Team USA Looks Unstoppable, but It’s Not a Dream Team Yet

“This American team is better than the original Dream Team from 1992.” That’s what Serbia’s head coach, Svetislav Pesic, said before the Paris Olympics last month. After Sunday’s 110-84 loss to the USA, Coach Pesic would likely double down on that statement. Despite having the world’s best player on his side—Serbia finished even with USA when Nikola Jokic was on the floor but got outscored by 26 points in the nine minutes he sat—the contest still felt so lopsided.

Kevin Durant was a sonic boom in his return to the floor after missing the entire tune-up slate with a calf injury. He scored a game-high 23 points in 17 minutes and didn’t miss a shot until there were eight minutes and 10 seconds left in the fourth quarter. LeBron James finished with 21 points and a game-high nine assists on 9-for-13 shooting. Now a combined 74 years old, Team USA’s all-time leaders in points and assists still looked like giants; their combined shot chart is excellence everlasting:

As a whole, Team USA made 56 percent of its 3s and 68 percent of its 2s. Steph Curry’s screens induced chaos, Anthony Edwards’s athleticism ignited fast-break opportunities, Devin Booker’s outside stroke punctured a game plan that packed the paint, and Jrue Holiday, Bam Adebayo, Anthony Davis, and Derrick White put on a defensive clinic.

The biggest (only?) area of concern for Team USA heading into group play was its low 3-point rate and how a preference for 2s could lead the team to be vulnerable against an opponent that went out of its way to win the math game. In Sunday’s victory over Serbia, a whopping 46.3 percent of the Americans’ shots came from behind the arc. They hunted 3s in transition and drilled several open looks that were set up by some pretty drive-kick-swing ball movement. Shots won’t always fall like they did in the opening win, but it’s impossible to game-plan for such random, brilliant offense that positions all five players as a threat to score.

It’s during these moments when people who believe this iteration of Team USA is the greatest ever assembled can puff out their chests. But even as it blew out a squad anchored by a three-time MVP, the standard, unreasonable or not, hovers just below perfection for a group that sometimes still looks unsure of how it wants to play. Sunday’s win was a beatdown. It also didn’t come close to displaying, in totality, how great the USA can be. There were sloppy turnovers (17 in total), bouts of offensive stagnancy (which allowed Serbia to attempt five more 3s and seven more free throws than the U.S.), and nearly a dozen minutes featuring Joel Embiid that toggled between decent and disaster.

If Durant equals Easy Money, Embiid is Overdraft Fee. Booed every time he touched the ball, the 2023 NBA MVP and GOAT that could’ve been was benched three minutes into the game after Serbia pounced out to a quick 10-2 lead. In the second half, he was repeatedly cooked in the post by Jokic and failed to find any offensive rhythm. Embiid finished with four points and was the only player in a USA jersey who had a negative plus-minus. (The team was outscored by eight points in his eleven minutes on the court.)

Embiid was reportedly sick and missed practice on Saturday, but his struggles are not new. Meanwhile, Anthony Davis, one of this group’s most impressive performers over the past few weeks, has also missed practice time due to an illness. (AD finished a team-high plus-28 and flashed understandable chemistry with LeBron.) It’ll be interesting to see how much longer Steve Kerr gives the benefit of the doubt to this incredible talent who also has little FIBA experience and a rigid on-court identity working against him. It’s hard to envision a scenario where Embiid gets benched, but coming into pool play, nobody expected Jayson Tatum to log a DNP-CD, either.

“It’s really hard in a 40-minute game to play more than 10 guys,” Kerr said after beating Serbia. “With Kevin coming back, I just went to the combinations that I felt made the most sense. It seems crazy. I thought I was crazy when I looked at everything and determined these are the lineups I wanted to get to. Jayson is first-team All-NBA three years in a row. He’s one of the best players in the world. I went with the combinations I felt would make sense, and I talked to him, and he was incredibly professional.”

Even with a few lackluster performances coming into the weekend, this was a shocking, strange twist for a premier all-around player who scored 19 points in Team USA’s gold-medal game against France three years ago, enhances every lineup he’s a part of, and just won his first NBA title. There’s no universe in which Team USA is better with Tatum out of its rotation, and it was unsurprising to hear Kerr say Tatum would play in the next game.

There’s also no universe in which Durant continues to come off the bench. He’s an established demon in Olympic competition and has enough shotmaking prowess to lead the entire tournament in total points. What he did on Sunday, making his first eight shots, was no fluke. How Kerr tweaks his rotation out of these two realities will be interesting. There could very well be a game in pool play where Durant takes Booker’s spot in the starting five, opening the door for Tatum to spell KD off the bench. There’s also a chance Davis (or Adebayo) will start at the 5 and Embiid will take the game off. Of course, it’s less about who starts than how much run the most sensible units get together, what the opponent looks like, and which five players are on the court to close a tight game (if Team USA ever finds itself in another one of those).

Kerr has so many different five-man combinations he can tinker with, particularly after moving away from the hockey lines that were deployed during each exhibition game. I personally don’t understand how Tatum—one of the most adaptable, skilled, unselfish, and winning two-way players alive—was deemed the odd man out against Serbia, but his demotion speaks to both this roster’s absurd depth and the paradox of choice Team USA’s selection committee imposed upon its coaching staff.

Assuming Curry, James, Durant, and Davis/Adebayo are crunch-time locks, Holiday, Edwards, Booker, Tatum, and White are all practical fits for that last spot. It’s a fantastic problem (if a problem at all) for Kerr to have. Few coaches have ever enjoyed a wider margin for error. It’s also more than enough reason to believe Pesic, a smart coach who knows what he’s talking about.