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When USA Basketball does not win the gold medal – when it does not win, earns points and does so convincingly – it sinks the American ego. We see this as our sport. Basketball was invented in the United States and as a country we have dominated it for so long, so convincingly, that any change is a shock to the system.
But sometimes they change.
The United States was eliminated from the World Cup on Wednesday by a French team that was simply better that day. The length and aggression of the French defenders on the perimeter made the Americans flee and the United States had no one who could compete with Rudy Gobert in the center. It was not a disaster for the United States, it was not a problem, it was not a lack of effort, it was just another sign of the change in the world of basketball.
Here are the top three points to remember from the experience of the United States Football World Cup in China.
1. TALENT WON
We see it every season of the NBA. We see it particularly in the playoffs of the NBA. And we have seen with this edition of Team USA: The talent gap between the top 10 world players (a few times close) and all the others is huge, and without them, it's hard to win big.
This is the obvious easy to remember of this World Cup, but that does not stop it from being wrong: the United States did not send its best players and they could not win without them. The members of the American team should not be bothered by the defeat against France – the Americans are not lazy, they did their best, France was just better Wednesday. The talent has triumphed.
As discussed in detail in the run-up to the tournament, the best American players chose to stay at home – as their right. There are legitimate reasons for their decisions (keep reading in # 3), but it still stings. CJ McCollum added an interesting angle, saying that worries about weight loss played a role and could have resulted in a snowball effect: some guys decided to stay at home, which made us fear lose, which has brought more guys to stay at home, which led to losing concerns, and so on and so on.
Would the US team still play for a medal if James Harden / Stephen Curry / Kawhi Leonard / Damian Lillard put red, white and blue? We will never know for sure, but the United States struggled to score throughout this tournament and had six empty possessions away in the tightest time in the fourth against a solid French defense, which helped to decide the match. After taking the lead in the third quarter with a good ball movement, a good tempo and a jerk of Donovan Mitchell, the United States has resumed the habit of playing in isolation on a half-court when the match became tight and they had no harden. Leonard to make it work. Kemba Walker is an All-Star / All-NBA player, but he is not one of the top 10 game changers. When he had a 2-in-9 game night, the United States stumbled to the side offensive.
I think Donovan Mitchell will become one of those elite players – and he's got 29 against France, the match is not too tight without him – but at 22, he's not going to be one. Is not there yet.
This World Cup was a big step forward in his learning curve for him, but he was aimless in the fourth quarter (the team went away from him at some point to a position of Harrison Barnes) and the only time he attacked, Gobert rejected his shot. . Mitchell is still growing up at the age of 22. If it was the third best scoring option of this team, would things be different?
Talent is not everything: the Greeks had Giannis Antetokounmpo, but they used it badly and they struggled. But at the end of the day, the Americans sent Team B, maybe even Team C, and that's not enough. more. One of the main reasons is …
2. The gap between the United States and the rest of the world is not so great
This is no longer 1992, when opposing players asked the members of the Dream Team autographs on the field after the match. It's also not the year 2008, when a stacked team Redeem Team has reaffirmed Team USA's dominance in the sport.
We are in 2019 and the gap between the United States and the rest of the world is far less important than it was ten years ago. This is the new reality. There is much less room for error for Americans – especially if we do not send the best.
According to NBCSports.com's projections "50 best players in 5 years", three of the top five players are not Americans (Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic). The United States still has more depth than any country in the world, and it was true 1 to 12 on this team from the United States, but the gap is much smaller, especially among the guys who accumulate long minutes. Against France, two of the top three players on the field were French NBA players Rudy Gobert and Evan Fournier. This – and a solid game of the former Spur Nando De Colo – was enough to bring down the United States.
If the best players in the United States treat the FIBA World Cup as a secondary event, it will continue. And the best Americans will probably continue to treat the World Cup this way because …
3. THE WORLD CUP IS NOT THE OLYMPICS (AND THE "IMPROVEMENTS" OF THE FIBA WORLD CUP ARE DAMAGING THE US)
FIBA dreams of making its basketball World Cup the type of cash cow, the "must-go event" of the FIFA World Cup. FIBA is desperately trying to make this dream come true.
The results were terrible. For the United States team and the tournament as a whole.
For players born in the United States, the Olympics remain the gold standard of international tournaments. The United States has done pretty well in this World Cup to qualify for the 2020 games in Tokyo – and next summer, many of the best players in the United States will agree to participate. For the United States, the Olympics are the largest stage, the largest marketing platform, the tournament with more prestige. This is the gold medal that American players want.
FIBA is not a fan of the Olympics (because the International Olympic Committee earns money, not FIBA) and seems to be trying to undermine the five-to-five games at the Olympics.
Nobody in America cares about the World Cup. Until we lose.
FIBA made some changes in the run-up to this World Cup to help improve the position of the event. They turned against them.
The first was to move the World Cup until 2019 – a year before the Olympics – instead of 2018, when it would have traditionally failed. The reason given by FIBA was to bring out its World Cup the same year as the World Cup football, which masks obviously. With this change, the World Cup basketball could also be the main event of the Olympic qualifiers.
This change has driven some players. Playing for Team USA is a summer engagement of five to six weeks in the summer, during the off-season, when players try to rest, regenerate, relax a bit and spend time with their friends and family. family. Most players are willing to make that sacrifice to play for the United States every two years (that's how the World Cup and the Olympics had been spaced), but when FIBA moved the tournament in 2019 he experienced two great summer days. commitments to play for the US team. The players have decided to withdraw one of them and the World Cup will always lose this fight.
In addition, FIBA has scheduled this World Cup for the beginning of September, which places it the opposite of the beginning of training camps around the world, with little rest for the players. It was also a strike against the event for the players. (It's not just the United States, have also begged international players such as Nikola Mirotic, because of the timing of the event.)
The other big change of the FIBA was to move the qualifications for the World Cup and to organize the games during what would be the season for the NBA and other major leagues in Europe. This is what FIFA does for football, except that no major basketball league would make an "international break" – as the big European football leagues do – so that the best players can participate in qualifying. It's part of the football culture, basketball is not going to fold that way. The NBA has not released any players, any more than the major European leagues. It meant that the best players in the world were not at all part of the qualifications. The United States qualified by sending a G-League team led by Jeff Van Gundy.
For the World Cup itself, this qualification system did not mean that all the best teams were successful. Slovenia, current European champion, did not qualify for the World Cup. This is a team led by Goran Dragic and potentially with Luka Doncic, but they failed to travel to China because their best players could not participate in qualifying.
FIBA is a mess of organization, and its thirst for money and power is detrimental to the World Cup and the product that the United States could put on the ground.
But that was just one of the American's problems.
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