Aging Stars & Stripes Alert.
The U.S. men's basketball team ambles into view
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It was friendly fire. I mean, it wasn’t friendly, but you understand the term. The call was coming from inside the house. It was one of our guys saying it.
And really, what Joel Embiid said wasn’t all that out of line. A lot of it was factual. He noted that the 2024 U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team is — how to put it nicely?
Old as dirt.
So, yeah. Friendly fire.
“You look at the talent that the U.S. has, but there’s equal talent on other teams,” Embiid told the New York Times Magazine. “And the talent that’s on the U.S. team — you also got to understand most of those guys are older. The LeBron of now is not the LeBron of a couple of years ago. So it’s a big difference.”
Huh. So anyway —
“Everybody would also tell you, and you can see for yourself, the athletic LeBron, dominant that he was a couple of years ago, is not the same that he is now,” Embiid continued. (Sorry — I had thought he was finished speaking, but no.) “I think people get fooled by the names on paper. But those names have been built throughout their careers, and now they’re older. They’re not what they used to be.”
Postscript! Joel Embiid is himself on the 2024 U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team.
The other Team USA players didn’t rise to the bait on this topic, in part because Embiid is one of them and in part because, not to put too fine a point on it, this U.S. team really is old. Even when judged by the contemporary Olympic standard of larding a national roster with seasoned professionals (in this case, NBA stars), it’s a very veteran crew.
How so? Well, seven of the players are already in their fourth decade of life, ranging from Derrick White at 30 to LeBron at 39. Stephen Curry is 36, Jrue Holliday 34. And the team already sent home 33-year-old Kawhi Leonard after determining that his chronic knee swelling would impede his level of play.
Embiid himself is 30, and Anthony Davis is 31, but they’ve both got the bodies of 67-year-old men, which brings up the class average.
In past Games, none of this would have mattered. Since the pros took over the show in 1992, the U.S. men have gone 58-4 in Olympic hoops competition, winning seven of a possible eight gold medals. (The 2004 team was the lone exception, taking three losses en route to a bronze.)
But here in 2024, the world at large is looking pretty solid. Canada’s team alone has 10 current NBA players on it, including MVP runner-up Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jamal Murray. The Serbian team is led by all-everything Nikola Jokic and Bogdan Bogdanovic.
France has Victor Wembanyama and Rudy Gobert, and they could have been scarier had Embiid, who holds French citizenship, chosen to play for them rather than for Team USA. Germany is loaded, too, and Greece features Giannis Antetokounmpo. It’s just a treacherous field.
When NBA players took over the Olympic team more than 30 years ago, a lot of fans of the international game declared they no longer had interest in watching. That could change if our dominance is suddenly threatened.
To be sure, the U.S. is still a strong favorite. And as for Embiid’s reality check about the names on the roster and the current state of play that corresponds to each of them — that’s still a stacked deck.
“The thing about greatness is that you adjust and continue to find ways to be effective,” said Kevin Durant, speaking about LeBron James, not himself. “That’s what LeBron has done. He’s not running and jumping the same way he was when he was 25, 26 years old, but he’s still jumping pretty high and running pretty fast.”
Is pretty high and pretty fast good enough against a rapidly emerging international field? In its final couple of Olympic tuneups, the U.S. didn’t do much to reassure anyone.
"It's time. We're here," coach Steve Kerr said after a lackluster several days of pre-Paris practice and games. "It's got to be 40 minutes of force and attention and focus, and we can't let teams outplay us effort- and energy-wise like we did the other night against Germany, like we did against South Sudan."
South Sudan? Gadzooks. Anyway, the U.S. opens on Sunday against Jokic and Serbia. The smart money says these old pros will awaken once the stage lights come up. Either that, or we’re just blinded by the names, as Embiid says.