Doctor MJ wrote:Ice Man wrote: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.
The low number of 3PA and the low 3P% may be partly due to coaching philosophy (probably is), but I think an important factor is the psychology of these all-star national teams, on the part of both players and coaches, especially with short preparation windows. These US teams (men's and women's) often or usually win because of better and deeper talent, but the whole is almost always less than the sum of the parts.
Sue Bird and Steph Curry have said some things in recent interviews that, IMO, point to why. Playing for an all-star national team means a lot of pressure, and it mostly means playing outside your normal role. It's a very uncomfortable situation to be in. People talk about this in terms of "sacrifice," like playing fewer minutes, fewer shots, and so forth, but I think it goes much deeper than that. These players have great respect for each other, and for the mission. They aren't just willing to sacrifice, they WANT to sacrifice. They don't want to be seen as selfish. They don't want to be ball-stoppers, they don't want to be THAT GUY who doesn't get it. While this is good and admirable in the abstract, IMO it can have a big negative effect on how they play, and specifically on how they approach three point shooting.
Before the last couple of games, Steph talked about the team passing up good shots and overpassing because (paraphrasing him), the next guy is LeBron or KD. So you don't aggressively take the first good shot or attack when you have an advantage, and end up with a worse shot, lots of turnovers, and having to force things late in the shot clock. Then when you aren't getting good shots within the offense, dudes feel like they have to take over an start forcing things individually. So it tends to oscillate between passive/overly unselfish and forced overaggression.
And I think this dynamic especially affect three point shooting. Three point shooting has a lower percentage and a higher variance than two point shooting, which means more missed attempts, even if the overall efficiency ends up higher. If you know you're not going to get your normal minutes and shot attempts, you don't want to miss. The next guy is KD or LeBron or Booker or Edwards, so if you're not hot, why are still shooting instead of getting the ball to your other weapons? When you miss, the opportunity cost of not having one of your other great shooters take the shot starts to weight heavier. You don't want to be that guy who shot the US out of game, when you have so many other great options. As a consequence, players are more hesitant to let it fly, and are much more hesitant to shoot themselves hot, and much more likely to get tight and shoot a lower percentage. This goes somewhat for all shots, but since players know that three pointers are lower percentage shots and since they are more likely to actually miss them, the psychological effect is greater.
You'd think players at this level wouldn't be so worried about these things, and there are often team leaders like LeBron and KD (or A'ja and Stewie) who might be more secure in a more normal "star" role even with the national team. But as Steph talked about in the interview I saw, it even affects a player at his level. And Sue Bird talked about a similar kind of discomfort in her experience.
With other teams, it's less of problem for a few reasons. The teams often have more preparation time and continuity over years, player's roles are more clearly defined, the top scorers know they're going to get minutes and shots and that the team needs them to keep shooting even when they're cold. So players can play with more confidence and decisiveness and shoot themselves into a rhythm. That's why back in the day, a Shane Heal, Sarunas Jasikevicious, or Carlos Arroyo would pull from deep with confidence anytime a US defender went under a screen, while the US was bricking open looks. Plus, when they're playing the US they're underdogs so they can play a lot looser.
I don't think it's a coincidence that after the interview I saw with Steph, he broke out with two vintage games. Not only did he recognize that he and other US players were deferring too much to each other, but other players started deferring to HIM. In the first quarter against France he missed all 3 of his three point attempts, but he kept firing away just like he would for the Warriors (and like he had just done against Serbia).
A consequence of this dynamic inhibiting players from shooting freely, especially from three point range, is that if coaches want to get more three point attempts, it has to be a specific point of emphasis. It's not necessarily going to just happen in the normal game flow of running the offense, like it would for the same players in their normal roles on their normal teams. I also think it would help to have more clearly defined roles and rotations so players would feel more secure. And that has to come from tough decisions made by the coach. These are all all-star/hall-of-fame level players, so it's hard to just dictate roles and rotations, and especially when there's no track record or preparation process to really sort it out based on performance. but I think it's necessary to get the best out of these rosters.
To her credit, Reeves adjusted to relying on Young and Copper, benching Taurasi and Lloyd, and reducing Gray's role (I love her but she's so far from vintage form) but she never really sorted a point guard rotation even in the final game. I thought Ionescu was particularly affected, since Gray at least got to start every game, even if her playing time was limited, and Plum ended up as thede facto main point guard. Sabrina didn't play badly, although she was predictably targeted on defense, and she's capable of playing a distributor role. But normally she's a gunslinger who's looking for her shot whenever she gets space, and that's a big part of what makes her a dangerous player. Whether because of her own inhibition or coaching direction, or a combination of both, that was totally missing throughout the Olympics.
Just because it happened to you, doesn't make it interesting.
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