Nothing quite captures basketball fans’ imagination like USA basketball each Olympic cycle.
From the first year that pro players were permitted to wear the red, white and blue to recent superstar pairings that have put the NBA’s super team era to shame, the sight of the NBA’s very best joining forces on the Olympic stage is a spectacle that feels fresh every four years. Unlike the NBA’s All Star Game, which pits top players against each other but lacks the fundamentals and competitiveness that are central to the sport, Olympic basketball raises the stakes and ensures compelling narratives that fill the quiet portion of the NBA offseason.
The star-studded squad that America sent to Paris is no exception. Flagbearer LeBron James is back at age 39 and is surrounded by many of the candidates to be the new face of the NBA: four-time NBA champion Stephen Curry, recent NBA MVP Joel Embiid, NBA champion Jayson Tatum, longtime rival Kevin Durant, 2024 breakout star Anthony Edwards. The coaching staff alone boasts a total of seven NBA Finals victories between head coach Steve Kerr and assistants Erik Spoelstra and Tyronn Lue. So far, Team USA has lived up to its billing with a 110-84 victory over Nikola Jokic and Serbia and a 103-86 win over South Sudan, a remarkable underdog that nearly toppled them earlier this summer.
Watching Team USA never gets old, but it’s no longer the most interesting aspect of Olympic competition. The international growth of the game is taking over the territory Team USA once controlled, as the Summer Olympics have highlighted the accelerated pace that high-level basketball is making across the globe.
I can pinpoint the exact game that sparked this realization for me — the battle between Group A contestants Canada and Greece. The abundance of NBA players in Canada’s lineup, including NBA champion Jamal Murray, MVP runner-up Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and former top-three pick R.J. Barrett, made picking out recognizable faces from the starting lineup and rotation a real treat, while a recent Finals MVP, Giannis Antetokounmpo, impressed me by willing his country back into the contest in the final minutes before falling 86-79. Greece also lost its second game of the group stage despite having the Greek Freak in his prime.
Canada’s Group isn’t the only one littered with talent. Germany is continuing its recent international dominance behind two Orlando Magic standouts, Franz and Moritz Wagner, while undefeated France boasts 7-foot-4 Victor Wembanyama, defensive stalwart Rudy Gobert and ascending Wizards guard Bilal Coulibaly. That team should only improve in future tournaments, with three of the NBA’s top six picks from this summer’s draft coming from the country. While Team USA has no shortage of scoring options and isn’t reliant on any single option, the fact that only one Team USA player (Kevin Durant) cracks the top ten in points per game in Paris underscores the must-watch performances that have come from countries around the globe.
Olympic marketers seem to be taking note. Team USA has plenty of jersey options in stock on Fanatics, the main sports merchandise online seller, but there’s a good bit of international representation as well, including gear for Wembanyama, Gilgeous-Alexander and Antetokounmpo. NBC will always ensure viewers know the times to catch USA basketball in action — and those games definitely boost viewership — but other 5×5 contests are providing stellar entertainment among the wealth of sports available to watch and stream.
Considering Olympic basketball’s track record as a USA-centric sport, this trend is encouraging for the game’s growth and the intrigue of the Olympic bracket. In 2004, the entirety of Olympic competition was framed around Team USA’s lackluster performance and bronze medal finish, paving the way for the 2008 Redeem Team in Beijing. Imagine if that happened now, with a team like Canada or France taking gold with well-known NBA stars leading the way. I don’t think this will happen given Team USA’s depth and star power, but if it did, a shift toward celebrating the individual champion (imagine Lionel Messi and Argentina in the recent World Cup) would seem more fitting than making the result all about the USA’s failure.
USA basketball also reminds me of the NBA season structure in that oftentimes, the storylines on the court are less interesting to those off it. Whereas drama on other teams derives from the wins and losses, USA has been so dominant for so long that the biggest headlines have been about which non-starters deserve to play more minutes in a blowout (cough, cough, Jayson Tatum). While those sorts of topics fill airtime on sports talk shows, that is not Olympic-level drama on the level of the competition itself.
It’s fantastic for Team USA to perform so brilliantly on a global stage, both for the men’s and women’s. The women have won gold in every Olympics dating back to the 20th century, while the men have an unblemished record since the Redeem Team’s run in 2008. But it’s hard not to root for the up-and-comers in the sport too, and even wish for a day when Olympic basketball more closely resembles the World Cup than the Dream Team’s demolition of opponents in 1992 and USA’s recent Olympic triumphs. That’s not something that Team USA hopes to see but would be a remarkable development for a sport that is quickly becoming a global game.
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