With only three holdovers from the 2004 Tournament of the Americas qualifiers and none from the 2002 World Championships team, this group had to learn how to share the ball and play team defense on the fly.īrown’s decision to enforce his own style on the team appears to have only made that challenge more difficult. The problem wasn’t just that a group of All-Stars had to learn to be a cohesive unit - it’s that they were given only a week or two to do so despite never having played together before. Leopold and Teitelbaum highlight several other themes among the respondents, including the lack of attention paid to the construction of the 2004 roster and a failure to prepare the team to face opponents who had grown up and come to understand each other on a level that usually takes NBA teams years. Truth be told, that’s probably why nine guys decided that they didn’t want to go do the Olympics. I remember in the qualifier for the Olympics, he told Jason Kidd, “Hey Jason, I know you’re really good at the fast break, but I want you to stop at the free-throw line and throw a bounce pass to one of the wings.” And you’re sitting here talking to the second all-time leading assist guy and one of the most dominant point guards of all time. He was trying to do something for the game of basketball and trying to put out a certain style of play and a certain style of message versus us just going out there and trying to win games and trying to accomplish things. It was when AND1 basketball was going on. Jefferson: I think Larry Brown tried to use the USA team as a tool. ![]() But the most salient is the team’s poor fit with head coach Larry Brown: Bill Leopold and Ben Teitelbaum have put together an oral history involving several of the era’s key members and observers for, and they list a number of factors that went into those poor performances. The Americans’ latest period of dominance has afforded the opportunity to look back on what went so wrong during that embarrassing stretch. Two straight poor performances at the 2002 World Championships in Indianapolis and the 2004 Olympics in Athens turned the dream into a nightmare, and a loss in Mike Krzyzewski first major tournament in 2006 didn’t exactly inspire confidence either. It’s remarkable to believe that Team USA looked in disarray a decade ago. USA Basketball’s senior men’s national team enters the Rio de Janeiro Olympics as beyond-overwhelming favorites to claim gold for the third straight games.
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