It doesn’t matter if Jayson Tatum plays for Team USA

Olympic basketball is meant to be enjoyable. However proper now, I’m probably not having enjoyable.

It’s enjoyable fan-casting a dream crew of gamers for Group USA, as is questioning if Anthony Edwards or Devin Booker ought to begin or what the perfect massive rotation is. It’s a practice to listen to that Kawhi Leonard is just too injured to play, write articles about cryptic posts on social media about who bought snubbed, in the event that they’re mad about it, or in the event that they hate their teammates now and if it’s truly Grant Hill’s fault.

It’s all in good enjoyable, however none of it’s about basketball. As a result of for USA Basketball, Olympic basketball isn’t about basketball. For the opposite 11 basketball groups on this event, it’s about basketball. However for this political social gathering we name USA Basketball, successful basketball video games has by some means grow to be a second precedence behind the exhausting and unoriginal larger fish all of us by some means ended up frying: silly, invented and downright uninteresting narratives about Jayson Tatum and Joel Embiid.

Not too long ago, on the 2024 Olympic Video games in Paris, Tatum performed zero minutes within the crew’s first recreation towards Serbia. Then, after head coach Steve Kerr obtained roughly seven trillion questions on it, Tatum began the next recreation towards South Sudan, logging 4 factors and 17 minutes. In the meantime, Joel Embiid had roughly the inverse recreation log, beginning the Serbia recreation however touchdown a DNP towards South Sudan. After the sport, Embiid was named a starter for the following recreation towards Puerto Rico.

Is that this significantly what the Olympics are going to be about? Am I truly going to must spend this complete lengthy march to a gold medal listening to about Tatum and Embiid’s worth prefer it’s mid-March in a traditional NBA season? If this was truly about successful, then placing collectively a steady eight-man rotation could be priorities primary, two and three for Kerr and Co., and so they had ample time to take action.

As a substitute, they’ve elected to flip-flop round like a pair of Birkenstocks to attempt to soothe the calls for of indignant followers who need this man or that man or these two or that lineup to get roughly or no taking part in time. It’s chaos, and morphing into some type of magnificence pageant to point out off the newest basketball tendencies within the USA one after the other. And this chicanery is inspired by the truth that they’re nonetheless going to win anyway as a result of they’re simply so significantly better.

Kerr claimed that the lineup modifications had been primarily based on “matchups,” a time period so imprecise it could actually cowl all method of sins. It’s potential USA Basketball had crunched the numbers and tape, however one wonders precisely how subtle the matchup information was for Tatum not taking part in towards Ognjen Dobric for Serbia however completely countering Nuni Omot for South Sudan.

Picture by Garrett W. Ellwood/NBAE through Getty Pictures

I’m not aware of all the small print, however often, basketball groups don’t toss NBA champions and league MVPs across the rotation like they’re a kind of Chinese language yo-yos getting hurled round a stage by your pal Eric on the Fifth-grade expertise present. Usually, the end-of-the-bench guys are simply completely happy to be there, and in the event that they log zero minutes however fourteen sideline-towel-spins and 9 air-guitar shreds, that’s a strong day’s work.

However these gamers often don’t find yourself beginning the following recreation, and are additionally often not named Jayson Tatum or Joel Embiid. These rotations simply look humorous, just because USA Basketball recruited a crew with approach too many good gamers and never sufficient minutes to play all of them. On a traditional basketball crew, that will be all effectively and good, however having the “DNP – CD” tag go on Jayson Tatum simply doesn’t sit proper with anybody.

However we have now to keep in mind that this crew isn’t about successful, since that’s going to occur anyway. It’s about sending the fitting message, and it’s turning the Olympics right into a LeBron James-captained redemption arc for the failures of USA Basketball on the latest FIBA World Cup, once they unceremoniously misplaced to Germany.

These Olympics are about what James has given to the game, what Durant has given to USA Basketball and why Stephen Curry doesn’t have a gold medal but. There’s lots else to select from, too: Kawhi Leonard dropped out. Jaylen Brown is tweeting the head-scratching emoji. Anthony Edwards could be Michael Jordan and Derrick White is a very nice man. Tatum is just like the ninth most fascinating story on this crew, so it’s no marvel he’s not precisely the highest precedence to play.

For the USA Basketball crew, striving in the direction of “victory” is irrelevant, not compelling and subsequently dangerous enterprise. Any final result apart from gold could be a nationwide embarrassment given the expertise mismatch, so reporters and media members focus extra on the rotations and on making up the explanation why a Tatum DNP issues in a recreation Group USA received by 26.

That is going to drive me insane. If we’re simply centered on successful, then let’s drop these narratives about who performed and who didn’t when any mixture of 5 gamers on the roster will robotically be higher than the opposition and simply consider beating them.

If it’s truly about these narratives, although, then I assume we’d higher proceed our evaluation of this non-issue and I’d higher proceed probably not having fun with Olympic basketball. However I’d slightly not do this.