PARIS — The world’s most dominant basketball nation has finally found a discipline of the sport where it can’t trample everyone in its path.
The rest of the world is taking out decades of frustration on the mighty U.S. in 3x3 basketball.
It started Tuesday night when Germany defeated the U.S. women and world No. 1 Serbia ran the U.S. men off the floor. A day later, noted global basketball power Azerbaijan edged the U.S. women and big, bruising Poland overpowered the U.S. men.
As a result, the U.S. men and women are a combined 0-4 in 3x3 entering Thursday night’s third game of group play at the Paris Olympics. That’s a jarring contrast to 5-on-5 basketball, where the U.S. men have suffered only one Olympic loss since settling for bronze in Athens 2004 and the U.S. women have seldom been challenged during an unbeaten streak at the Olympics that dates back to Barcelona 1992.
For the U.S. women’s 3x3 program, the poor start in Paris is an outlier. The U.S. is the reigning Olympic women’s 3x3 world champion and won the 2023 women’s 3x3 World Cup.
For the U.S. men’s 3x3 program, this is more representative of previous woes. The U.S. failed to qualify for Tokyo in men’s 3x3 and hasn’t won a men’s 3x3 World Cup since 2019.
So what gives? Why is the U.S. struggling at 3x3 when in traditional 5-on-5 it bosses around the rest of the world at every possible age group? There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer for the U.S. men and women. The explanation is a little different for both.
Injuries, inexperience and a lack of chemistry are all partly to blame for the vulnerability of the U.S. women so far in Paris.
Only 3x3 veterans Cierra Burdick and Hailey Van Lith are holdovers from the team that won the 2023 World Cup. USA Basketball selected two-time WNBA all-star Rhyne Howard over Linnae Harper and called up three-time WNBA all-star Dearica Hamby as a last-minute replacement after losing Cameron Brink to an ill-timed ACL tear in mid-June.
Howard played five games with Burdick and Van Lith at a tournament in April. Hamby had little to no 3x3 experience prior to Paris and has received a crash course from her teammates on the strategic differences from traditional 5-on-5 basketball.
“We’re the most inexperienced team here,” Burdick said. “We’ve got a lot of skill, a lot of talent, but that doesn’t win 3x3 games.”
Other 3x3 teams don’t have the WNBA talent that the U.S. boasts, but Van Lith, Burdick, Howard and Hembry have only practiced together for two weeks — and it shows. The U.S. has been stagnant at times on offense and has repeatedly botched pick-and-roll defense, sending two players to the ball or to the screener and leaving someone wide open.
Still, the Americans appear confident their chemistry and cohesiveness will improve.
“If we went back to the hotel room and didn’t see each other, I wouldn’t expect us to get better,” Van Lith said. “But we eat every meal together. We spend every off minute in a room playing card games or talking or going to the Olympic Village together. So we’re getting closer every day.”
The U.S. men can’t blame inexperience or a lack of cohesion for their 0-2 start. Jimmer Fredette, Canyon Barry, Kareem Maddox and Dylan Travis have crisscrossed the globe playing tournaments together for two years.
The obvious question for USA Basketball is whether this is the most talented quartet of players they could find. Why send a venture capitalist, an engineer, a former podcast producer and a special education teacher to try to win a gold medal when USA Basketball could simply select LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Steph Curry and be done with it?
The reality is that 3x3 players must accumulate points on the world tour in order to be eligible to play for their countries in the Olympics, a possibility for WNBA stars because of their shorter seasons but unrealistic for NBA players. As a result, USA Basketball has tried to scramble to find men’s players passed on by NBA and top-tier overseas clubs yet talented enough to challenge for a medal.
The talent gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world may not be as large as it is when Steve Kerr brings Durant off the bench against South Sudan, but the men's 3x3 team seldom takes the court at a disadvantage. No one else has a former lottery pick like Fredette who on the Houston Rockets in an exhibition game not that long ago. Even Barry is a former SEC sixth man of the year at Florida who later spent five years playing professionally in the G-League and overseas.
The bigger issue for the Americans so far is how poorly they’ve shot in Paris. Barry and Fredette went a combined 0-for-8 from behind the arc against Poland, difficult to recover from in a 10-minute game.
In the final minutes of the Poland game, Fredette required assistance from a trainer. The trainer appeared to be looking at Fredette’s left thigh or groin. USA Basketball did not have an update on his status, but Maddox said Wednesday night he’s “not too concerned.”
“I guarantee you he’ll be playing tomorrow,” Maddox added.
When asked why the U.S. struggles in 3x3 more than other disciplines of basketball, both Barry and Maddox pointed to how brief the games are and how that format leads to upsets. There’s more variance in a 10-minute, first-to-21 sprint than there is over the course of a 48-minute traditional basketball game.
“Tonight is a perfect example,” Barry said. “We didn’t make any shots tonight. If this is a 5-on-5 game, that’s the first quarter. We have three more quarters to make shots.”
Added Maddox, “I would look to the history books and see how many times the 5-on-5 team was down after the first quarter. That’s a full game for us. It’s a game where if someone gets hot fast, it’s hard to dig yourself out of the hole.”
The only solace for the U.S. is this is not a two-game tournament. There are still five games left for the U.S. in pool play before the bracket portion of the competition. The top two teams in the eight-team pool qualify to the semifinals and the next four teams advance to the play-in games.
Maddox described the opening two losses as “adjustment games” for him and his teammates.
“If I had to guess, 5-2 will get us through to the medal rounds,” he said. “4-3 might. But we don’t want to worry about that. We want to figure out how to get to 5-2 and get to the next round.”
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