Of all the victories the United States secured in their pre-Olympic exhibition series, the game that was most comfortable was the victory against Serbia in Abu Dhabi. Even with the opposition featuring the Denver Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic, widely acclaimed as the NBA’s best player, the Americans blew the Serbs off the floor.
So maybe a 110-84 victory to open the pursuit of a fifth consecutive gold medal isn’t quite the cause for celebration that it seems. It’s better than the alternative, though.
And maybe it is a suggestion of what might be possible now that USA Basketball has all its senior men.
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1. Is Kevin Duran even human?
The one question that lingered throughout the five-game exhibition series in advance of Paris 2024 was what the team would look like once Durant was available to play. Because of an issue with his calf, he did not appear for a minute in any of those games.
The Americans managed to win all five games, anyway, but not without some difficulty. Three of the five were close. Two of them required late heroics from LeBron James. One necessitated James grabbing the ball and storming through the South Sudan defense to produce a one-point victory
We kind of saw that in reverse once Durant entered the game with 2:33 left in the first quarter against Serbia. He rescued them in the first half from a largely dismal performance.
What would the score have been if Durant had not entered to make all eight of his field goal attempts, including five strikes from 3-point range and a ridiculous fallaway jumper to beat the first-half buzzer and give the U.S. a nine-point lead?
He missed the only shot he attempted in the second half, so it wasn’t a perfect night, but it genuinely was promising for the Americans.
His 23 points resulted in a plus-20 rating. He committed only one turnover in 17 minutes, which matters on a team that has been sloppy with the ball from the jump.
“We’re going to get better with our turnovers,” LeBron James told NBC Sports. “We’re trying to make, so you can never exclude that, but some of the careless turnovers that we had, that we can give ourselves even more possessions offensively, we’re going to be better coming up on Wednesday.”
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2. Does the starting lineup matter?
We’ve now seen coach Steve Kerr start essentially the same group in six national team games, with LeBron James, Steph Curry, Jrue Holiday, Joel Embiid and a different player rotating through the wing position that seems destined to be filled by Kevin Durant.
Their combined advantage over the first five minute of each of six games: 2 points.
It’s not working.
And it’s pretty obvious why it’s not working. Joel Embiid isn’t consistently effective at either end of the floor. In the first half against Serbia, he was a minus-11 during his 6 minutes of playing time. Superstar Nikola Jokic wound up with 20 points on 8-of-15 shooting for Serbia. So maybe Embiid’s physicality wore on him a bit. But Embiid’s wretched play in pick-and-roll defense mattered. He wound up a minus-8 for the game, the only negative rating among the 10 U.S. players who appeared.
And it’s not like holding back the team’s superior center – at least in regards to international play – is assured of keeping Anthony Davis out of foul trouble. He wound up having to sit much of the first half after picking up his second foul.
If protecting Davis to provide a second-unit spark is a consideration, the United States might be better opening with Bam Adebayo at center alongside James and possibly Durant. Kerr and his staff have now waited six games for Embiid to remind everyone what a player he’s been in the NBA. How long can they afford this?
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3. What do we make of Jayson Tatum’s disappearance?
Although he was a hero of the gold medal drive in 2021, and though he was the star of the 2024 NBA Champion Boston Celtics, and though he started some games in the pre-Olympic exhibition series, Tatum found himself on the bench as Durant returned to the rotation.
He joined exhibition exile Tyrese Haliburton in riding the bench for the entire Olympics opener. And there is some justification for this.
Tatum functions better when he’s one of the featured players: when he must score if his team is going to be successful, and therefore a concerted effort is made to assure that’s likely to happen.
In Tokyo in the summer of 2021, with Damian Lillard searching in vain for his shooting touch and Durant was looking around for help, Tatum arose to deliver what the U.S. needed. There would have been no gold medal without him.
This team does not need to build itself around someone like Tatum, not with elite shooting from Booker, Curry, Durant and, at times, Edwards, Holiday and James. Tatum is less reliable as a distance shooter; he did not make a 3-pointer in the exhibition series. He’s got a variety of ways to score that benefit from the NBA’s emphasis on the screen-and-role game and isolation offense.
It’s conceivable Tatum still could matter for this team.
With the gold as the goal, it’d be best if it never comes to that.