Team USA showed their weaknesses vs. Turkey at FIBA World Cup
Team USA showed their weaknesses vs. Turkey at FIBA World Cup
It’s not enough to put together on the court 12 NBA players under Gregg Popovich’s lead to have a strong team. One of the American problems is the selfish one-on-one that isn’t work in FIBA competitions where many squads have a very tactical use and circulation of the ball. European teams especially don’t force one-on-one situations every possession. Instead, they try to build the offense in a very different way, moving the ball till there will be a concrete mismatch, who can be properly exploited in order to have better accuracy of the shots taken.
The chaos and the selfishness of playing starting to cost the Americans. Eventually, they won the battle against Turkey, but thanks to the 4 free-throws missed in a row in the last seconds of the game. The Turks seemed to be “afraid” of winning, they have it there, in their hands and let it go.
No 100% conclusion can be drawn after this game and I am sure that team USA can improve their collective game for the next stages of the FIBA WORLD CUP. They are not the invincible squad that Dream Team was. As well they can be prematurely eliminated or win the tournament in the end. But their game is far from being constant and that’s the main problem they have to fix as soon as possible.
Remember, Turkey is a good team but they are not Serbia. Yesterday, only six of their players had a notable contribution to the game. After overtime, the other 6 players of Turkey scored together 2 points. Actually the squad rely almost only on the 3 NBA youngsters (Osman, Korkmaz, Ilyasova), Scottie Wilbekin and Melih Mahmutoglu. Then is a big gap because the bench is poor, only role-players some of them with small contributions. If the Americans would have played so poor yesterday against Serbia, instead of Turkey, they would have been smashed by 15.
Photo credit: http://www.fiba.basketball/basketballworldcup/2019
Gratian Cormos
