Viewed a certain way, the job in a given Olympics of the head coach of the U.S. men's national basketball team is easy as hell. They give you a roster made up of a dozen of the best, what, 30 basketball players on the planet, and your formal responsibility is to make sure this supergroup does not lose to teams comprised mostly of well-meaning goobers. With all due respect to the extremely energetic fellows who play for South Sudan, who will face off against Team USA on Wednesday, a casual basketball fan would not be wrong to expect the Bright Stars to lose by one jillion points to the Washington Wizards. Their only NBA player is JT Thor of the Charlotte Hornets; their best player, so far as I can tell, is Carlik Jones, who plays professionally for China's Zhejiang Golden Bulls.
The gig is not without its particular challenges. If coaching basketball at the highest levels is often about managing egos, this is that but tuned to Ultra Nightmare difficulty. Superstar players who are conditioned to ruling the roost in their day jobs will have to accept smaller roles, ones that orient them in the pecking order behind players who under normal circumstances are considered The Enemy. And if it doesn't work out—if countrymen can't coalesce and lineups don't thrive and the team fails to bring home the gold—everyone involved will wear the stink of it forever. Team USA took home bronze in 2004 with a talented but imperfect roster scrambled together at the last minute, and those involved were utterly disgraced, in some cases all but blackballed from the program, and were still eating mountains of shit in oral histories published 15 years after the fact.
Steve Kerr, head coach of the current squad, made the decision ahead of Sunday's opening game against Serbia to run a 10-man rotation, which meant benching two of his nation's best players. One of those players, Tyrese Haliburton, is a 24-year-old point guard on his first go-round with the national team, and a reasonable victim of a glut of star guards on the roster. The other is Team USA veteran Jayson Tatum, a three-time All-NBA first-teamer and reigning NBA champion, and formerly the second leading scorer on the squad that won gold at the Olympics in Tokyo in 2021. Devin Booker, Jrue Holiday, Anthony Edwards, and fellow Celtic Derrick White were in the rotation; Tatum, who might reasonably think of himself as at least one cut above each of them, was a spectator.
To Kerr, this was a matter of matchups: Serbia, led by Nikola Jokic, presents a particular set of challenges, best met by particular lineup combinations which evidently do not include Tatum. Kerr recognizes the fundamental lunacy of this calculation—Tatum, after all, was no worse than the second-best player on the team that just won an NBA title, a vastly more difficult career accomplishment for an American basketball star than the summiting of any given international tournament—but views it as a reality of the Olympics format. "The hardest part of this job is you're sitting at least a couple of guys who are world-class, some of the very best players on Earth," he said after the game. "On one hand, it makes no sense at all. On the other, I'm asking these guys to just commit to winning one game and then move on to the next one. I have to do the same thing. And so I felt like last night those were the combinations that made the most sense."
It says something about the goofy pressures of the job that part of Kerr's post-game responsibilities involved assuring everyone back home that Tatum will for sure touch the floor Wednesday, for what will almost certainly be a gruesome blowout of South Sudan, as if he is a little-league coach with a mandate to achieve universal participation. Boxed in by his own basketball justification for benching Tatum against Serbia, Kerr now needs a basketball justification for using him, in an upcoming game against a team without a single player cut out for rotation minutes on an NBA team. Serbia was a large team, you see—Brian Windhorst of ESPN was impressed by their "strong big men" and "strong guards"—whereas South Sudan, on the other hand, is a fast team.
"With South Sudan, it's more about the speed, and speed is a killer," Kerr said Sunday, not super believably. "You have to be prepared for everything, and that means we need everybody." Tatum, by Kerr's calculations, is better suited to thwart speed than strength.
I can't help it: To me, this is more embarrassing to Tatum's reputation and damaging to Kerr's credibility than if he'd blamed Tatum's DNP on too much partying. It's clear with the benefit of hindsight that Team USA would've prevailed over Serbia comfortably with a wider distribution of minutes; frankly, some of Bam Adebayo's minutes could've gone to Jordan damn Poole without upsetting the final outcome. I already consider Steve Kerr an inveterate over-tinkerer, and I already consider Jayson Tatum to be both boring and gently overrated. Now we have Kerr running a playoff rotation against Serbia and working up precise game plans for South Sudan, and Tatum being too limited to hold his own against Ognjen Dobric, whose professional basketball journey has brought him no closer to the NBA than the Adriatic League Finals.
Kerr may not have quite the same wiggle room as head coaches of Team USA's glorious distant past. The bronze finish of 2004 was a historic, generation-defining humiliation, and the U.S. is no longer the slam dunk it used to be in international competition. The days when Team USA players could spend their off-hours gambling and gamboling into the wee hours, stumble into an arena with red-rimmed eyes and toxic blood, and expect to beat the living hell out of any conceivable opponent, are gone. On the other hand, I would certainly have a higher opinion of Tatum today if Kerr had blamed his DNP on out-of-control partying. Tatum would return to the United States a vastly cooler basketball idol if Kerr had told the world that his swingman couldn't hoop Sunday because he'd escaped the village for a scenic westward train-ride and spent Saturday overindulging on a gluttonous pintxos crawl in San Sebastian's Old Town.
I do not like to think of an American basketball star who is not good enough to take the floor and do midair Fortnite dances against various tragically earthbound international try-hards, no matter how reasonable the underlying basketball calculations. No, not even if that basketball star is a member of the Boston Celtics. It is Steve Kerr's solemn duty to tell the world that Joel Embiid is missing the South Sudan game because he vanished into the Biarritz nightlife and could not be found until he quite literally washed ashore just hours before tipoff, and not because he is simply too slow to run up and down with Wenyen Gabriel. We used to be a great nation, for crying out loud.
