Will USA hoops bring back gold?

Sorry, it is.

The sniveling old woman was more fixated on forcing the players to play his way, the "right way," than he was on winning the goddamn gold medal, which was, of course, his only responsibility.

It takes time to get basketball teams to "play the right way." It takes a training camp, exhibition games and probably half a season, and even then they may not get it (see New York Knicks, 2006).

Time of course is the one thing you do not have when coaching an Olympic basketball team. Like it or not, the players you get are the players you get. You are not going to significantly change their habits, tendencies and abilities in the 4-to-6 weeks an Olympic team is going to be together. (Especially if two of the PGs are guys like Marbury and Iverson who have been resistant to coaching over their careers, a fact Brown was perfectly well aware of going in.)

Thus, the coach must look at the roster as given to him and figure out what the players can do and cannot do, what they will do and will not do, and devise some way to win with the personnel he has.

Instead, from virtually Day One, Brown concentrated on preemptive alibiing about what the selfish fundamentally-unsound players would not or could not do, pissing and moaning about all the great players he would rather have on the team (most of whom had refused to go out for the team anyway), and what a soul-wrenching ordeal it was for a true basketball purist like him to try against such fearsome odds to instill in these shiftless lazy thug players (an implication not lost on the media) the correct way to play the game.

Followed of course by his mournful puppy-dog eyes, the deep exasperated sighs, shoulder shrugs and eye-rolls after the losses. What could he do? He was only a courageous coaching legend trying to get them to "play the right way."

 

Can a newbie hand out a "Solid"?

 

You can but the rest of us have heard that rant about 1,000 times.

Starman is more predictable than the sunrise

 

A little different than saying we about the Steelers.

 

Run, run, run, press the shit out of of every single team they face and nobody comes within 25 of them.

 

Yup. Have Chris Paul push the ball at about 1,000 feet per second and with Kobe and LeBron finishing on the wings, this team SHOULD be far superior than the previous embarrassments. I'm still not convinced Coach K won't try to force the team to play half court so he can prove how smart he is, which might result in Jason Kidd and LeBron jacking up 3s like they're the distant cousin of Trajon Langdon, but Kobe will be a huge, huge addition. He can run, he can hit mid-range jumpers, he can defend, he can sucker-punch an Italian defender in the nuts. After the NBA finals weak showing and Shaq's weak ass but on-point improv, no one has ever been given a chance to redefine their legacy so quickly. He will go bonkers trying to win those games. And when Jason kid gets hurt in Game 1 (which he will, because he's 1,000 years old as sucks), he can even play point guard, if Williams and Paul need a break.

 

Sam Mills 51 said it best: why the fook didn't they pick a "real" center? We're doomed against Yao or Nowitzki. Big problem.

The small roster will be able to defend Argentina and Italy's shooting, but we need some inside presence here, IMHO.

 

Unless the USA gets a Great Wall-size fucking from the refs, there's no way the Chinese will win that game.

 

Don't like Kidd and Wade on this team.

Kidd, because he's ancient.

Wade, because his style (above LeBron or anyone else's) is a terrible fit for the international game. He was bad at the Worlds in '06 and that was coming off of the NBA Finals MVP, not a season that saw him hurt and shut down early.

But as others have mentioned...defending is the key. I talked to a college coach a year or so ago, who had heard Majerus talk about helping to coach the 2000 Olympic Team. Majerus said over and over that if that team would have simply defended the pick and roll effectively 50 percent of the time, they would have won the gold.

 

We are talking about the Olympics.

 

China has a player or two other than Yao. Has Germany even qualified yet?

Besides, when did bigs fear Dirk Nowitzki bullying them around the basket?

The US does need somebody other than Howard down low, though. I've always wanted to see a Charles Oakley/Anthony Mason-like player on the Olympic team, if only to see Europeans flying into the fifth row.