Oh!! I thought we had Serbia next. Cool …. bring it on Germany. Maybe one of those big Serbs will have enough of Brooks’s crap and break his nose for him.
germany's been really good. we could lose either of the next two games. laker fans, of anyone, should understand how hard it is to just chuck a newly-formed team into competition, even with a talent advantage. the talent advantage has to be huge or the cohesion has to happen really fast. i still expect us to beat germany and make the finals, but it wouldn't be the upset of the century or anything.
This has always been the hard part, most of the national teams have time to play together, they may have a couple of players like a Luka type who is busy in the NBA and can only commit like other American players but many of them being on the national team is their main gig. It is getting harder and harder to compete against those teams, when you ONLY get to play a month or two at most as a team.
and even if they don't play together year round, many guys carry over from year to year, so they have that prior experience. it's more valuable than people imply.
the real issue is for the US is once you won an Olympic gold, players kind of rightfully feel like they fulfilled their national team obligations and concentrate on securing the bag in the NBA. The US tends to win gold and so you lose the ability to create continuity and you get a roster like the current one where they only have one marginal MVP candidate on the roster in Edwards and maybe Halliburton is only other guy who can claim to be the best at their respective position in the NBA.
Another real issue is that 4 out of the top 5 vote getters for MVP last Season are not American or playing for Team USA. USA can definitely put together a deeper team, but we'll never have guys like Embid, Giannis, Jokic, Luka or SGA on our Team.
No doubt the world is getting better but these are the best American players at their relative positions C: AD/Bam PF: probably Lebron but you can have AD/BAM again plus JJJ/Draymond SF: Durant/Tatum/Leonard George SG: Booker/Brown/Butler/Mitchell PG: Steph/Ja/Kyrie/etc So basically bigs are on the weaker side but otherwise the US would be throwing waves of MVP caliber players if the US brought in their best
