ROLE CALL!
Team USA turns to specialists for World Cup
You already know that the stars will not be joining Team USA Basketball for the FIBA World Cup next month. The roster is bereft of top-tier talent, and as a result, we’ve poked a more than fair amount of fun at the leftovers. But as the roster streamlines into something like its playing weight, the shape of this Team USA looks a lot like the shape of a modern NBA contender.
Saturday morning, USA Basketball cut Thaddeus Young and Bam Adebayo from the senior roster (the one that will play in the Cup) and promoted Derrick White and Marvin Bagley III. Young is a steady veteran scorer, and Adebayo is a talented but limited young big.
Along with White and Bagley, the Nets’ Joe Harris and the Kings’ De’Aaron Fox have been promoted from the Select team — the senior team’s sparring partners — to contend for a roster spot at the Cup.
The additions from the select team add not only youth and depth, but the most important dimension on a modern NBA roster: specialization.
Harris has become an elite long-range shooter, adept at finding creases in the defense to flash open for a catch-andshoot. White, who plays for USA coach Gregg Popovich on the Spurs, is one of the best defensive guards in the league, and with Marcus Smart possibly slowed by injury, the roster needs a player like him. Fox provides the driving and finishing ability absent without the big names (though, if Fox continues to shoot like he did last season, it’s only a matter of time until his name rings out as well). And Bagley, while unfinished, is already a doeverything forward who shrinks the court with topshelf athleticism.
These aren’t scrub fill-ins, they’re blue-chip prospects and building blocks. While the best Team USA rosters have the advantage of jamming willing, overqualified stars into these roles, this squad has decided that without a bench full of stars who can plausibly do anything, it will get by with players who can most definitely do one thing.
Still, only five players can share the court, and as NBA fans know, a pocket full of loose change is no substitute for money that folds. For this roster to thrive, league veterans like Kemba Walker, Harrison Barnes and Myles Turner will need to turn up big, and young stars like Fox, Jayson Tatum and Donovan Mitchell will need to meet the moment. All three have played well in practice, and Fox appears to have locked up a roster spot.
Players like White and Harris being in the mix, however, recast the way those young stars and mid-tier vets appear. It was easy to see this team as an analog of the disappointing 2002 and 2004 teams, which were peppered with All-Stars and young talent, but whose role players consisted of vets like Antonio Davis, Michael Finley and Carlos Boozer. These were good players on good teams, but not hyper-specialized the way today’s role players tend to be. Having the luxury of going to a shooter like Harris or a defender like White (or Smart, if his health checks out) can swing a quarter, or a game.
Maybe it’s all just perception, and the peripheral roster moves won’t matter much in the final calculations. But as the Celtics found out this past season, having a roster full of similar players with similar expectations tends to go sideways. Infusing a team full of promising young stars with promising young role players seems as good a way as any to add a little hierarchy back into a team with a power vacuum at the top.