All is fine when Team USA brings its best

Tyrese Haliburton and Austin Reaves.The USA basketball team finished fourth at this year’s FIBA World Cup. Is this a sign that the world is catching up, as Team USA coach Steve Kerr suggested? Is America’s long reign atop the hoops world coming to a close? Should all of us who follow these sorts of things sign up for stress management classes?

Nah.

We could try to get strategic and puzzle out roster fit and lineup optimization and hey! let’s fire the coach, or we could employ Occam’s Razor: The simplest explanation is often the correct one.

In this case, the simplest explanation is that the US didn’t send its best players. That’s not to say they sent a bad roster, just that it was…