Friday, March 3, 2006

More on Iverson, Coach K, and the Olympic Team Snub

A prominent sportswriter who covers the NBA for a newspaper with a national audience e-mails me some excellent and provocative comments on Iverson and his Olympic Team snub:

Michael,

I've had a chance to see the pissing match over the A.I. issue on the Sports Law Blog, so I'll pass along a couple of comments.

Yes, it's just plain ignorant not to have Iverson as one of the 25 finalists for the team. If he goes in and it just so happens that he doesn't work out, I can live with that. But the idea that there are 22 players in world, let alone the U.S., more qualified than he for any team is just plain ridiculous, especially when you have two years to tweak the lineup.

However, the main issue to me seems to be that USA Basketball has never been about putting the best possible team on the floor, and probably less so since the NBA players were allowed to participate in international play. During the amateur era, you had coaches using the team to give favors to old friends, or to pump up players in their own programs.

During the professional era, it's been about having the most marketable team. And nothing seems to have changed for the '08 campaign, which is an attempt to distance itself from the 2004 team as much as possible. So many people saw the Athens Games as a referendum on the state of American basketball, that they ignored the fact that the wrong players were sent for the wrong reasons. (Carlos Boozer over bad-boy Rasheed Wallace pretty much sums it up.) And even though I don't necessarily disagree with the move, USA Basketball decision to totally overhaul its methods of preparing for the Olympics had the wrong motivations.

I'd be a little less cynical about their efforts if not for the selection of Diva K as the national team coach. If you're supposedly wanting to prepare for the international game, picking a tyrannical-type coach who spends most of his time in the college game -- a brand no more similar to FIBA than the NBA -- doesn't indicate much seriousness about completing the task at hand.

It's more of a PR move than anything else. If the pro coaches can't keep the players "in line", of course the answer is to introduce a famous "hard-nosed" coach used to lording his power over kids.

The rest of the moves I've heard of seem to be reactions to radio-show gripes from the 2004. Rebuffing Iverson is a show for the world that they don't want a star-driven team and bringing Bruce Bowen on is some kind of symbol of the "team concept". (As if Diva K is an anonymous figure; even more relevant, he's not above pulling rank on his bosses to get a raise, either, as he did during his dalliance with the Lakers.)

I don't mind Bowen being on the team -- because (after R. Artest) he's one of the best perimeter defenders in the NBA -- but it's an outgrowth of the notion that you need role players on a team such as this. You need that during the season when a team has only a handful of stars. When you don't have to contend with the draft or a salary cap, do you really need to have role players? How is it that the U.S. National women's team doesn't need "role players"?

Just preaching to the choir, I know.

Regards,

[name withheld]

0 comments:

Post a Comment