2024 olympics - women's basketball

[donkeylips]

Surprised it’s so close

[MrDollarBills]

This game is horribly officiated.

Finally Wilson gets a whistle

[MrDollarBills]

Come on Kelsey you gotta knock that down

[MrDollarBills]

How is Gabby Williams not in the W? Holy sh*t

Congrats to Team USA!!!

[Ghetto Gospel]

game was saved when copper and sabrina entered the game

[MrDollarBills]

game was saved when copper and sabrina entered the game

Copper was not losing today. What a star she is

[Ghetto Gospel]

game was saved when copper and sabrina entered the game

Copper was not losing today. What a star she is

yeah, she really saved cheryl reeves legacy. that was the worst coaching performance i think i've ever seen

[rmontro]

Congratulations to Team USA for getting that gold medal. They did their part. Cut it a little close.

[Ice Man]

Hoo boy was I wrong that the US women faced no real competition. Really, really, really wrong.

[Ghetto Gospel]

its alright, caitlin clark and juju got us in 2028. the mens team is looking a little troubling though

[Doctor MJ]

Hoo boy was I wrong that the US women faced no real competition. Really, really, really wrong.

So, one thing I'm always looking at with this stuff is the 3PA. If you're not shooting 3's, it's like you're playing with a handicap.

Team USA shot less 3PA per game than any other team, and made less 3P too, while being below the median in 3P%.

And in the Gold Medal game they shot 2-12 from 3 with only one player making 3's (Plum).

I think I can say confidently that if Team USA doesn't change this approach going forward, they're going to lose the Olympics in the near future. Not saying they can't win in 2028 like this, only that there's just way less margin for error.

Note that in 2020 this wasn't how things went. While Team USA shot less 3PA than average then - which to be clear, does make sense in the abstract because of their size advantage - they still shot more than this time, and they made at a much higher percentage.

Note also that having a profound weakness at the 3 is precisely why you might want Caitlin Clark on this team, though to be honest, they still had plenty of 3-point shooting talent on the roster had they chosen to use it. They instead chose an extremely 2-heavy approach focusing not simply on having an offense based around 2 bigs (A'ja & Stewie), but to have Stewie take considerably less 3's than last time.

This where I'll note that the coach this time is Cheryl Reeve. Reeve coached the dynasty of the 2010s (Minnesota Lynx) and has more cred than any working WNBA coach...but what if I told you that I thought that that dynasty was the something close to the opposite of pace & space getting by with by virtue of the greatest WNBA player in history who also brought the pace & space with her whenever she stepped on the floor (Maya Moore)?

I really do believe that if Reeve had re-done everything around a pace & space model led by Moore, the dynasty would have been stronger.

This then to say that I have questions about whether Reeve should really have ever been seen as the best mind in the WNBA. I think she's knows all the fundamentals as well as anybody, but any NBA coach operating with the paradigm she was using in the 2010s likely would have been seen as behind the times at least by 2015.

This is in stark contrast to Becky Hammon, coach of the Aces, who brought the pace & space to Vegas when she replaced Laimbeer's slow twin-tower set up...and let's note that Reeve was Laimbeer's assistant before she was a head coach. Hammon has 4 of the members of Team USA on her Aces, and they play pace & space.

Now if fairness to Reeve, in 2024 while her Lynx still play slow, are shooting a lot of 3's and making them superbly. So I'm not saying that Reeve simply rejects the use of 3 point shooting no matter the roster...but I do think that she'd rather focus on a more traditional approach if at all possible, and that that's exactly what she did in 2024.

And yeah, I think this was clearly a mistake. They eeked out the Gold this time in a super-close game where the opponent wasn't even having hot shooting. So yeah, a team coached by Hammon that included Clark probably does better than what we got, and if this isn't a 1992-style wake-up call for the women's Team USA, we should expect the 8-straight Gold streak to end in the not too distant future.

[Doctor MJ]

Here's a breakdown of Team USA's MOV in Olympic history:

1976 -0.4 (Silver, crushed by USSR because Uljana Semjonova)

1980 n/a

1984 +32.7 (Gold)

1988 +13.8 (Gold)

1992 +29.0 (Bronze, unlucky loss to CIS, not due to CIS 3-point shooting, but worth noting Cynthia Cooper was on the team and being treated like a role player because Team USA never understood what they had in Cooper.)

1996 +28.6 (Gold)

2000 +21.8 (Gold)

2004 +23.8 (Gold)

2008 +37.6 (Gold)

2012 +34.8 (Gold)

2016 +37.3 (Gold)

2020 +19.3 (Gold)

2024 +15.7 (Gold)

Things worth noting:

1. I think people today tend to just assume that Team USA has always dominated women's basketball, but this really wasn't the case until roughly the start of the WNBA. I think the WNBA really helped here.

2. By the metric above they were at their most dominant in 2008 just barely over 2016, but I would be inclined to see the 2016 team as the best team in women's international basketball history, and it's just a question of whether they were better than the 2023 Las Vegas Aces.

3. The fall off in the 2020s for the women's team has made them less dominant than the men's again, and honestly, I don't think there's any "to be expected" reason for that. I understand that historically the WNBA doesn't have the same level of dominance over foreign leagues as the NBA does, but this was always true, and unlike in the men's game, we haven't seen any "best in world candidate" level talents emerge from outside the US in a long time (since Australia's Lauren Jackson, who was born in 1981).

To put another way: I think the 2023 Aces would win a Gold Medal in this Olympic tournament, so it's not a matter of the WNBA having weaker talent at the top, nor is about that top talent refusing to play for Team USA.

[DonaldSanders]

Great posts Doctor MJ (as usual). It's weird as a fan to watch a coach use what looks like a clearly outdated strategy that is hurting the team, and especially looks odd with FIBA rules. It's much easier to clog the paint in FIBA, so it seems obvious that you need outside shooters even more than in the W.

And it wasn't just that 3P shooting wasn't being utilized, it was that there was a lack of ball movement and a ton of iso. This was a pretty rough watch! I hope Hammon coaches next time.

[MrDollarBills]

I agree with the consensus that Becky needs to take charge. I did not like the sets we were running and Reeves did nothing to take advantage of the fact that we've got good shooters. The ball was sticking way too much.

[MrDollarBills]

Hoo boy was I wrong that the US women faced no real competition. Really, really, really wrong.

So, one thing I'm always looking at with this stuff is the 3PA. If you're not shooting 3's, it's like you're playing with a handicap.

Team USA shot less 3PA per game than any other team, and made less 3P too, while being below the median in 3P%.

And in the Gold Medal game they shot 2-12 from 3 with only one player making 3's (Plum).

I think I can say confidently that if Team USA doesn't change this approach going forward, they're going to lose the Olympics in the near future. Not saying they can't win in 2028 like this, only that there's just way less margin for error.

Note that in 2020 this wasn't how things went. While Team USA shot less 3PA than average then - which to be clear, does make sense in the abstract because of their size advantage - they still shot more than this time, and they made at a much higher percentage.

Note also that having a profound weakness at the 3 is precisely why you might want Caitlin Clark on this team, though to be honest, they still had plenty of 3-point shooting talent on the roster had they chosen to use it. They instead chose an extremely 2-heavy approach focusing not simply on having an offense based around 2 bigs (A'ja & Stewie), but to have Stewie take considerably less 3's than last time.

This where I'll note that the coach this time is Cheryl Reeve. Reeve coached the dynasty of the 2010s (Minnesota Lynx) and has more cred than any working WNBA coach...but what if I told you that I thought that that dynasty was the something close to the opposite of pace & space getting by with by virtue of the greatest WNBA player in history who also brought the pace & space with her whenever she stepped on the floor (Maya Moore)?

I really do believe that if Reeve had re-done everything around a pace & space model led by Moore, the dynasty would have been stronger.

This then to say that I have questions about whether Reeve should really have ever been seen as the best mind in the WNBA. I think she's knows all the fundamentals as well as anybody, but any NBA coach operating with the paradigm she was using in the 2010s likely would have been seen as behind the times at least by 2015.

This is in stark contrast to Becky Hammon, coach of the Aces, who brought the pace & space to Vegas when she replaced Laimbeer's slow twin-tower set up...and let's note that Reeve was Laimbeer's assistant before she was a head coach. Hammon has 4 of the members of Team USA on her Aces, and they play pace & space.

Now if fairness to Reeve, in 2024 while her Lynx still play slow, are shooting a lot of 3's and making them superbly. So I'm not saying that Reeve simply rejects the use of 3 point shooting no matter the roster...but I do think that she'd rather focus on a more traditional approach if at all possible, and that that's exactly what she did in 2024.

And yeah, I think this was clearly a mistake. They eeked out the Gold this time in a super-close game where the opponent wasn't even having hot shooting. So yeah, a team coached by Hammon that included Clark probably does better than what we got, and if this isn't a 1992-style wake-up call for the women's Team USA, we should expect the 8-straight Gold streak to end in the not too distant future.

To your point, this is another reason why Clark being on this team at this time would have been a waste. Clark specializes in pace and push, the way we were playing was the antithesis of that.

With CC, Reese, Paige, JuJu, Brink and several others on the way I think 2028 we need to be playing faster with pace and loading up on 3s. I think our talent level will still be elite but we will need to play a more modern style.

[Doctor MJ]

Great posts Doctor MJ (as usual). It's weird as a fan to watch a coach use what looks like a clearly outdated strategy that is hurting the team, and especially looks odd with FIBA rules. It's much easier to clog the paint in FIBA, so it seems obvious that you need outside shooters even more than in the W.

And it wasn't just that 3P shooting wasn't being utilized, it was that there was a lack of ball movement and a ton of iso. This was a pretty rough watch! I hope Hammon coaches next time.

Yeah it's been really interesting for me in general to see the differences in adoption of pace & space between the men's & women's game, particularly because the first 4 years of the WNBA were dominated by a Houston Comets dynasty whose secret sauce was due to Cynthia Cooper, a quick guard who shot 3's and got to the line.

It feels to me like generally in the WNBA strategic evolution hasn't come from copying winning WNBA teams so much as belatedly embracing NBA trends, and in the case of Hammon, with someone coming directly from the current NBA.

Re: Hammon coaching next time. Well, she wasn't even an assistant coach this time, so my guess is that doesn't happen. Generally these head coaches are anointing their assistants as the next coach. If Team USA truly bombed that would probably change, but they still got their Gold Medal.

Current assistants are Kara Lawson, Joni Taylor & Mike Thibault incidentally.

[Ghetto Gospel]

With CC, Reese, Paige, JuJu, Brink and several others on the way I think 2028 we need to be playing faster with pace and loading up on 3s. I think our talent level will still be elite but we will need to play a more modern style.

i was just thinking when watching this team play today that they looked really old, but i guess that's just the way coach wanted them to play. who do you think we should cut on the roster to make space for these 5?

[Ghetto Gospel]

This where I'll note that the coach this time is Cheryl Reeve. Reeve coached the dynasty of the 2010s (Minnesota Lynx) and has more cred than any working WNBA coach...but what if I told you that I thought that that dynasty was the something close to the opposite of pace & space getting by with by virtue of the greatest WNBA player in history who also brought the pace & space with her whenever she stepped on the floor (Maya Moore)?

I really do believe that if Reeve had re-done everything around a pace & space model led by Moore, the dynasty would have been stronger.

This then to say that I have questions about whether Reeve should really have ever been seen as the best mind in the WNBA. I think she's knows all the fundamentals as well as anybody, but any NBA coach operating with the paradigm she was using in the 2010s likely would have been seen as behind the times at least by 2015.

This is in stark contrast to Becky Hammon, coach of the Aces, who brought the pace & space to Vegas when she replaced Laimbeer's slow twin-tower set up...and let's note that Reeve was Laimbeer's assistant before she was a head coach. Hammon has 4 of the members of Team USA on her Aces, and they play pace & space.

Now if fairness to Reeve, in 2024 while her Lynx still play slow, are shooting a lot of 3's and making them superbly. So I'm not saying that Reeve simply rejects the use of 3 point shooting no matter the roster...but I do think that she'd rather focus on a more traditional approach if at all possible, and that that's exactly what she did in 2024.

And yeah, I think this was clearly a mistake. They eeked out the Gold this time in a super-close game where the opponent wasn't even having hot shooting. So yeah, a team coached by Hammon that included Clark probably does better than what we got, and if this isn't a 1992-style wake-up call for the women's Team USA, we should expect the 8-straight Gold streak to end in the not too distant future.

in cheryl reeve's defense, even though i thought she was terrible this game, how many coaches across all sports have the ability to to maximize their personnel? i find most coaches have an idea of how to run and offense/defense and coach up their players to properly run whatever the coach wants to run. i find very few have the ability to customize a scheme around the players that they have.

i think it's also why the nba has so many new fresh young coaches: the inability for the old guard to adapt to how the new modern nba should be ran. i think it's the same for the nfl and teams that want to just pound the rock, control the clock and play good defense. the game has just passed them up

[Doctor MJ]

Hoo boy was I wrong that the US women faced no real competition. Really, really, really wrong.

So, one thing I'm always looking at with this stuff is the 3PA. If you're not shooting 3's, it's like you're playing with a handicap.

Team USA shot less 3PA per game than any other team, and made less 3P too, while being below the median in 3P%.

And in the Gold Medal game they shot 2-12 from 3 with only one player making 3's (Plum).

I think I can say confidently that if Team USA doesn't change this approach going forward, they're going to lose the Olympics in the near future. Not saying they can't win in 2028 like this, only that there's just way less margin for error.

Note that in 2020 this wasn't how things went. While Team USA shot less 3PA than average then - which to be clear, does make sense in the abstract because of their size advantage - they still shot more than this time, and they made at a much higher percentage.

Note also that having a profound weakness at the 3 is precisely why you might want Caitlin Clark on this team, though to be honest, they still had plenty of 3-point shooting talent on the roster had they chosen to use it. They instead chose an extremely 2-heavy approach focusing not simply on having an offense based around 2 bigs (A'ja & Stewie), but to have Stewie take considerably less 3's than last time.

This where I'll note that the coach this time is Cheryl Reeve. Reeve coached the dynasty of the 2010s (Minnesota Lynx) and has more cred than any working WNBA coach...but what if I told you that I thought that that dynasty was the something close to the opposite of pace & space getting by with by virtue of the greatest WNBA player in history who also brought the pace & space with her whenever she stepped on the floor (Maya Moore)?

I really do believe that if Reeve had re-done everything around a pace & space model led by Moore, the dynasty would have been stronger.

This then to say that I have questions about whether Reeve should really have ever been seen as the best mind in the WNBA. I think she's knows all the fundamentals as well as anybody, but any NBA coach operating with the paradigm she was using in the 2010s likely would have been seen as behind the times at least by 2015.

This is in stark contrast to Becky Hammon, coach of the Aces, who brought the pace & space to Vegas when she replaced Laimbeer's slow twin-tower set up...and let's note that Reeve was Laimbeer's assistant before she was a head coach. Hammon has 4 of the members of Team USA on her Aces, and they play pace & space.

Now if fairness to Reeve, in 2024 while her Lynx still play slow, are shooting a lot of 3's and making them superbly. So I'm not saying that Reeve simply rejects the use of 3 point shooting no matter the roster...but I do think that she'd rather focus on a more traditional approach if at all possible, and that that's exactly what she did in 2024.

And yeah, I think this was clearly a mistake. They eeked out the Gold this time in a super-close game where the opponent wasn't even having hot shooting. So yeah, a team coached by Hammon that included Clark probably does better than what we got, and if this isn't a 1992-style wake-up call for the women's Team USA, we should expect the 8-straight Gold streak to end in the not too distant future.

To your point, this is another reason why Clark being on this team at this time would have been a waste. Clark specializes in pace and push, the way we were playing was the antithesis of that.

With CC, Reese, Paige, JuJu, Brink and several others on the way I think 2028 we need to be playing faster with pace and loading up on 3s. I think our talent level will still be elite but we will need to play a more modern style.

You're not wrong, but there's an elephant in the room:

This Olympic roster had 4 Aces, and the Aces play at the fastest pace in the league.
This Olympic roster had 2 Liberty players who push the pace relative to what the team does when they sit.
The main two non-LV/NY players on the roster (Collier & AT), both push the pace relative to their team too.

So, Reeve's Team USA chose to play like they did, but it didn't even necessarily make sense with the roster they chose that they actually used, and they could have chosen a roster that was better suited for it.

As I say all of this, there's one other factor to consider which maybe explains a lot of the decisions:

A'ja Wilson likes to slow it down, and given that A'ja is considered the best player in the world, it's hard to say that looking to build your approach around A'ja's preference is a mistake...but it really could be.

Not saying I wouldn't have A'ja on the team though, only that I think it needs to be reconsidered how perimeter players are getting utilized.

EDIT: I read the data wrong. A'ja speeds up the game for the Aces too!

(ftr, the column I was looking at was ORtg. Bizarrely, the Aces offense has been working better by this metric without A'ja, but clearly not because they speed things up without her.)

[Ghetto Gospel]

I agree with the consensus that Becky needs to take charge. I did not like the sets we were running and Reeves did nothing to take advantage of the fact that we've got good shooters. The ball was sticking way too much.

reeve's panicking in the 3rd because she couldn't trust any of her guards was embarrassing. as soon as one of the guards made a mistake, they got pulled for another. i felt like the pressure of potentially losing this game and thereby ending the US dynasty over women's bball got to her