4 Teams That Could Beat The USA's Basketball Team

The United States remains the undisputed champion of international basketball, but it might not be as easy in Tokyo in 2020.

The 2016 Rio Olympics taught us that even when USA Basketball sends its B-team, the rest of the world still isn't particularly close. Without LeBron James, Steph Curry, Russell Westbrook, Kawhi Leonard, Anthony Davis and many others, the U.S. still won the gold medal game by 30 points over Serbia. There were tight games and uninspiring stretches along the way, but the final result was never in real doubt because of Team USA's overwhelming talent advantage.

That could change by the time the U.S. is going for its fourth straight gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The United States will still have the greatest and deepest pool of players to choose from, but there is some serious young talent emerging around the world. The 2016 NBA Draft was the best example of this, as 10 of the first 16 players selected were born outside of the U.S.

There appear to be four countries in particular that could have some legit star power by the time the 2020 games arrive. With apologies to Spain, Serbia, Lithuania, Greece and Germany, here are the biggest threats to U.S. basketball supremacy.

4. France

 


Who's probably back: Rudy Gobert, Nicolas Batum, Nando de Colo, Thomas Heurtel, Joffrey Lauvergne

Who's probably out: Tony Parker, Boris Diaw

The next French team will have a distinctly different feel after the departure of Tony Parker, who announced his retirement from international competition last week. Parker has been the face of French basketball for the last decade, but it's possible the next generation could have even more success.

France should bring back a strong veteran core, led by Gobert's towering defensive presence. Nando de Colo (who would be 33) and Thomas Heurtel (who would be 31) could still provide offensive firepower in the backcourt, while Nicolas Batum provides two-way stability on the wing should he return at age 31 in the 2020 games.

France also has some exciting young players. Five French players were selected in the 2016 draft covering all five positions. Another wave of French-born talent is coming in the 2017 NBA Draft, with point guard Frank Ntilikina gaining hype as a potential top-10 selection and 7'2 center Jonathan Jeanne also currently projected as a first rounder.

The biggest addition of all should be Evan Fournier, who was strangely left off France's 2016 team in Rio because he skipped a preliminary tournament.

3. Croatia


Who's probably back: Bojan Bogdanović, Dario Saric, Mario Hezonja, Darko Planinić

Who's probably gone: Roko Ukić and/or Krunoslav Simon, who will each be 35 years old.

Let's recognize that Bojan Bogdanović is a star in international play. His 25.3 points per game were four more than any other player at the Rio Olympics. He'll be 31 in 2020 and should still have one more good run left in him. And by that time, Dario Saric and Mario Hezonja should be coming into their own in the NBA.

Saric and Hezonja might be the next great international duo. Saric played well as a 22-year-old in this tournament and has rare talents as a playmaking four. Hezonja has outstanding potential as a shooter and scorer and at 21 years old is only starting to scratch the surface. They will be ready to roll in Tokyo.

Dragan Bender is on his way, too. It's incredible to think Bender will still only be 22 years old for the 2020 games, but the fourth pick in the 2016 NBA Draft was outstanding for Croatia in junior competitions and should have already carved out an NBA role by then. Croatia also has Ivica Zubac and Ante Zizic, a pair of 19-year-old centers who were selected in the 2016 NBA Draft.

2. Australia


Who's probably back: Patty Mills, Matthew Dellavedova, Aron Baynes, Joe Ingles

Who's probably gone: Andrew Bogut, David Andersen

The Aussies watched their first Olympic medal slip through their hands in heartbreaking fashion in Rio, but a bright future should help alleviate the sting of the final minute against Spain. The Australians already have a quality system put in place by a good coach in Andrej Lemanis. They should have Patty Mills (Rio's second-leading scorer) and Matthew Dellavedova entrenched in the backcourt. They have a veteran shooter on the wing in Joe Ingles and a steady defensive anchor in the front court in Aron Baynes. Even without Andrew Bogut, that's the solid base.

The reason Australia's basketball future is so exciting is because of who is joining them. It starts with Ben Simmons, the No. 1 pick in the 2016 NBA Draft and possibly Australia's first NBA superstar. Point guard Dante Exum, the fifth pick in 2014, could be a very good NBA player in his own right by then. There's also the great unknown that is Thon Maker.

There also seems to be quality Australian players entering the college ranks every year. Deng Adel is expected to be a breakout player for Louisville as a sophomore, while Isaac Humphries should crack Kentucky's loaded frontcourt rotation. Another name to remember is Harry Froling, a 6'9 stretch forward set to debut for SMU this season.

1. Canada


Canada hasn't qualified for the Olympics since 2000, but it's impossible to ignore the young talent base that's been accumulating for our neighbor to the north. Since 2011, there have been 10 first-round draft picks from Canada, with seven selected in the lottery. That includes two No. 1 overall picks on distinctly different career paths at the moment.

While time is running out for Anthony Bennett, Andrew Wiggins looks like a future All-Star as he enters his third NBA season. With Wiggins holding down the wing, Canada should also have go-to offensive options in the backcourt and front court. Trey Lyles is a 6'10 forward coming off a promising rookie year for the Jazz, while Jamal Murray comes to the Nuggets as the No. 7 pick in the draft after a great offensive season at Kentucky.

Canada also has a group of solid young veterans who have already realized their potential in the NBA. Point guard Cory Joseph has turned into a great defender for the Raptors, the Celtics' Kelly Olynyk has proven to be a capable shooter in the front court and Tristan Thompson is already one of the NBA's best rebounders. Each will only be 29 years old in 2020.

The wildcard here could be R.J. Barrett, currently the top-ranked high school sophomore in the world. He was born in 2000 and would be 20 years old in Tokyo. We're all so old.

It would require a massive jump for Canada to go from a non-qualifier to an Olympic contender in just four years, but the talent is there. Team USA remains on top of the world, but they can't get too comfortable.

Why LeBron James is Nike's for life

LeBron James has said in the past that he is tired of being compared to Michael Jordan, but the new deal he signed on Monday means that he may well be seen as stepping into Jordan’s shoes, or more specifically, his Air Jordans.

James has just signed a lifetime deal with Nike, which will potentially earn the Cleveland Cavaliers superstar more than $60m (£40m) a year. Like Jordan, James has been working with the company since his youth, signing his first $90m deal with them when he was just out of high school after a bidding war between Nike, Adidas and Reebok.

“I’m just grateful that Nike and [Nike co-founder] Phil Knight and everyone over there just believed in a skinny 18-year-old kid from Akron, Ohio,” James told reporters on Monday.

So what does a contract for life involve and who gets them? Karl Lagerfeld is said to be so important to Chanel that he has one with the label. Ditto Annie Leibovitz, whose contract with Vanity Fair publisher Condé Nast is supposedly worth $5m a year. Jordan, who first signed a deal in 1984, has been working successfully with Nike for 12 years since his retirement. His Air Jordan line sold $2.5bn worth of shoes in 2012, and Jordan is thought to earn $100m a year thanks to the range. David Beckham, meanwhile, will make more than $160m from the lifetime contract with Adidas that he signed in 2003.

David Abrutyn, an executive vice president at the media marketing agency Bruin Sports Capital, says that the deal reflects James’s importance to the company. “They are very purposefully defining that they have done a lifetime deal with LeBron and I think that speaks volumes about what he means for their business,” he says. “I’m sure if you talked to the people at Nike they would tell you that of the thousands of athletes they represent, more than a few of them have asked for a lifetime deal.” He says that it is likely to be Nike’s biggest deal since its “de facto” lifetime contract with Jordan.

The world of sponsorship hasn’t always been plain sailing for Nike, whose shareholders were reported to have lost tens of millions of dollars after standing by Tiger Woods during his infidelity scandal. Lance Armstrong and Oscar Pistorius, who lost their Nike sponsorship in 2012 and 2013 respectively, have also caused headaches for the company.

Despite this, Abrutyn thinks that Nike envisages this deal being successful, perhaps even to the grave. “As with Jordan, what you’re seeing here is a reflection of the business that LeBron helped drive,” he says. In other words, nice work if you can get it.

The Joy of Six: the NBA's hard menc

 
1) Bill Laimbeer

The funniest thing about the basketball’s biggest tough guys is that away from the game they could be very nice. It’s just when they got on the court something took over. They were rugged, fierce and willing to throw anyone out of the way. And few men in professional basketball played that role better than the center of the late 1980s and early 90s Detroit Pistons.

Perhaps you have to consider the setting with Laimbeer. He was the muscle on a team called the Bad Boys. He had no choice but to be rough. Fortunately, he had no trouble fitting the role. At 6ft 11in, with thick shoulders and dark eyes, he looked mean. When he wore clear plastic mask as he often did, the scowl was even worse. Whether real or not he appeared to enjoy driving an elbow in an opponent’s side.

Perhaps Dennis Rodman (we’ll get to him in a bit) summed it up best in his book As Bad As I Want To Be when he wrote: “He was more than a thug but that’s what he’ll be remembered for.” He was a four-time All-Star, once led the NBA in rebounding and averaged nearly 10 boards a game for his career – but that’s not what people will recall. Instead, when they think of Laimbeer they will think of him for moments like this.
That escalated quickly.

Ironically, Laimbeer has become an outstanding women’s basketball coach with three WNBA titles in 11 years – all with the Detroit Shock. To see him now as coach of the New York Liberty, laughing on the sidelines, imploring his players to hurry up the court you have to wonder: Is this the same guy?

2) Xavier McDaniel

With a nickname like the X-Man how can you not be a tough guy? The essence of McDaniel can be summed up in a single photograph. In the picture, McDaniel, then with the Seattle SuperSonics, has Lakers guard Wes Matthews pinned against the scorer’s table and is choking him. Matthews’ eyes are wide with shock and his mouth is open as if gasping for air.

McDaniel also had a handful of memorable confrontations with the Chicago Bulls, and Michael Jordan in particular, when he played for the Knicks in the 1990s. Though he started off as a big scorer with the Sonics in the 80s, he came to fit best in a role as a reserve willing to set heavy screens, make a defensive stop, get a rebound and generally annoy opposing players and coaches.

The X-Man was always one of the game’s more interesting players. In keeping with the theme, he named his son Xavier and his daughter Xylina. He also dabbled in television with an appearance on Married With Children and a handful of reality shows. But his finest screen performance was in the movie Singles, which might be the best athlete cameo ever.

3) Maurice Lucas

So much of professional basketball history is centered around the modern era we don’t pay enough attention to the past. Since Lucas played in the 1970s there’s isn’t as much video evidence of his career as there is for contemporary players, but there was a tine when the last person you wanted to tussle with on the court was the man they called: “The Enforcer.”

He played for seven teams in 14 years, which doesn’t say enough about how dominant a player he was on the floor. While he averaged 14.4 points and 8.8 rebounds in his NBA career he was best known for using his 6ft, 9in, 250lb body to clear players away from the basket. To understand how powerful Lucas was as a player, Bill Walton named his son Luke after Lucas – in part, a testament to the role Lucas played in helping Walton and the Portland Trail Blazers to the NBA title in 1977.
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“He really liked being the enforcer-type player,” Portland’s coach in those days, Jack Ramsey, said after Lucas died in 2010. “A great rebounder. A great outlet passer. Then he could score on the post, make jump shots on the perimeter. But mostly it was his physical persona that he carried with him that made us a different team.”

Perhaps Lucas is best remembered for his role in this fight with Darryl Dawkins in the 1977 NBA Finals. “More than anything else in my career, I’ve been reminded of that incident and reminded of the fact that I was a real physical player,” he later said. “I’m not reminded of the fact that I was the leading scorer on those teams that I played on. But the old saying goes, ‘As long as they remember you, you can’t be mad.’”

4) Dennis Rodman

In later years Rodman became such a sideshow it is easy to forget the ferocious rebounder and defender who played alongside Laimbeer in Detroit and helped the Pistons establish their relentless reputation as much as anyone. He won five NBA titles, was twice the league’s defensive player of the year and was named to the all-defensive team seven times.

Of course, he is rarely glorified for these things. Instead, he is best known for wearing a wedding dress, his celebrity pals and multi-colored hairstyles. In many ways, he became bigger after basketball than he ever was as a player. This is unfortunate.

Nobody was better at stopping another team’s top scorer than Rodman. A lot of this came from an intense desire to be great at basketball. Not even considered for his high school team in Dallas, he gave the game a try after school when he suddenly grew several inches. While other players had been heavily recruited by big college programs, he went from working at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport to junior college, to little-known Southeastern Oklahoma State. So when he finally made the NBA at 25 he was determined to stay.

If that meant fighting his way through the league then that was what he would do. But to win five championships in what was essentially a 13-year NBA career says something about how good a defender and rebounder he really was.

5) Charles Barkley

To see him now on television, laughing through the halftime show, is to not remember how rough, aggressive and downright irrepressible he was as a player. One doesn’t average nearly 12 rebounds a game as a 6ft 5in forward and not be tough.

After establishing himself as a star over eight seasons with the Philadelphia 76ers, he won the MVP in 1993 in his first season with the Phoenix Suns and came within two wins of the NBA title that would forever elude him. Getting him away from the basket was impossible, he took his 252lbs that gave him the nickname ‘The Round Mound of Rebound’ and knocked people away. He was as good at grabbing a rebound and laying it back in as he was as shooting a fadeaway jumper. In some ways he was probably best with three players around him.

But he was also a polarizing player. He tussled with several opponents, shouted at fans and seemed to operate without a filter. When Nike introduced a commercial campaign in which he declared “I am not a role model”, people were furious. Why couldn’t he learn to behave?

That was Barkley. His most notorious incident might have been the time in 1991 when he spit at a fan in New Jersey, missing the man with his saliva and hitting a little girl instead. He was fined $10,000 and suspended. He apologized to the girl and later said the incident was his greatest regret.

6) Charles Oakley

Though his career roughly shadowed Barkley’s, this Charles was not as famous. He was three inches taller than Barkley and not nearly the accomplished scorer and yet he might have been the most aggressive player of his era. If Isiah Thomas had Laimbeer and Rodman, Michael Jordan had Oakley in his early years.

Oakley served as the young Jordan’s protector, clearing away big defenders and showing little regard for those who did not appreciate his ferocity. But it was after Oakley was traded to the Knicks in 1988 that he became widely known for his aggressiveness, especially against Chicago and Miami. This 1996 fight with Barkley embodies Oakley’s 10-year career in New York.

He could also score, averaging in double figures several times, but since he played most of his career in the NBA’s Eastern Conference he was usually needed to protect teammates, get rebounds and clear opponents away from the basket. He played this role perfectly. He never got the Knicks to an elusive title but he came close and became an essential stopper on a team built for defense first.

Dave Meyers, U.C.L.A. Basketball Star, Dies at 62

Dave Meyers, who led U.C.L.A. to the 1975 N.C.A.A. basketball championship as the team’s lone senior in John Wooden’s final season as coach, and who was later part of the trade that sent Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the Los Angeles Lakers, died on Friday at his home in Temecula, Calif. He was 62.    

His death was announced by U.C.L.A., which said the cause was cancer.

Meyers, a 6-foot-8 forward, led U.C.L.A. in scoring with 18.3 points a game and in rebounding with 7.9 a game in his final season, helping the Bruins to a 28-3 record. He had 24 points and 11 rebounds in U.C.L.A.’s 92-85 victory over Kentucky in the N.C.A.A. title game, which was played in his hometown, San Diego.  

He was chosen by the Lakers as the second overall pick in the 1975 N.B.A. draft. (David Thompson of North Carolina State was drafted first, by the Atlanta Hawks, although he instead signed with the Virginia Squires of the rival A.B.A.)

Shortly after the draft, Meyers was part of a blockbuster trade: He was sent, along with Junior Bridgeman, Brian Winters and Elmore Smith, to the Milwaukee Bucks for Abdul-Jabbar — who was already a three-time most valuable player and who is now widely regarded as one of the greatest players in N.B.A. history — and Walt Wesley.

Meyers played well for Milwaukee, averaging 11.2 points and 6.3 rebounds a game, but retired after four seasons.

David William Meyers was born on April 21, 1953, in San Diego. His survivors include his wife of 40 years, Linda; a daughter, Crystal; a son, Sean; his mother, Pat; three brothers, Mark, Jeff and Bobby; and five sisters, Ann Meyers Drysdale, Patty Meyers, Cathy Meyers, Susan Meyers and Coleen Lindsey.

Ann Meyers Drysdale was also a star basketball player at U.C.L.A. and was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1993.

Lovetron beckons: legendary dunk artist Darryl Dawkins dies at 58

Darryl Dawkins of the Philadelphia 76ers dunks during a 1980 playoff game against the Atlanta Hawks. Photograph: Rusty Kennedy/AP

The biggest surprise about Darryl Dawkins’s death on Thursday is that it came at age 58. He always seemed destined to either die early or live on forever.

We were lucky that Dawkins came along before sports was ruined by image-makers and professional basketball athletes dared to show personality. Few men made basketball more fun then the 6ft 11in center for the Philadelphia 76ers, New Jersey Nets, Detroit Pistons and whatever minor league team was willing to extend his career long after it had burned out in the NBA.

Dawkins died Thursday in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania hospital. No cause was of death was given, an inglorious end to an oversized life.
Darryl Dawkins’s ferocious dunks became his calling card.

He claimed to have come from a planet called Lovetron and called named himself Chocolate Thunder, claiming the nickname was given him by Stevie Wonder. He was also Dr Dunkenstein and Sir Slam. The nicknames forever changed depending on how he felt. And when he dunked basketballs he did so with a ferociousness few had ever seen. Today, players regularly battle to see who can dunk the hardest, but the late 1970s when Chocolate Thunder roamed the courts, Dawkins was slamming the ball through rims in a way other players never dreamed.

Twice, he broke backboards dunking in games. Each time he shattered the glass into little shards that looked like tiny bits of ice strewn around the court. The NBA introduced collapsible rims not long after that, leaving Dr Dunkenstein to perform more traditional assaults on basketball rims.

Dawkins so loved his dunks that he often named them. His first backboard-breaking dunk deserved an outrageous nickname, therefore he called it: The Chocolate-Thunder-Flying, Robinzine-Crying, Teeth-Shaking, Glass-Breaking, Rump-Roasting, Bun-Toasting, Wham-Bam, Glass-Breaker-I-Am-Jam. Others were comparatively subtle even if they seemed just as ridiculous. Who could forget the In-Your-Face-Disgrace? Or the Spine-Chiller-Supreme?

But for all the laughs and outlandish dunks Dawkins did not have the dominating career many assumed for him when he came to the league straight from high school in 1975. He was the fifth overall pick in the draft that year and helped the Sixers make three NBA finals before his trade to New Jersey in 1982.

For his NBA career he averaged 12.0 points and 6.1 rebounds a game. Decent numbers but not the kind of Hall of Fame career his immense talent said he should have had. He seemed a player who should have gone to college, maybe maturing before coming to the NBA. Instead, he had to learn as a pro, struggling through his first few seasons. When he finally established himself, injuries kept him from basketball greatness.

He drifted for several years, floating through Italy and the Continental Basketball Association and even had a brief run with the Harlem Globetrotters, not fully retiring from basketball until 2000.

Still, few players can say they left a mark – literally – on the game and inspired perhaps the biggest equipment change in 50 years with collapsible rims.

Not bad for a kid from Lovetron who never went to college.