Before writing the first edition of my new column here at the Web Devil, I tried to conjure up a few guidelines. Besides developing a fun yet deeply opinionated style and earning a strong readership through my very personal approach, one of my main goals is to write from unique angles and focus on stories the mainstream media isn't chewing up and spitting out like something at an Olsen-twin dinner party. So naturally, I decided to write my first piece on the hardly covered, often neglected U.S. Men's Olympic Basketball team. (By the way, if you haven't read my work before, I'm very, very dumb.)
Sure, everyone's been covering this story for weeks, but how often do you get to write about our men's basketball team legitimately losing at the Olympics? I hope not too often, but right now it sure isn't looking good.
So, without further ado, I'd like to put my stamp on the issue as well.
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In 2002, Larry Brown was named the head coach of the 2004 U.S. Olympic Team. At the time, he told reporters, "I look at this as an unbelievable honor, one that I don't take lightly. I understand how many great coaches there are out there who are deserving of this opportunity and feel so honored to be chosen." How could Brown not feel honored? He'd just secured a spot coaching the best team in the world during the summer of 2004. He just didn't know that the team would end up being the Detroit Pistons.
Pushing the much discussed Olympic fiasco aside for a moment, let's make one thing clear: What Brown accomplished this season with Detroit, including winning an NBA title and not hesitating to napalm the entire Lakers franchise in the process, instantly became his crowning achievement.
Unfairly or not, Brown's most successful seasons at both the college and professional levels are often credited to heroic efforts by his players. He was the head coach at Kansas in 1988, a season that will forever be known as "The year Danny Manning put Kansas on his back and carried them to the national title." And he was the head coach of the Philadelphia 76ers in 2001, when they made an unlikely run to the NBA Finals thanks to 1) Allen Iverson's MVP season, and 2) the duct tape that held him together as he struggled with countless injuries. As a result of Manning's and Iverson's accomplishments, it's common to hear complete summaries of those seasons without a single Larry Brown reference.
That's what made the 2004 season so important to Brown's legacy. "Basketball people" have long considered him the best active coach at any level (with an argument to be made for Mike Krzyzewski, of course). But without a mainstream breakthrough, the everyman wasn't about to put Brown on a coaching pedestal. Apparently it wasn't enough that he twice took the Clippers (the Clippers!) to the playoffs. Brown needed a moment all to himself to coach a team that rose to the top as a dynamite, cohesive unit, and for once to be noticed as the straw that stirred the drink, the glue that held the team together and the focal point of many other horrible cliches. Finally, in the 2004 playoffs, he did it with the Pistons. His resume was complete, his legacy was established and his life was great. Time to break out the champagne and keep all James Cameron acceptance speeches to himself.
But before he could catch his breath from the postgame celebration, just two months later, his Olympic basketball team fell flat on its ass.
Before the Olympic team ever stood on the podium to accept its bronze medal -- something it did with all the joy of Bill Gates winning an online auction -- everyone already had an opinion as to why the Americans had just suffered a fortnight-long, worldwide Buster Douglas-ing in the Olympic basketball tournament. Some said cockiness; others said even the Olympic flame couldn't light a fire under a bunch of millionaire, NBA asses. But most agreed it was a combination of the international game progressing into a beautiful, unselfish style of play, and the American game degenerating to the on-court equivalent of a bar fight: two guys going at it to "represent their peeps" and "prove they're the top dog" while everyone else stands around and watches.
All of these reasons seem to revolve around the players. I say, why not hold Brown at least somewhat responsible? What makes him so immune to criticism?
Maybe it's because the excuses were lined up ahead of time, prepackaged and at Brown's disposal: the best players declined their invitations, the roster makeup had infinite flaws, and the team only had 10 days to develop chemistry and prepare for international rules.
Excuses aside, what about everything this team had going for it, such as being the most athletic in the tournament? Or having what should have been 12 of the best 13-16 players at the games (Yao Ming would start for us, and Manu Ginobili, Carlos Arroyo and Pau Gasol are better international players than a few of our guys on most nights)? Or heading into a less-than-strenuous tournament schedule, being well rested and having young, resilient legs accustomed to playing back-to-back nights countless times over the course of an 82-game season? Do we just throw those things out the window because our best professional players declined invitation? Didn't we win 50 years worth of gold medals without ANY pro-players on the roster? Why are these excuses suddenly so relevant?
I'm not about to say Brown's completely or even mostly at fault for the Olympic team's shortcomings. There are a number of issues that put the United States in a position to fail, and I'd never want to shortchange the efforts made by Argentina and Italy, who both finished ahead of us. But I'm also not about to let Brown slide back into his newfound throne atop the NBA without questioning a few of his moves. Or non-moves.
Brown's successfully nomadic coaching career (he's taken seven NBA franchises to the playoffs and at UCLA and Kansas put together a .744 winning percentage) has him pegged as a master of the adjustment. So why was he still implementing the strategies that made the Pistons successful on a team that couldn't have been any more different? I mean, take the two main ingredients of Detroit's championship squad and you tell me if they apply to the 2004 Olympic team (tossing out the unrealistic expectation of team chemistry, of course):
1. A hard-nosed defense, ready to bang bodies. While the Pistons had a tough-minded, physical defender at every position, the Olympic squad was filled with roamers -- off-the-ball defenders more interested in stealing passes than actually stopping anyone. See the way LeBron James stands like he's trying out for a spot at the right end of the evolutionary chart? Standing straight up like that is a definitive characteristic of a roamer. You put players like that in a zone defense, especially if you have five of them on the floor at once.
Why ask a bunch of guys accustomed to carrying their team on offense and catching their breath on defense to play man-to-man? Nothing good can come of it. It's like pumping Britney Spears full of liquor and dropping her off at the altar. You're just asking for trouble.
No one on this team was looking to chase shooters off screens and defend the three-point line -- which is where Team USA got torched. In most cases, man-to-man is the better option if you're trying to defend the trey, but not when your guys aren't used to playing against highly efficient, screen-setting international machines. Brown's assistants were pleading him to switch to a zone, mostly to keep Tim Duncan out of foul trouble, but he continued to stick with the man. And once again, without a true center to back up Duncan, he was sitting on the bench in foul trouble at the end of the semifinal game that knocked the United States out of gold-medal contention.
I just don't get it. The team needed a quick fix on defense. The obvious choice was to switch to a long-armed, less-exhausting zone defense, not take eight guys aside and try to re-teach them the intricacies of man-to-man in one week.
2. An array of outside shooters. The Pistons had so many quality mid-range/outside shooters, they somehow stretched the court enough to make Ben Wallace look un-lost on offense. Meanwhile, Team USA had Richard Jefferson and Stephon Marbury combining to hit nine of their first 49 shots. And yet, both players started every Olympic game. How is an adjustment not made there? Too afraid to break three weeks of tradition? At least one of those guys needed to be benched at the start of the game.
Starting Jefferson I can understand, because he's one of the only quality on-the-ball defenders on the roster. But why start a streaky shooter like Stephon Marbury and let LeBron James, another streaky shooter who can actually contribute in about 320 more ways than Marbury, rot on your bench? Before he caught fire against Spain, you can bet people for both "W" and Kerry were preparing answers for the inevitable debate question, "As president, what would you do to keep Stephon Marbury off the next Olympic team?"
Is there any argument against starting James, one of the best all-around players in the entire NBA, at shooting guard -- or maybe even the point? Do we really need two sub-6-foot-2 players in a starting lineup that already doesn't have a true power forward and has Tim Duncan playing out of position at center? Isn't Marbury better suited to come off the bench for some instant offense, anyway? Why am I pushing so hard on these keys as I type?
Before I obliterate any veins in my forehead (or the Web Devil record for words in an inaugural column), I'd better wrap things up. While I could probably go on for hours about my frustrations, there's just one more, rather serious point I'd like to make about the Olympic basketball team's disappointing performance in Athens:
It's entirely acceptable to blame the United States' coaches for their bonehead moves or blame the players for not performing well, as I did in this column. Hell, for some reason it's even acceptable to not watch a game and still say, "They suck," when you hear a final score. But it's absurd to make assumptions about their character, their heart, their will to win and especially their patriotism. An array of more talented NBA superstars declined invitations to play in Athens. They chose to watch from the comfort of their own homes rather than go overseas and risk a terrorist attack or (gasp!) an on-court embarrassment. If you feel like questioning someone's integrity, don't ignorantly allow yourself to attack the guys who jumped at the chance to represent our country. Blame the guys who didn't show up.
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Ryan Perry is a freelance web journalist based in Tempe. His No Blood, No Foul column is exclusive to the Web Devil, and he can be reached at ryanperry@gmail.com.
