Is the U.S. men's basketball team following the same path as the 2004 team that rallied for a bronze medal in the Athens Olympics?
Team USA's 83-76 loss to France in Sunday's opening game in Tokyo was its first loss in Olympic competition since 2004, when a defeat to eventual gold medalist Argentina in the semifinals doomed the U.S. to the bronze-medal game. Then as now, Team USA suffered early losses in pre-Olympics exhibition play and fell in its opening game of pool play.
USA Basketball responded to the disappointment of 2004 by putting together a stronger program with Mike Krzyzewski leading the U.S. to gold medals with undefeated runs in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 Olympics. Is that streak of golds destined to end as Team USA's Olympic winning streak did? Let's break down the comparison.
World Championship prelude
Although 2004 was the first time a U.S. team with NBA players lost in the Olympics, the pros previously lost on home soil in the 2002 FIBA World Championships in Indianapolis, going 6-3 and finishing in sixth place after a loss in the quarterfinals to Yugoslavia.
By 2019, the world's other major global basketball competition had been renamed the FIBA World Cup, but the results for the U.S. in China were similar: a loss in the quarterfinals to France and a seventh-place finish.
Star players unavailable
Initially, USA Basketball bounced back well from the disappointment of 2002. Needing to qualify for the Olympics through the next summer's FIBA Tournament of the Americas -- now known as the AmeriCup -- the U.S. put together a roster featuring five members of the 2002-03 All-NBA teams plus future Hall of Famer Ray Allen and likely Hall of Famer Vince Carter. That group crushed Argentina 106-73 in the final to win the tournament. The U.S. seemed to have regained its place atop the basketball world.
By the Athens Olympics the next summer, the U.S. roster was much younger. Just three players from the 2003 Tournament of the Americas roster returned as stars Allen, Carter, Kidd and Tracy McGrady all dropped out along with many other NBA veterans. In their place, the U.S. sent a team with budding stars, including future Olympic building blocks Carmelo Anthony, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade. But the inexperienced group featured six players age 22 or younger.
As is the case this summer, the 2004 U.S. team was hardly devoid of prime talent. Tim Duncan and Allen Iverson, who had collectively won three of the previous four NBA MVP awards, headlined the roster. But they were the lone two Olympians who had been All-Stars during 2003-04. Collectively, the 2004 group's production the previous season in terms of my wins above replacement player (WARP) metric paled to the U.S. rosters before and after -- until now.
Remarkably, this year's U.S. roster features just two players who produced at least 10 WARP during the 2020-21 regular season: Damian Lillard (14.8) and Jayson Tatum (10.1). Bradley Beal (11.0) would have been a third had he not been forced to withdraw due to health and safety protocols, while Kevin Durant missed the mark only because of injuries that limited him to 35 games. Still, even the 2004 roster had four such players: Duncan, Stephon Marbury, Shawn Marion and Lamar Odom. Meanwhile, this year's late replacements for Team USA, Keldon Johnson and JaVale McGee, produced fewer WARP than anyone on the 2004 roster.
A lack of continuity is another point of comparison between the 2004 and 2021 rosters. Both teams featured eight players seeing their first action for the U.S. in a senior international competition. By contrast, all 12 players on the 2008 "Redeem Team" had previously represented USA Basketball at the senior level, as had 10 of the 12 in 2012.
Exhibition wake-up call
Team USA's loss on Sunday was preceded by a pair of losses in exhibitions played in Las Vegas, first a 90-87 defeat on July 10 to Nigeria and then a 91-83 loss to Australia two days later. As in 2004, when Team USA suffered its first loss with a roster of NBA players in an exhibition against eventual silver medalist Italy in Cologne, Germany, it was easy to excuse these performances as tuneups where the result was less important than preparing for the Olympics.
In both cases, the exhibition results proved telling once the Olympics started. The same was true in 2019, when the U.S. lost at Australia in the lead-up to the World Cup. Although the games themselves may not count, there's certainly some predictive power to exhibitions.
Will the story end the same?
As maligned as the 2004 Olympic team is relative to its peers, the group produced some good results. The U.S. handed Spain its only loss in Athens, knocking off the top seed from Group A in the quarterfinals. And after losing to Argentina in the semis, Team USA bounced back to win a rematch with Lithuania -- which had beaten the Americans in group play -- for the bronze.
However, USA Basketball's teams with NBA players are judged on a pass-fail scale with the gold medal the only satisfactory result. Given that bar, the unpredictable nature of single-elimination knockout play in the Olympics might actually work in Team USA's favor this time around. We saw in an 83-76 win over Spain to conclude exhibition play in Las Vegas that this roster can beat any competitor when things go correctly.
The U.S. can count on better performances from Devin Booker and Khris Middleton, who shot a combined 1-for-8 from the field Sunday in 24 minutes of action a day after arriving in Tokyo from the NBA Finals, which concluded on Tuesday. (Jrue Holiday, the third player on the U.S. roster who played in the Finals, performed much better, with 18 points on 5-of-13 shooting in 28 minutes.)
Larger roles for Booker and Middleton could help Gregg Popovich remove Johnson from the rotation after the U.S. was outscored by 11 points in his nine-plus minutes of action Sunday. Foul trouble also limited Durant to 21 minutes, less than he'll likely play going forward.
At the same time, winning gold in Tokyo might not be the best thing for USA Basketball going forward. After years of progressively less-talented rosters in the World Cup and Olympics, it appears to be time for the U.S. to reset the program as it did under Krzyzewski and managing director Jerry Colangelo -- who's planning to step down after this year's Olympics -- between 2004 and 2008. The U.S. would be wise to follow the same path.