Team USA Basketball is 5-0 so far in the Rio Summer Olympics, but it hasn’t been without a few issues. While everyone still expects the team to win the gold once again, there appears to be a few chinks in the armor leaving them slightly susceptible to being upset. And now that Team USA has advanced to the knockout round, an upset would be very, very bad.
Charles Barkley, a member of the original Dream Team, and one to never hold back when asked for his thoughts, expressed some very valid reasons why Team USA is vulnerable.
In an interview with Brad Cesmat of Sports360AZ.com Chuck had this to say…
“Well, I hope they win gold. I want always us to win the gold medal. It’s not a good team to put together. I don’t think they did a good job because if you watch all those guys — they’re all good players, don’t get me wrong — they all need the ball.
“If you take away DeAndre Jordan, every guy on that team is a ball-dominant guy. You see them playing a lot of one-on-one basketball. That’s the thing I’ve noticed more than anything. Like, you have to understand when you put a team together like that, you have to have some role players. … But you take a guy like Kyle Lowry, who is a hell of a player, he wants to score. Kyrie wants to score. Kevin wants to score. DeRozan wants to score. So, I think they have been really stagnant offensively.
“When they put that team together in the future, they have to realize we can’t have just really, really great offensive players. They gotta to have players that if they don’t get a shot, they’re not just gonna stand around and mope.”
As you can see, Chuck has a point. This probably wasn’t the most well-thought out roster Team USA could have put together. They do have too many scorers and not enough balls. Then again, you could put together a whole different team of players from the NBA who passed on the Olympics that would probably beat this one. So it’s not as if whoever picked the team was left with as many options as they would have liked.
Perhaps next Olympics they can just put Sir Charles in charge. I’d love to see him running things and there’s no way anyone would be doing any “moping” with him around.
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