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MIAMI – Atlanta coach and USA Basketball men’s assistant coach Lloyd Pierce had a one-day coronavirus scare a few weeks ago and had to stay in his hotel room while the matter was sorted out.
The bad news: practice was missed.
The good news: He didn’t have to miss a call from USA Basketball staff that head coach Gregg Popovich had scheduled for that day, because it would have conflicted with that practice.
“That’s how smart Pop is,” Pierce said.
If the rest of the plan goes well as it did that day, USA Basketball will be very happy this summer. The start of the team’s training camp in Las Vegas is about four months away: July 1 is an expected date, although it is not absolutely finalized, which means that decisions on who will play for the Americans in the Olympics Reprogrammed Tokyo’s are getting closer and closer.
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The Americans are expected to have around 60 players in the Olympic prospect pool by this summer, then they will cut that down significantly before bringing a team to Las Vegas. Assuming the schedules don’t change, that camp would start during the NBA conference finals and with four teams still playing, which means it’s a safe bet that some players USA Basketball will want for Tokyo, otherwise they might be busy at the time.
That is why this Olympic selection process will have to be different than usual for Americans, and multiple contingency plans must be drawn up.
Some of the questions that US basketball coaches (Popovich’s staff also includes Golden State coach Steve Kerr and Villanova’s Jay Wright) and that staff are currently considering included these, as Pierce recalled Sunday ( Monday Manila time) in Miami before his Hawks took on the Hawks. Hot:
“Who are you waiting for? Who is worth waiting for? How long are you waiting? How do you manage your list because we will play four or five games in July in Las Vegas, kind of a mini-bubble of teams and just How do you keep everything? there? And how do you run a roster, knowing that there may be some very important guys potentially who may still be playing? And then what do you do in case of a random emergency when you have to go out on 19 for Tokyo? “
Most of the league’s biggest American stars (LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Damian Lillard, James Harden, Jimmy Butler, Kyle Lowry, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant among them) were part of the player pool last year and are expected. that are part of the pool this summer.
Pierce, Kerr, and Wright were all with Popovich as assistants when USA Basketball finished seventh at the Basketball World Cup in 2019. More than 50 players were part of America’s plan at one point or another for that tournament; Of those, 12 went to China, two were cut after the first week of training camp, and the other three dozen withdrew on their own.
“There is a lot to discuss,” Kerr said. “We talk about the possibilities of the squad and that sort of thing, and the logistics. And the logistics is up in the air, so we’ll play it by ear, and when the time comes, we’ll be ready to go.” to work.”
Pierce said the United States is trying to be preventive and proactive at the same time when it comes to figuring out how this summer might work in terms of personnel.
“We haven’t talked about the style of play and things like that,” Pierce said. “I think there are a lot of other factors that are really important right now that lead to that.”
The American men will open the Olympics against France, the team that beat them in the World Cup quarterfinals and ended their medal hopes at that event, on July 25. The American men will also face Iran on July 28 and a future – determined team on July 31.
American men are seeking a fourth consecutive gold medal. The Tokyo Games are scheduled to open on July 23, a day after the NBA says it is the last possible date for this season’s NBA Finals.
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