2020-ish Tokyo Olympics

After the jacked up last two seasons in the NBA, if I am a USA NBA player, I am telling the national team to find someone else, I have to take a nap.

 

USA water polo just came back from a 3 goal deficit in the second to win behind 5 goals from Alex Bowen.

 

My traumatized Vol Brain saw "5" and "Alex Brown" in that sentence and about punched the screen.

Thanks, Dooz. Thanks.

 

USA getting murdered in the pool. Even Ledecky losing now.

 

Got the men's 4x100 at least

 

Dressel looked surprisingly iffy, for him, but the US got the win. That's always a difficult relay.

 

Every four years I remain astonished at the level of strength and endurance required for water polo. The player whose position is to chicken fight right in front of the goal for the entire game reminds me of when some asshole thought it was fun to dunk your head repeatedly under water in the pool as a kid. I hated those dudes.

 

US Olympic basketball goes one of two ways for 2024 after what appears to be headed for disaster this cycle.

1) A resurgence of interest in playing among the biggest stars in the game a la 2008.

or

2) Everyone checks out and we regress to playing NBA benchwarmers, or perhaps even top tier college guys, and we get our asses handed to us.

 

Is it bad that I don’t really care either way?

I totally understand why star players have little interest in the Olympics.

 

I believe the latter scenario that I offered is the more likely one.

 

I mean I’m not even a star player and I don’t care

 

Will you care if we keep losing?

 

No.

 

Not even a little bit.

 

Not me, personally. The sport would have to become way more balanced, globally.

 

We are also in kind of a weird era where a number of the best NBA players are not from the US. Jokic, Embiid, Giannis, Luka.. you could even throw Gobert and Ben Simmons in there, if you want. That's what, the last 3 MVP's, the best Center in the game, the guy most consider the best player in the game, the last 4 DPOY's, and the guy who should have won DPOY this past season.

There's no doubt in my mind that we'd still win if we added Steph, LeBron, AD, etc. to the roster, but how many more could those guys realistically compete in beyond this year? And nearly every top tier player who skipped was battling injury at the end of this past NBA season.

Younger guys will need to step up, at some point.

 

Swimming, track, women's gymnastics. Don't care about anything else.

 

Also, there's really no excuse for us to be losing Olympic basketball games. Luka managed to drop 48 points and carry Slovenia to victory. We really don't have an excuse.

 

We have lost 5 of our last 8 games. I know the rosters aren't optimal, but it's more competitive than we'd like to admit. I mean, we had to fight tooth and nail in 2008 and 2012 with lineups much better than we could put together today.

 

I was honestly thinking of something closer to hockey, at the least.