Knowing this, Puerto Rico packed in a zone defense designed to take away the player they most respected, Duncan.
"We knew they didn't have any good shooters," Puerto Rico forward Daniel Santiago said. "Rolando Hourruitiner fronted Tim. . . . I or Jose Ortiz got in back of him, and we just packed it in . . . I mean, really packed it in and dared them to shoot. Sometimes I was out on Richard Jefferson, and I was letting him shoot it . . . They've got penetrators and slashers, so you lay off and let them take those shots."
Carlos Arroyo shows the world who is first to topple U.S. men's Olympic basketball squad since 1988. "They have . . . freestyle players," he said.
(Michael Conroy -- AP)
|
|
That's the scouting report, ladies and gentlemen. The team from the country where basketball was invented can't shoot a lick. . . . Well, not the guys on this team anyway. "They're great going to the basket, they're great rebounding, and they're really strong," Arroyo said. Asked again about the shooting issues, he just smiled.
Allen Iverson and Stephon Marbury are scorers, but they couldn't win a game of H-O-R-S-E against half the 12-year-olds in the state of Indiana. Lamar Odom, Richard Jefferson, Carmelo Anthony, LeBron James, Shawn Marion, Dwyane Wade, Amare Stoudemire . . . they're all basically the same player. Slash, jump, throw it down. Looks nice on "SportsCenter." It's worthless in international play, now that kids in Europe, South America and Asia are big and quick enough to settle into a zone and play better defense than they could back in the early 1990s.
Three for 24 isn't indicative of a bad night; it's reflective of a bunch of guys who can't shoot from the perimeter. And keep in mind, while the NBA three-point arc is at 23 feet 9 inches, the international three-point is at 20 feet 6 inches. That's more than three feet closer, and U.S. players still can't shoot it. Is Shaq going to help with that? Jermaine O'Neal going to bury some threes? Ben Wallace? Karl Malone? The only guys who said "thanks but no thanks" who would have mattered in this competition are Ray Allen and Mike Bibby.
And even then it might not make this U.S. team a great team.
Fact is, Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Charles Barkley, David Robinson, Clyde Drexler, Patrick Ewing, John Stockton, Karl Malone and Chris Mullin are not walking through that door again, to borrow a thought from Rick Pitino.
That team won by an average margin of 43.8 points. The 1996 team, which had Malone, Pippen, Stockton, Robinson and Barkley, won by an average of 31.7 points per game. The 2000 team won by an average of 21.6 points. This year's team? The average is down to 7.8 points for the qualifying games. Not only do teams no longer fear the U.S. players, they all want a piece of them. Twelve years ago the international players posed for pictures with the Dream Team before and after games. Sunday night, Arroyo and several members of Team Puerto Rico apologized for celebrating a little too enthusiastically. "I know it looked kind of cocky," he said about emphatically pointing to his jersey toward the end of the game, "and I'm sorry about that."
Arroyo, bless his heart, did nothing for which he needed to apologize, unless he wants to whisper a little something to Stoudemire after making him look like a chump with a move to the basket early in the game. Arroyo is part of this new world order -- a kid who grew up in Puerto Rico idolizing NBA stars, he is as good if not better than today's NBA guards.
"The game," Brown said with a sigh, "has gotten so much better around the world."
Well, everywhere except perhaps the United States, where it isn't better than it was 12 years ago, where folks are scratching their heads wondering what went wrong, like the U.S. players having failed to pay attention to an entire world gaining ground for a dozen years.
