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mattinNH
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Joined: 7/11/2004
Member: #695
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Team USA, needing the work, stays in Turkey to practice
Aug. 11, 2004
SportsLine.com wire reports
ISTANBUL, Turkey -- If the U.S. men's basketball team's wildly
inconsistent warmup tour accomplished anything, coaches hope it
finally delivered the message they have been screaming about:
Winning the gold medal in Athens won't be easy.
The team stuck around Turkey for an extra day Wednesday, getting in
a lengthy practice before it travels to Athens for what promises to
be the most competitive Olympic tournament since professionals began
playing in 1992.
Coach Larry Brown, both a perfectionist and a pessimist, still
doesn't believe his team is entirely ready for what's in store.
"I don't know where we are," Brown said. "We have good moments and
bad, but I have a pretty good understanding of who needs to play.
Now the job is to get an understanding of how we have to play."
Already, there is no question of who is the team's most important
player.
Tim Duncan has made it abundantly clear that he is the key to
winning a gold medal and keeping any further blemishes off an
all-time Olympic record of 109-2.
The two-time MVP and two-time NBA champion will be the most talented
big man in the tournament -- although Yao Ming of China is rapidly
gaining ground in that department. But if Duncan gets into foul
trouble or goes down with an injury, the Americans' chances will
drop precipitously.
Brown has settled on a rotation of Duncan, Lamar Odom, Richard
Jefferson, Allen Iverson and Stephon Marbury as the starters, with
Carlos Boozer, Carmelo Anthony, Shawn Marion, LeBron James and
Dwyane Wade as the key substitutes.
Amare Stoudemire and Emeka Okafor do not figure to play much, and
Brown said Wednesday he'll need to shorten his rotation even
further. Either James or Anthony will likely be the odd man out when
that happens.
"We're getting there, slowly but surely," Jefferson said. "Easily
we're the most talented team in the world, but it's a matter of have
we had enough time to come together as a team, to know each other's
tendencies and to understand what coach Brown wants."
The U.S. team's weaknesses have at times been glaring -- especially
on the first stop of their European tour when they were steamrolled
by Italy and needed a last-second 3-pointer by Iverson to defeat
Germany.
They have no great outside shooters, not a lot of height and only
one pure point guard, Marbury, whose career-long proclivity to be a
shoot-first, pass-second playmaker has put him fundamentally at odds
with Brown's vision of what a floor general should be.
"It's been good," Marbury said of his time thus far under Brown.
"I've learned a lot from him."
The Americans played their best all-around game in Belgrade when
they defeated the defending world champions, Serbia-Montenegro.
But they regressed again in Istanbul and had a difficult time
breaking away from Turkey -- a team, like Germany, that didn't even
qualify for the Olympics but still gave them all they could handle.
The U.S. team also did not face much zone defense in its final three
exhibitions, a trend Brown expects will be reversed once the games
start meaning something.
The Americans open Olympic play against Puerto Rico on Sunday in
Group A, the weaker of the two fields in the Athens draw. Their
toughest opening-round games figure to come against Lithuania and
Greece, and the team's first must-win game won't come until the
quarterfinals when the format switches to single-elimination.
That gives Brown almost two more weeks to continue shaping his team.
Many of the players conceded that the best thing that could have
happened to them was getting a taste against Italy of how high the
level of competition will be.
"The talks we had after that game, the humility we felt, we really
needed it," Odom said. "The key is to be confident and not ****y."
Do any of these sports reporters really watch the game? Marbury has started at the
exhibition games, plays about 25-30 mins, and hardly ever takes a shot because, well,
Brown has told him to pass to everyone. Steph seems to have taken that to heart, and
he's probably having a tough time acclimating, but he's definitely trying. I swear,
I think all these reporters just read each others articles and paraphrase.
Not one original idea among them! The day someone writes about how Marbury is the only
PG on the team and is actually doing fine, and was the only PG to be man enough
to accept the invitation, instead of ragging on him, I'll personally write them a
thank you letter. I mean, here's the situation, you invite every star you can think of...
most of them turn you down, then you ask Marbury "Please, come to Athens" He says,
"Ok, cool the Olympics" Now everyone says that he sucks. What a bum deal!
We're probably all biased and I'm just preaching to the choir, but there it is. HeHe.
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8/11/2004 12:15 PM
