USA Basketball puts together what it calls a select team to train and compete against its national team ahead of big events like the World Cup and Olympics, and hopes these games will be a real test.
Mission accomplished.
To be clear, Friday’s “games” lasted 10 minutes, the national team tried a number of combinations and US coach Steve Kerr didn’t exactly handle a three-point deficit in the last minute the way he would a medal would be at stake. He didn’t call for time out to prepare plays and didn’t even get up from his seat until the final buzzer sounded.
However, on Friday, the second day of camp in Las Vegas, the selected team defeated the USA World Cup team in two of those duels. Kerr seemed completely unfazed afterwards, noting he’d seen similar results ahead of the 2019 World Cup and Tokyo Olympics two summers ago.
“It’s a time-honored tradition in US basketball,” Kerr said.
That’s absolutely true, as it’s known to date back to when NBA players first represented the country. It was the 1992 Dream Team, the group of what were essentially the best players in the world at the time – Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, Larry Bird, Karl Malone, John Stockton, David Robinson and more – battling a team of collegiate Students played in closed scrums. The Dream Team lost 62-54.
“We had a little bit of success against this team,” Grant Hill said earlier in the year, “and over the next few days we also had a lot of failures.”
Hill – now CEO of USA Basketball – was then a college player on the 1992 national team and vividly recalls what happened in the duels that followed. The Dream Team played like the Dream Team and the defeat was in progress. That’s unlikely to happen in this camp as the talent gap between the national team and squad is nowhere near what it was 31 summers ago.
Detroit’s Cade Cunningham was a special star for the selected team on Friday.
“You want great talent to come to you and challenge you in every way possible,” Kerr said. “That’s what the selected team did today.”
Camp continues on Saturday and Sunday, with the USA playing their first pre-World Cup preseason game against Puerto Rico on Monday in Las Vegas.
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