Can team USA lose this gold in basketball?

[p0peye]

Fun fact: USA and Serbia are only countries that are finalists in 3 team sports.

[Pitimiquel]

Fun fact: USA and Serbia are only countries that are finalists in 3 team sports.

Which sports?

[chudak]

Fun fact: USA and Serbia are only countries that are finalists in 3 team sports.

Which sports?

basketball (men), volleyball (female), waterpolo (men) - Serbia

basketball (men), basketball (female), waterpolo (female) - USA

[chudak]

Fun fact. USA had 552 athletes in these Olympics. Serbia had 105.

Out of those 105, 54 are coming home with a medal. (team sports medals mostly though: basketball - in finals (men), basketball - bronze (female), volleyball - in finals(female), waterpolo - gold (men))

Serbia was also able to get a medal in every team sport where we qualified for Rio

Besides team sports very few individual medals for Serbia - wresling (men, gold), canoe sprint (men, silver), taekwondo (female, silver), long jump (female, bronze).

[Chicago76]

Tv ratings there's your proof . And Basketball has more Mark famous stars.

You have to be careful just going by certain TV ratings. That kind of data is easy to manipulate to tell the narrative one would want.

I am a baseball fan - love the game; but to me basketball is religion. I'm a Texan who will change the channel from a football game in order to watch pre-season basketball. As much as I'd love basketball to be the #2 sport in the USA right now, I just don't see that you can make the realistic case. Yes, you are right that there are more marketable stars in the NBA, but that isn't a great measure for overall popularity. Casual fans still tend to glom towards baseball, especially when factoring in them playing twice the games as an NBA team.

Basketball's crowning achievement over baseball in the United States actually has nothing to do with the NBA. It is all about the NCAA tournament. The NCAA tournament is easily the biggest event in USA sports after the Super Bowl. But so much of that translates as team loyalty and results and not so much the actual game played.

Globally, Basketball is leaps & bounds ahead of Baseball, so there is that. I just think that it is far too institutionalized in American society to be overcome by some TV ratings or James Harden Taco Bell commercials.

I do love the discussion about the two sports, though.

Ratings need to be placed in context. For example it is silly to assume a winner take all Super Bowl rating is the same as An average series game in NBA, NHL, MLB. I wouldn't compare a standard MLB broadcast rating to NBA either due to the number of games in baseball. I also wouldn't compare total attendance because ticket pricing and how viewable games are when you're one of 40,000 vs 20,000 vs 70,000 is different among sports.

NBA FInals vs World Series is a pretty good comparison though. Especially if you only look at the first three games of a series as the baseline. You can't really Clare average ratings in a tight 7 game series to one that isn't competitive and ends in 4 or 5 because as the drama builds, the ratings build.

The average NBA rating in the first three games is 9.3 since 2008. It's about 8 flat in the World Series since then. The last Yankees series was the only WS over that time period that exceeded the first three games NBA finals average. This is despite the fact that the World Series occurs at a very favorable time of the year for TV viewing compared to the NBA finals.

The other thing to acknowledge is that baseball fans skew older and are better reflected by TV ratings. A recent study estimated that only 17% of MLB fans are 18-34. For the NBA, that number is 32%. So even if we think that the total fandom is about even (despite the NBA rating ms advantage), the popularity among those who are of playing age is almost twice as high for the NBA.

Another issue to consider is how this popularity translates to player pools. NBA talent pools skew extremely tall. There is almost zero competition from other major sports for a 6-6 kid. Some in pitching from baseball, but the height range of baseball players is 5-9 to 6-6. That popularity competition between NFL, NBA, and MLB most directly hits MLB. NBA avoids most of it by skewing so tall. MLB suffers the most by being less popular than NFL, which requires huge rosters that are filled by guys of similar stature as MLBers...until their bodies change through all that training.

When you look at roster composition, the popularity and physical requirements explain the racial/international compositions of MLB. Hardly any African Americans. Tons of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in particular. I get that baseball is life in those places, but for a country the soze of the U.S. with the history in baseball the U.S. has, this is massive over representation--the level of which can only occur because baseball isn't popular enough among normal sized human Americans to produce the players needed to reduce that representation.

[LookToShoot]

Another issue to consider is how this popularity translates to player pools. NBA talent pools skew extremely tall. There is almost zero competition from other major sports for a 6-6 kid. Some in pitching from baseball, but the height range of baseball players is 5-9 to 6-6. That popularity competition between NFL, NBA, and MLB most directly hits MLB. NBA avoids most of it by skewing so tall. MLB suffers the most by being less popular than NFL, which requires huge rosters that are filled by guys of similar stature as MLBers...until their bodies change through all that training.

When you look at roster composition, the popularity and physical requirements explain the racial/international compositions of MLB. Hardly any African Americans. Tons of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in particular. I get that baseball is life in those places, but for a country the soze of the U.S. with the history in baseball the U.S. has, this is massive over representation--the level of which can only occur because baseball isn't popular enough among normal sized human Americans to produce the players needed to reduce that representation.

Your logic doesn't make sense. The average white or African American is not walking around 6'6+ in the first place. Puerto Rico and DR (which are nationalities by the way, not races) have a population is a majority of African descent, so I'm not sure why you would think a racial component would matter here.

This is baseball you're talking about. You don't have to be super athletic and quick. Most baseball players are overweight. It comes to down to culture, and baseball is a dying sport in America.

[90sgoat]

No, there is a good point. US only has basketball for tall guys, while Europe also has handball, which in itself is a very popular sport in Spain, Balkans, Germany, Scandinavia. These are guys with an average height of 195cm or what is 6'4'' (http://www.eurohandball.com/article/016153/Facts+and+figures+around+the+World+Championship). Handballers are tough, strong, quick and explosive.

If they were trained as basketball players they have all the tools to succeed.

[Chicago76]

Another issue to consider is how this popularity translates to player pools. NBA talent pools skew extremely tall. There is almost zero competition from other major sports for a 6-6 kid. Some in pitching from baseball, but the height range of baseball players is 5-9 to 6-6. That popularity competition between NFL, NBA, and MLB most directly hits MLB. NBA avoids most of it by skewing so tall. MLB suffers the most by being less popular than NFL, which requires huge rosters that are filled by guys of similar stature as MLBers...until their bodies change through all that training.

When you look at roster composition, the popularity and physical requirements explain the racial/international compositions of MLB. Hardly any African Americans. Tons of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in particular. I get that baseball is life in those places, but for a country the soze of the U.S. with the history in baseball the U.S. has, this is massive over representation--the level of which can only occur because baseball isn't popular enough among normal sized human Americans to produce the players needed to reduce that representation.

Your logic doesn't make sense. The average white or African American is not walking around 6'6+ in the first place. Puerto Rico and DR (which are nationalities by the way, not races) have a population is a majority of African descent, so I'm not sure why you would think a racial component would matter here.

This is baseball you're talking about. You don't have to be super athletic and quick. Most baseball players are overweight. It comes to down to culture, and baseball is a dying sport in America.

I'll try again:

Basketball doesn't need to be as popular as baseball to get its player pool. It only needs to be popular enough. 66% of all minutes played in the NBA last year went to 6-6 or taller players (in shoes, so 6-5 or taller). That's a 1 in 200 or so American male. If you were to examine that 0.5% of the population, I would imagine that basketball is the runaway favorite/most played team sport. Because being really tall is detrimental in most sports and those kids get plugged into basketball when people see how tall they or their parents are. There are exceptions (pitchers, some NFL players are 6-6 in shoes, swimmers, water polo, high jumpers). General sport popularity isn't extremely critical to keeping the interest of really tall people because really tall people are limited.

95%+ of all baseball players are 5-9 to 6-6. That a half inch shorter than average men up to 8.5 inches taller. That covers about 55-60% of all men. That is the MLB player pool. If you were to look at people's self identified favorite sports among the 5 largest team sports, in 1985, 31% of people picked baseball (Harris poll). In 2015, that number was down to 19% (same poll). It is probably down more than that if you consider that baseball followers skew older. This has a huge impact on the talent pool of baseball, because the core height range of a baseball player falls in an area with a lot of competition. A 6-1 athlete can choose any of 5 major sports and compete provided they have the other physical tools to do so. For basketball, not so much, because they get the tall people to basketball cushion regardless. The NBA doesn't need that many "normal sized" people to round out their rosters, although they do get a share.

In baseball, what we have seen is an exodus of African American males leaving the sport. This is a big source of their declining interest from younger generations and it also hurts their talent pool. MLB has been working hard to remedy this, but baseball isn't an easy game to play without a high level of resources and it is also difficult to improve at without resources/players. You can play 2v2 or 3v pickup games in basketball. In baseball, you need nearly a full team or a cage.

This is why we see a huge influence of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans (among others) in baseball. Their race has nothing to do with it. I never said it did. These are small islands where the game is a religion. Even though the game is a religion, a big reason for the proliferation of talent in MLB from those areas is because the US doesn't have the same market share of 20 somethings of normalish human height who are suited to play baseball. NBA hit peak popularity in the late 80s through the Jordan era. Its popularity is down too. There has been some internationalization, but to penetrate the NBA, it has had to come from a ton of places with a lot of tall guys. Islands the size of PR and the DR side of Hispanola could never get the level of penetration to put the numbers of MLB players they do into the NBA. Even if basketball was their religion and they had the height of people residing in the US (they don't). And the reason, again, is that when you're 6-6 or even more so 6-8+ and you're American, there aren't other options. The NBA could become less popular but it wouldn't appreciably change the number of tall guys practicing jump shots.

[Jaivl]

Yes, they easily can.

[Dr Positivity]

Yes, but I think they will end up winning in the end, the team isn't as structurally broken as 2004

[LAKESHOW]

I'll be shocked

[MrDollarBills]

Having to go through Spain and Australia to make the gold medal round is brutal

[BlueSan]

Having to go through USA for semi finals, finals or the gold is brutal

[LAKESHOW]

Well my friends, we have the answer.
Gold Medal Champions Tokyo Olympics.
It was great to see, though I had my doubts