USA USA USA

Though it is still the off-season, at least the NFL season has started so we don't need to suffer through the monotony of another baseball infested summer.

On the basketball end of things, though, we at least had the pleasure of watching Team USA compete in the FIBA Americas tournament, if compete is really the right word to use. Let me get the qualifiers out of the way. This tournament was not full of powerhouse teams. Argentina was missing Ginobili, Oberto and Nocioni, and the next strongest teams are Brazil and Puerto Rico - neither of whom are real international powers (although with Nene and Barbosa on Brazil's squad, they certainly have a good looking future). Compared to these teams, the USA looked like the Spurs vis-a-vis a college team - giving as much credit to the international competition as possible.

That being said, we often thought the same of international teams prior to these big tournaments and yet of late have continued to come up short time after time. What's different now? Is anything different not?

The stats suggest no weaknesses. Playing an incredibly fast tempo of 85 possessions a game (in a 40 minute game), the team maintained a 137 offensive efficiency and a 90 defensive efficiency. They shot 69% eFG holding their opponents to just 43%. They only turned it over on 12% of their possessions, and forced turnovers on almost 20%.

The rebounding statistics are actually a little strange - though I have a theory to venture about the cause. The phenomenon is that the USA, in total rebounds, actually were, as they say, "outrebounded" in a number of the games. When you actually break down the rebounds properly, you find that the USA often had a substantial advantage on defensive rebounds (as one would imagine given disparity in FG%), but were getting incredibly outrebounded offensively. Over the course of the tournament, the USA grabbed offensive rebounds on only 27.5% of their possible chances, whereas their opponents grabbed about 31.4%. Looking at the opposition's rebounding rate, it's clear that Team USA were really not giving up an abnormal amount of offensive rebounds relative to the amount of shots the team missed (which was many), but were themselves simply not rebounding offensively very often. Why could this be? Often the USA fielded Dwight Howard and/or Amare Stoudemire - both are huge and freakishly athletic (quicker than most international guards and yet almost 7' tall each).

Of course, one has to first note that the international paint is much wider near the basket, thus making offensive rebounds near the basket slightly more difficult. Big men are offensively less inclined to stay so close to the basket for as long of a period of time as in the NBA since they have much farther out to go to "reset" their 3 seconds. Furthermore, the only reason anyone wants to grab offensive rebounds to begin with is to increase offensive efficiency - rebound margin itself means nothing. When your team shoots 69% eFG and has a 12% TO rate, the need for offensive rebounds is fairly low. Otherwise on paper there is really no reason to be concerned. Generally very good offensive rebounding teams are very athletic teams with size advantages at a few key positions (as are good defensive rebounding teams). It's hard to imagine a more athletic team that outsizes their opposition at every position as much as Team USA. Just as important to their loss on rebounding margin is the sheer quantity of missed shots their opposition had. Yes, they had on the whole a tendency to grab 5% more possible rebounds than Team USA, but 31% is still a very low number. The large number of actual offensive rebounds was a result of a massive number of misses caused by a suffocating perimeter and interior defense.

Now, none of this wankery really guarantees victory in Beijing. There are still powerhouse teams out there we haven't yet faced: Greece, Slovenia, Russia, Spain, Argentina at full strength. However, I can't imagine that those teams would enter a game facing a starting 5 of Jason Kidd, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Dwight Howard with a tremendous amount of confidence. In Japan last summer Team USA lacked Jason Kidd (who is really the perfect floor leader for this style of play - keep in mind he had 46 assists to just 5 turnovers in these qualifiers and has never lost a game in international play), and Kobe Bryant (who is, frankly, probably the best player in the world). It's also worth noting that Amare sat out last summer as well given that he had been recovering from knee surgery. This summer, Team USA, for the first time in a long time, looked comfortable on the court. They looked like they were having a tremendous amount of fun running up and down the court, shooting tons of 3s, and throwing improbable alley-oops to one another. There is very clearly no team in the world who can match USA's talent, athleticism, and depth - not to mention coaching experience. However, USA is still young and they still are subject to criticisms of past years - these are just all-stars, they all have egos to assuage, they have lapses in defense (though on the whole, they played exceptional defense) and so forth. I think what we're seeing is an actual team who has been somehow brought together from a group of probably 6 future Hall Of Famers, a dozen more All-Stars, and coached by an exceptional group of experienced coaches who get along well and have similar enough styles to not conflict too much. I have long thought that Coach K is best at motivation and interpersonal skills, and not exactly a strategic master of basketball. Add with him Mike D'Antoni, Jim Boeheim and Nate McMillan and I think you have a pretty excellently drawn team of coaches.

At any rate, for the first time in 12 years, I am actually excited about watching Olympic basketball next summer. Quite frankly, this Team USA might be better than the 1992 Dream Team, but the mystique and the results will never compare because that 1992 Team was full of veterans who were already on their walk into the Hall and were playing a much, much weaker international competition. In those days, teams just had fun watching Charles and Michael dunk all over them and losing by 50, but these days international teams are really out there gunning for Team USA - to stick it to America and prove that basketball isn't just "our" game anymore. Considering that USA's closest game in the recent FIBA tournament was a 15 point win over erstwhile undefeated Argentina, shortly followed up by a 37 point win over the same team - I think that Team USA may be able to get some revenge for a decade of international shame.