It didn’t take long for that label to be permanently discarded. It only took a decade for the NBA to drag the national team from a 44-point average margin of victory and the greatest assemblage of talent ever on a single roster — 11 of the 12 were voted individually into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame — to being defeated by Argentina, Yugoslavia and Spain at home in Indianapolis at the 2002 FIBA World Championships.
That was no dream. That happened.
Mike Krzyzewski and Jerry Colangelo fixed that in two years.
Oh, they had help. So much help. They had help from the coaching staffs chosen to work the USA bench, from Jim Boeheim to Nate McMillan to Mike D’Antoni to Monty Williams to Tom Thibodeaux. They had help from the coaching staffs at Syracuse and Duke, who aided with scouting and workouts and so many other tasks. They had help from international scouts who joined the cause and helped the coaches devise gameplans to attack the teams from Spain, Turkey, Serbia and others, and from the trainers who helped players stay fit and healthy as the miles on their bodies accumulated.
And, of course, more than anyone else they got help — in a sense, they were carried — by the players who committed to become national teamers, including LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Kobe Bryant.
As the head coach of record, Krzyzewski gets a lot of credit for what has been achieved by the national team. He gets the glittering record: 52-1 in official FIFA competitions. He also gets the jealous, snide remarks from the NBA personnel who’d helped wreck the whole thing in the first place.
That is the real shame of the argument that broke out stateside following the Americans’ gold-medal performance at the 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup. Instead of celebrating the achievement of winning still another championship, this time with the very best U.S. talent absent from the roster, the story became whether coaching USA Basketball gave Krzyzewski an unfair advantage in recruiting.
Boeheim’s assertion that Kentucky coach John Calipari had complained about this — which Calipari denies — allowed the NBA-firsters who were sniping at the Duke coach to see their campfire turn escalate to a conflagration.
From 1992 until 2005, when Krzyzewski was hired to take over as head coach, USA Basketball at the senior level was strictly an NBA enterprise. Taking the game to the world helped grow the league’s reach enormously, particularly in China but also in numerous European countries. The NBA folks oversaw all that, and they benefitted in terms of the dollars drained from foreign markets and the burgeoning basketball talent immigrating from around the world.
There naturally has been a cost for that expansion, but it is far more episodic and anecdotal than Mark Cuban (whose objections are on the record) and some others in the league (who aren’t willing to take a personal stand and thus speak anonymously) will claim.
For every Yao Ming whose national team workload might have contributed to his decline, there are several who continued to play internationally well into their careers and still excel in the NBA: Manu Ginobili, Pau Gasol, Boris Diaw.
For every Paul George injured in a freak playing accident, there are scores of guys who play hundreds of FIBA minutes without incident, all of whom would be playing somewhere, probably with less to gain, if world national team competition were eliminated.
The suggestion to turn the Olympics into an U-22 or U-23 event, which former NBA commissioner David Stern floated a while back and some in the league have adopted — sorry, but that’s not going to happen. Soccer gets away with it at the Olympic level because it is by far the world’s most popular team sport and FIFA felt it necessary and prudent to protect its World Cup showcase event.
Some NBA folks want not only to diminish the Olympics, but also the Worlds. They want LeBron and Melo and all the Gasols out of the entire enterprise. “We need to get our vets out and move our younger players in,” an NBA general manager told Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports.
No, sir. What the NBA needs is to decide whether it wants basketball to be a world game. Baseball and hockey have recognized the value of international competition in promoting their games. Basketball has attained a position each of those sports would envy, but the Olympics could get along fine without basketball if the Games weren’t getting the best.
Undermining Krzyzewski’s impressive work with the national team isn’t going to maintain or accelerate the game’s growth. Withdrawing the world’s best players from international play would kill it.
There already is a FIBA U-19 World Championship. It is a nice event that helps the world’s best teenagers test themselves and their progress.
Basketball doesn’t need any more age groups. If it wants to grow, it needs its best players on the biggest world stages. The NBA Finals is one, but only one, and maybe not the most important in that campaign.
