coach k = fraud

Sorry Star, but I really laugh at the idea that we need to bring different players. When the USA played the best basketball in the world, the roster composition was almost irrelevant. What your long-winded post above really boils down to is that the USA no longer plays the best basketball in the world. The sooner you resign yourself to it, the better off you'll be. Your posts on this thread suggest you're about to go postal.

P.S. I agree with you that today's college players aren't the answer, but if you could find a time machine and bring back the '84 squad of collegians, we'd still win gold. Because that is the era when the USA played the best ball in its history.

 

What makes them semi-literate, exactly?
Perhaps it's something you see in them?

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/01/AR2006090101815.html

Wilbon has a nice take.

 

go through this entire thread and see how many synonyms you see for 'black'

 

Starman,

I'm not sure full-court pressure defence is the answer. The Russians weaved through John Thompson's pressure defence in 1988 with ease. I know those were college kids, but many of these other teams are so skilled, so fundamentally set and so well-coached that I think they could handle it. And the last few times the pros have tried it, it hasn't been that successful, either.

Half-court, maybe. I'm still not certain. Right now, I'd worry more about defending the pick & roll. God, that was embarrassing. My eight-year-old nephew was watching the replay with me (he's just learning how to play basketball) and asked me to teach him that play so he could score every time, too.

 

I don't think we need to bring ALL different players, just SOME. 3-4 tops. MOST of the team this time was very well selected. We need a couple more guys who are outstanding at shooting -- and defending -- the 3PFG. And, a couple more who can play full-court, open-court pressure defense.

We don't need Shaq, Tim Duncan or KG. Especially not Shaq and Duncan, who are slow (extremely slow in the case of Shaq), getting older, and BOTH horrible FT shooters. They would exacerbate the problems which already exist.

In that graph, Wilbon sums up the whole problem. When this team started out, we heard all the right things about how they were going to play hard against everybody. And, they did for a while. But then, they learned they could beat most teams playing at 3/4 speed. And then, 2/3 speed. And then, maybe 55% speed. Instead of fast-breaking all the time, they fast broke SOME of the time. The high-pressure defense was reduced to token pressure -- one guy maybe with 15 feet of the dribbler, acting sorta like he was playing defense, but that was it. By the last couple of games (I didnt watch the bronze-medal game Saturday), we were pretty much back to playing the usual NBA walk-it-up crap.

Well, the problem with that was that Thompson played a moronic Bizarro World combination of defenses and offenses. (Just like Iba in 1972 and Brown in 2004, it was like he sat down and tried to come up with the one perfect game plan which would most completely negate every single physical advantage his team started out with. With the added bonus of Brown's case, the objective of humiliating both the selection committee and the players on the roster.) Thompson played a full-court trapping press, whose objective is to slow down the offense and bring the pace of the game down to a near-complete standstill. Plus, also, a halfcourt trap, which is designed completely to force the opponent to slow the game down, control the pace, and limit the contest to a very finite number of shots, rebounds and possessions. (Precisely the thing a US team should NOT want to do.)

Conventional zone traps, mostly, will not work in international play (or the NBA), because yes, the experienced players know how to find the open man and pass out of the traps. The kind of presses which are needed are full-court man-to-man denial and full-court run-and-jump switching presses, with the objective, not so much to create turnovers (although that's certainly part of it) is to force the opponent into a hurricane blowtorch pace where speed, quickness, depth and explosiveness are at a premium and overwhelm all other factors in the game.