When Jerry Colangelo took control of the American basketball federation in 2005, he had put in place a very simple system: players had to commit to playing for Team USA for several years if they wanted to participate in the Olympics.
The American selection could thus work on the long term with a hard core and no longer compose a training at the last minute, deprived of experience and collective. It is with this method and the repeated presence of LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony or Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul and Kobe Bryant that the Americans have found the heights.
But with the Covid-19 pandemic, this rule had not been applied in 2021 for the Tokyo Olympics. And it will no longer be in the future announces Grant Hill, the successor to Jerry Colangelo.
“Commitment will no longer be necessary”, he said for ESPN. “There is no longer this condition of ‘if you want to play the Olympics, you have to play the World Cup’. I understand why this was put in place and it worked wonderfully. But we think we have to change. So more tries, more commitments. »
Therefore, there will not necessarily be continuity between the team that will go to Manila this summer for the World Cup and the one that will defend its gold medals in Paris next year. But if, as Grant Hill confirms, this system has worked very well in recent years, why do without it now?
“You have to live with the times. If we look at the NBA, it is evolving enormously. It has changed since I retired in 2013. Every generation is different and it’s important for us at USA Basketball to recognize that and deal with it. »
We understand that the former player of the Pistons and the Suns, without saying so openly, evokes the “load management” of the stars of the league. Therefore, asking the best players to commit to playing in the summer for several seasons means taking the risk of seeing some refuse on principle, because they will first want to recover physically from the long NBA season.
Without strict regulations for the world competition next August, Steve Kerr will undoubtedly have more options in a few months, when composing his list of players for the 2024 Olympic Games. world (in 2010 and 2014), which surely has more desire to seek the Olympic gold which is missing from its list.
