I)

“I saw his leadership starting on the court in 2008. You know, he has such a strong voice, a commanding voice. Because he was playing against bigger guys, he was playing where he could see the court and everything in front of him, and as a result he could orchestrate our defense. And he’s doing the same thing for us now. He has great things to say.

“Today, in the meeting, it was ‘How do you feel about how we’re thinking about defending Scola, do you feel comfortable with that?’ He gave a couple suggestions, and if they have that input then they have a better chance of owning it. And if they own it, they have a better chance of doing it. In ’08, we got it done, but we were still getting to know one another. Now we know each other, and no one is hesitant at all about sharing their ideas.”

Defending Scola will be one problem the Americans need to solve, but defending the Spanish front line of Pau and Marc Gasol and Serge Ibaka two nights later will be a truer test of whether the Americans really are so small that they are truly vulnerable.

By then, they will have had five days in Barcelona.

For one of them, it will almost feel like home – or what has become home.

“It reminds me of Miami, honestly. A lot,” said James, who visited Barcelona for the first time last summer. “The food, the beaches, the people. I love it here.”

He will love it even more if he emerges from here with his doubters and his haters doubting and hating him a little less.

First, he must become King of the Hill at Palau Sant Jordi.

Chris Sheridan is publisher and editor-in-chief of SheridanHoops.com. He has covered every version of Team USA since 1996, covering them at the Olympics in Atlanta, Sydney, Athens and Beijing, as well as the World Championships in Indianapolis, Japan and Turkey. Follow him on Twitter.

Filed Under: Columns, Editor's Picks, Olympics, Team USA Tagged With: , , ,

Sheridan: Diary of the Uncredentialed: Edition 1

5 Comments

Manchester Town Hall in Albert Square, seat of local governance, is an example of Victorian era Gothic revival architecture.

MANCHESTER, England, July 19, 2012 _ Team USA is staying the night tonight.

They will leave for Barcelona in the morning, refreshed or not. You don’t get many nights off on the way to the Olympics after 40-point wins, but Team USA got that rare treat tonight, and perhaps the paparazzi will tell us more tomorrow.

This column is entitled Diary of the Uncredentialed because I am over here in Europe with Team USA until they enter the Olympic bubble.

Once they are in, I am out …

At least for now.

I haven’t played all my cards yet. But Diary of the Uncredentialed is what I will write until that elusive Olympic credential comes in, if it does. Maybe I’ll be better off embracing an outsider role a la Hunter S. Thompson, as colleague and SH columnist Jan Hubbard suggested when I told him about my $77 non-stop ticket to Manchester, which didn’t quite work out (more on that below).

So if I stick with Diary of the Uncredentialed, I will strive to entertain you with stories about Team USA and stories about the logistics and happenstances of covering them from outside of a mainstream media perspective. This if my fifth Olympics, and my last TV memory of the Games was Roy Jones Jr. getting mugged by the judges in Seoul in 1988.

I was not assigned to Barcelona in ’92, and I was covering baseball at the time and did not pay much attention. (Hubbard was there, and he’ll have a column about his experiences on Monday). I picked up Team USA coverage in 1996 at the Atlanta Olympics, and I’ve been with them at every stop ever since.

So here is tonight’s Team USA diary news:

Deron Williams got to accompany coach Mike Krzyzewski to the interview podium tonight after killing it as Team USA’s new starting point guard, which might be an experiment or might not be. Chris Paul had started against the Dominican Republic and Brazil, and Williams was a player who had to sit out the first few days of training camp until he signed his “$95 million contract,” which is what Krzyzewski called it at the podium.

D-Will had the good grace to not publicly inform Krzyzewski that the contract is closer to $100 million than it is to $95 million.

Bottom line is that Williams is more invaluable than people realize.

And now his he the starter, and maybe Chris Paul is the new Rajon Rondo, albeit to a lesser and different degree.

(RELATED CONTENT: Team USA will have 7 starters; Kevin Love the 10th man)

Some background: The last time Coach K and Jerry Colangelo took a team to Europe, it was the summer of 2010 and the team had to get from JFK in New York to Madrid.

Colangelo was on a limited budget and had chartered a shit-ass airplane (UPDATE: Colangelo disliked that description. He said it was the Lakers’ plane, and the refueling stops were necessary to comply with international aviation regulations). They had to stop at the edge of Newfoundland and in Greenland to refuel. It turned into a 20-hour excursion, and they were dead-ass tired as they walked into the Four Seasons in Madrid. I waited outside that hotel for them to arrive for 5 hours. I hung out with a freelance camera crew working for Nike (who got fired two days later for slacking), and I chatted with an 18-year old kid in a Grizzlies’ Navarro jersey that might be worth something some day.

Anyway, the next night the Americans played their first exhibition game, against Lithuania, and scored 8 points in the first quarter with Rondo as the starter.

Eight.

Rondo walked the ball upcourt all night, and the U.S. team barely got through it. Kevin Durant and Eric Gordon carried them in what turned out to be a tighter game than it should have been.

‘Two nights ahead was a game against Spain, in Madrid, and the B-Deem team was in a crisis. If you are Team USA and you score 8 points in the first quarter of your first game on European soil, you are in a crisis.

Krzyzewski knew it, and two nights later against Spain he had a new starter —  Derrick Rose.

The Americans jumped on Spain from the start, the crowd never got into it until 39 minutes had elapsed, and Rondo was toast. He quit the team two days later in Athens.

But here was the thing with Rose: He started to suck, seriously, and by the time we finished up in Istanbul two weeks later, Krzyzewski was going with Russell Westbrook as his go-to guy. Rose never had a good stretch again until the fourth quarter of the gold medal game against Turkey when the B-Deem team pulled away.

But the point here is that Krzyzewski developed quite an affection for Westbrook, who is also spending the night here in Manchester tonight after dropping nine dimes off the bench in the 40-point victory over Luol Deng, Pops Mensah-Bonsu and the Great Britain team, coached by American Chris Finch. (Best Olympic nugget anywhere: Paul Mokeski is an assistant for Team GB. I used to love Mokeski when I went to college in Milwaukee and he came off the bench, a pudgy white guy with range and an ethnic last name in that German-Polish American city, and Mokeski was beloved — even though he and and Jack Sikma and Sidney Moncrief and Paul Pressey never got past the Eastern Conference finals. But I digress.)

Westbrook and Williams are going to be the key guards for Team USA, no matter how good Paul is.

Krzyzewski has faith in them.

Deron was his finisher in Beijing. Paul was on that team, as was Jason Kidd, the starter and the calming veteran voice in the locker room.

But Deron Williams was Coach K’s favorite.

“There’s nothing he can’t do. Absolutely no weaknesses in his game,” Krzyzewski told me one afternoon in 2010 over dumplings and other Chinese delicacies at the Wynn in Las Vegas. ESPN picked up that check, and I encouraged gluttony on behalf of Uncle Walt.

The other place where Coach K made a change tonight in Manchester was at the 4, where Kevin Durant (who can be a 3 on defense) replaced Carmelo Anthony in the starting lineup. The is quite significant given the fact that Durant can’t be coming off the bench, especially after Team USA 1.0 shit the bed in the first quarter against Brazil. LeBron can play the 4 on defense, Coach K needs about 35 minutes out of Durant to win the gold medal, and he realizes it.

I give him credit for realizing it before the first game in Europe, instead of after as he did two years ago in the Rondo purge.

(RELATED CONTENT: Team USA is in trouble if lineup changes are not made)

(RELATED CONTENT: President Obama witnesses 11-point win vs. Brazil)

One other piece of Krzyzewski-CP3 history: Coach K lost faith in Paul and replaced him with Kirk Hinrich in 2006 at the World in Japan. I know because I was there. So there is a history of someone replacing CP3 at the point for Team USA.  Hopefully Chris enjoyed himself against the Dominican Republic and Brazil. He now gets to become the energizer bunny off the bench.

Team USA leaves in the morning for Barcelona, 20 years after the Dream Team made history there. The exhibition opponents will be Argentina and Spain, two worthy opponents. The games should both be close. Team USA will not be a 32-point favorite like they were against GB (covering easily in one of the biggest lock bets ever).

I will in Barcelona tomorrow night, the airline gods permitting. I am flying EasyJet, so we shall see. Being a frequent flyer veteran who goes back to the days of People’s Express (you had to pay your fare in cash in mid-flight), I think I’ve seen everything.

Which brings us back to the $77 flight to the Olympics that I wrote about above.

So when I was looking at airline flights to get over here with the team, I found a one-way ticket fo 30,000 Continental/United miles and $77 in taxes. I had 32.000 miles in my account. Booked.

Bingo, right?

I got to Dulles airport from downtown Washington for $6 on the 5A bus, but that triumph was trumped by the “Cancelled” that was flashing next to the DC-Manchester non-stop. The woman at the counter told me I had been re-booked through Frankfurt with a 6-hour layover. She was not open to reason or discussion.

So I found myself in Frankfurt 8 hours later, I had a frankfurter at a very nice airport cafe (had to, right?), and went to my gate. I decided to put my head down to a two-hour nap, and three hours later when I awoke the place was empty, the airplane was gone and I was stuck in Germany with my brilliant $77 non-stop ticket that wasn’t quite that anymore.

Long story short: Wonderful Lufthansa woman, call to United, negotiated $75 change fee, Heathrow, sprint to connecting flight to Manchester, luggage didn’t make it, I stink like Muresan never did, I finally get to the hotel and open the computer, and it’s dead. (Loose piece of plastic in battery plug area).

So no luggage, no computer, no phone (memo to Verizon — get a roaming partner here), 300 Euro poorer.

But I made it to the game, it was a sellout with a genuinely raucous crowd, and Coach K replaced two starters. I’m glad I somehow made it here. And yes, it rained. And no, I did not pack anything with long sleeves. That was another 30 Euro.

So ends Diary of the Uncredentialed, Day One.

I’ll file again from Barcelona, Travel Gods permitting. I have a flight back to Gatwick a week from Friday. Perhaps I’ll be credentialed by then. Perhaps not. Maybe I’m better off without an Olympic credential. I have four old ones back home in New York, I’m feeling a been there-done that vibe, and maybe I’ll end up outside the bubble. Maybe that’ll be better. We’ll see.

Hasta luego en Catalonia.

Chris Sheridan is publisher and editor-in-chief of SheridanHoops.com. He has covered every U.S. men’s national team at the Olympics and World Championship since 1996. Follow him on Twitter.

Filed Under: Diary, Editor's Picks, Olympics, Sheridan Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Coach K says Team USA will have 7 starters, Love 10th man

2 Comments

MANCHESTER, England — Kevin Durant replaced Carmelo Anthony as the starter at power forward, and Deron Williams took over the starting job at the point from Chris Paul.

But despite the efficiency that those moves produced, there is no permanence to those moves, coach Mike Krzyzewski said Thursday night after the United States clobbered Great Britain 118-78, in its third tuneup game.

Coach K said there will be seven starters, with Anthony getting the nod when the team needs a little more beef, and Williams and Paul being almost interchangeable.

So it will be Tyson Chandler at center, Anthony or Durant at power forward, LeBron James at small forward, Kobe Bryant at shooting guard and Williams or Paul at the point.

Further, the eighth and ninth men will be Andre Iguodala and Russell Westbrook, which means Kevin Love – Team USA’s only true power forward – is going to be a bit player in the Olympics, unless Coach K changes his mind.

I caught up with Krzyzewski as he walked to the team bus after the win and I pressed him on the issue of whether Love might be better utilized as a member of the regular rotation. After all, this is a guy who was a double-double machine for the Timberwolves last season, and a rebound-per-minute player for Team USA at the World Championship in Turkey two years ago.

“He’s your best natural 4,” I said.

“But Iguodala can do that job, too,” Coach K retorted.

He’s the coach, and I am a mere spectator and second-guesser. But I will go out on a limb and say that by the time this journey is over and the winner of the Olympic gold medal is known, Love is going to vault from that No. 10 spot in the rotation and be one of the three most important players on the team.

As I wrote following the Americans’ 11-point victory over Brazil in Washington three nights earlier, there will come a time in the single-elimination round when the Americans are going to have to deal with some beefy bigs – whether against Spain, Russia or Brazil.

And although Love is not as beefy as he was two years ago in Turkey, he is as beastly as ever and would be going to waste as the 10th man, in front of only James Harden and Anthony Davis.

“I don’t think there’s any permanence to our starting lineup,” Krzyzewski said. “We basically have a core group of veterans, mostly from the Beijing Olympics, and they need to be the core of this team. They’re older, theyve been through the Olympics, and Durant, talent-wise, he’s right there with any of them. We talked about it, and they’re fine with it.

“I’m not sure who will start against Argentina, and I don’t think it really makes a difference. It’ll be within that realm of seven players, with Tyson at the center spot.”

Granted, the caliber of competition was quite different against GB than it was against Brazil, but let’s have a look at how the guys who changed roles performed.

Anthony, who was 1-for-7 overall and 0-for-4 on 3-pointers against Brazil, shot 8-for-10 overall and 3-for-5 for 3s for 19 points in just 17 minutes against GB. Durant’s lines were almost identical: 5-for-13 (11 points) off the bench against Brazil; 5-for-12 (13 points) as a starter against GB.

As for the point men, Williams was the Americans’ best player and picked up the game MVP award after shooting 7-for-8, including 5-for-6 on 3-pointers, and scoring 19 points in 19 1/2 minutes. Paul had three points, six assists and three steals against GB after going for 10 points, three assists and four steals against Brazil.

Westbrook was the player who picked up his game the most in contributing 15 points and nine assists in 20 minutes (he had four points and four steals in 15 minutes against Brazil). Love’s line was also better (he had no points and two rebounds in five minutes against Brazil) with six points and three rebounds. However, all of that production came in garbage time, when the Americans’ lead got as high as 47 points.

Krzyzewski disputed he notion that the 11-point victory against Brazil – a game in which Team USA trailed for a majority of the first half – was any kind of a wake-up call.

“We’re still in the development stage, and we are awake – we never were asleep,” he said. “If we play poorly, it’s because the other team is good.”

Williams went so far as to say that “we know we can be beat” – something no member of the orginal Dream Team never uttered, much less thought, for those who need further reason to stop making comparisons between the two teams.

And Britain coach Chris Finch repeated himself twice when the question of the Americans’ vulnerability – and the possibility that they could lose – was raised.

“Absolutely,” Finch said. “Basketball is a game that needs to be played out every possession. They have the most talent, but can they be beaten? Sure. There’s a lot of teams that can beat them on any given day.”

Two of those teams are Argentina and Spain, who will be Team USA’s opponents in its final two exhibition games next week in Barcelona.

Still, there are folks back home who will remain insistent that Team USA is infallible.

They have not learned from the lessons of the recent past, but Krzyzewski has.

Any maybe that, above all else, is why he went with two new starters in the Americans’ first game on European soil.

Chris Sheridan is publisher and editor-in-chief of SheridanHoops.com. He has covered every U.S. men’s national team at the Olympics and World Championship since 1996. Follow him on Twitter.

Filed Under: International, Olympics, Team USA Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Sheridan: Without changes, undersized Team USA is in trouble

11 Comments

WASHINGTON — Someone has to say it first, so I’ll take the plunge.

Team USA is in trouble unless changes are made. They are too small, they are bringing their best scorer off the bench and making him guard players much stronger than him, and they are brimming with so much overconfidence that they are practically blind to the reality of the situation.

If they cannot impose their will on their opponents at the London Olympics, they will lose.

They are a one-trick pony, and everyone around the world knows it.

“We know this is a team that likes to go in transition very fast, they don’t like to go 24 seconds (on offense),” Brazilian guard Marcelinho Huertas said after his squad lost to Team USA 80-69 on Monday night.

“They’re the only team that don’t have many systems on offense, they play 1-on-1, which is to their abilities, and on defense the same. They try to steal the ball, get in the passing lanes all the time. So whenever you get a team that’s used to playing like this, you make them play 24 seconds on defense and chase you around, and don’t let them run, make them play 5-on-5, that’s when you can prosper in a game like this,” said Huertas, who would have an NBA job by now if he didn’t have a 7 million Euro buyout in his contract with Barcelona that still has three years remaining.

In case you missed it Monday night, here’s all you need to know: With 5 1/2 minutes remaining, it was a 7-point game.

Yes, the Americans held Brazil to just 5 points in the second quarter, but Brazil was playing its scrubs.

Not once did Brazil zone up and force the Americans to beat it from outside. If the teams meet again in the elimination round in London, you can bet your bottom farthing that the tactics employed by coach Ruben Magnano will change.

This is a coach who played against the original Dream Team in 1992 at the Tournament of the Americas, who defeated Team USA at the Athens Olympics when he was coaching Argentina, and who knows Mike Krzyzewski’s schemes inside and out as the two happen to be good friends.

“The American team is better than the 2010 team,” Magnano said in the postgame press conference Monday night, long after President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden had left the building.

No kidding, Ruben.

This team has LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Deron Williams, Carmelo Anthony and Chris Paul –  the five returnees from the 2008 Beijing Redeem Team.

They also have Kevin Durant, who was a one-man machine for the 2010 Team USA that brought home the gold medal from Istanbul.

But the three-time defending scoring champion cannot crack the starting lineup on this team – at least Not yet. Krzyzewski brought Durant off the bench Monday night and played him at power forward, where he was overmatched against Brazil’s three burly bigs – Anderson Varejao, Nene and Tiago Splitter.

Anthony shot 1-for-7 against Brazil, and Durant got off 13 shots in 25 minutes off the bench, making only five of them for 11 points. If not for James, who was 11-for-20 for 30 points while adding four of the Americans’  19 steals, we might be talking today about an unfathomable loss that gave the rest of the world hope.

But you know what?

The rest of the world already has hope.

This American team is structurally flawed, especially with the way Krzyzewski is deploying his players. You have to wonder which player might subjugate his ego and do what Dwyane Wade did in 2008 – volunteer to come of the bench – in order to get some semblance of a well-balanced team on the floor.

One case in point where Krzyzewski is making a rotational mistake is with Kevin Love.

The only natural power forward on the roster, Love logged all of 5 1/2 minutes against Brazil and had zero points and two rebounds. When is the last time you saw a line like that from him? Dude should be logging 30 minutes, starting ahead of Anthony at the 4.

The only center on the roster is Tyson Chandler, as Anthony Davis already has become the 12th man in a rotation that will eventually be shortened to eight or nine.

Dwight Howard would have helped, but back surgery knocked him out. Chris Bosh would have helped, but his abdominal strain knocked him out. Blake Griffin would have helped tremendously, but his knee injury in Las Vegas and subsequent surgery knocked him out. Andrew Bynum, DeMarcus Cousins and/or David Lee could have helped, but they were passed over in the selection process.

(RELATED CONTENT: With Obama on hand, Team USA gives hope to rest of the world).

So what do the Americans have? For one thing, too many point guards. Chris Paul, Deron Williams and Russell Westbrook are all worthy of inclusion, but this is a case of too much of a good thing. You can play one of them off the ball at 2-guard, but that shifts Bryant to 3, James to the 4 and Durant to the 5 (if Love continues to get no love).

The common belief around the world when the Olympic draw was announced was that the Americans had landed in the more difficult bracket, having to play France and Argentina and two qualifiers from the pre-Olympic tournament (those teams turned out to be Lithuania and Nigeria).

But you know what?

The Americans are lucky to be in that group, because none of their opening-round opponents have the type of big men that can hurt them. The Brazilian threesome is in the other group. Timofey Mozgov is in the other group. Spain’s front line of Pau Gasol, Marc Gasol and Serge Ibaka is in the other group.

Going forward, the Americans should be able to roll through group play and impose their will on everyone, using their defense to create the transition opportunities that are their bread and butter,

But when we get to the single elimination round, the caliber of competition will be different. Teams with bigs are going to pose big problems for the U.S., as will teams that can protect the ball and milk the clock. If Team USA can’t get out and run, they are going to have to beat teams in the halfcourt. And there are probably four of five teams in the tournament that run their halfcourt offenses better than the Americans.

(PODCAST: Team USA is no lock for the gold medal).

So a word of warning as we head down the road to the Olympics.

It is time for comparisons with the original Dream Team to cease. It is time to start thinking about comparisons to the teams who will be potential opponents in the quarterfinals, semifinals and gold medal game – if the Americans make it that far.

If Coach K ultimately goes with a lineup of Chandler at 5, Love at 4, James at 3, Durant at 2 and Paul/Williams/Westbrook at 1, with Bryant as the Sixth Man, they are golden. But I don’t think he will choose to deploy his weaponry in that manner. He is too stubborn, too schooled in the West Point dogma of using overwhelming force to annihilate the enemy. But if Team USA isn’t forcing turnovers and scoring in transition, it is eminently vulnerable.

Brazil proved Monday night that the Americans are beatable. Obama himself was a witness.

If Krzyzewski deploys his talent in a more conventional way, Team USA should bring home the gold.

But if he sticks with what he went with against Brazil, his team could be in trouble. Remember where you heard that first.

Chris Sheridan is publisher and editor-in-chief of SheridanHoops.com. He has covered Team USA at every Olympics and World Championship and qualifying tournaments since 1996.

Filed Under: Columns, Editor's Picks, Olympics, Team USA Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,