bisme37 wrote:You guys! I was all excited for olympic basketball but I'm so damn grumpy about this Tatum thing I'm not really enjoying it at all and haven't even watched a lot of it. I think it may be stupid for me to feel that way but I can't do anything about it. I should be rooting for Derrick and Jrue and the whole team. (I'm still making the stupid Olympic threads though lol.)
3 years ago in the last Olympics, Popovich was the coach and Jayson Tatum was the 2nd leading scorer on the US Gold medal team.
Tatum mostly came off the bench as the 6th man. He and KD played together often but also Pop used them in waves. When KD went to the bench Tatum took over the offense and basically did his FIBA KD impersonation. There was really no letdown from one to the other.
He was only 23 and ended up averaging more points than any USA player in Olympic history not named Durant, Anthony, Jordan, Robinson or Barkley. And the team won a Gold Medal vs much stiffer competition than most of those guys played against.
Then KD declared JT to be the next leader of team USA and the guy who would eventually break KD's Olympic records. Pop made similar comments about Tatum's standing with USA basketball.
JT is a really good FIBA player. He's the only current 1st team All NBA player on Team USA. He leads the entire NBA in playoff points, rebounds and assists in 2020's. He just won a damn championship. He's been committed to Team USA since before he was even a pro. As we saw in the C's title run, he is more than willing to sacrifice his offense and just set other guys up and rebound and play defense if needed. Or he can score with the best of them.
Not playing him is absolutely bizarre. How is this the guy you decide to alienate? You're going to need him on Team USA for the next decade and I'm wondering if he even wants to deal with it after this. If we have any Kerr fans up in here, sorry guys but dude is forever in my doghouse lol.
You talked about several things but frankly almost nothing you mentioned should be in Kerr's calculus: not what Tatum did in Tokyo, not what he did last season, not how he'll feel about it going forward. The only thing that matters is winning this one tournament, and Kerr feels that giving other guys minutes puts the US in a better position to do that. Thus far he hasn't been proven wrong.
In 2021, he was the team's second best player without question. This year you could arguably put four players ahead of him, and several of the players he's better than...Booker, Jrue, White, AD, Bam...fill needs that he doesn't.