PARIS — The world’s most dominant basketball nation has finally found a discipline of the sport where it can’t trample everyone in its path.
The rest of the world is taking out decades of frustration on the mighty U.S. in 3×3 basketball.
It started Tuesday night when Germany defeated the U.S. women and world No. 1 Serbia ran the U.S. men off the floor. A day later, noted global basketball power Azerbaijan edged the U.S. women and big, bruising Poland overpowered the U.S. men. It continued into Thursday the U.S. women lost to Australia 17-15 and the men fell to Lithuania 20-18 with Jimmer Fredette sidelined with a left leg injury. The American women finally broke through later Thursday with a 17-11 victory over Spain — the U.S. program’s first win of the Olympics — while the men dropped to 0-4 after losing 21-19 to Latvia.
As a result, the U.S. men and women are a combined 1-7 in 3×3 at the Paris Olympics. That’s a jarring contrast to 5-on-5 basketball, where the U.S. men have suffered only one Olympic loss since settling for bronze in Athens 2004 and the U.S. women have seldom been challenged during an unbeaten streak at the Olympics that dates back to Barcelona 1992.
For the U.S. women’s 3×3 program, the poor start in Paris is an outlier. The U.S. is the reigning Olympic women’s 3×3 world champion and won the 2023 women’s 3×3 World Cup.
For the U.S. men’s 3×3 program, this is more representative of previous woes. The U.S. failed to qualify for Tokyo in men’s 3×3 and hasn’t won a men’s 3×3 World Cup since 2019.
So what gives? Why is the U.S. struggling at 3×3 when in traditional 5-on-5 it bosses around the rest of the world at every possible age group? There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer for the U.S. men and women. The explanation is a little different for both.
Injuries, inexperience and a lack of chemistry are all partly to blame for the vulnerability of the U.S. women so far in Paris.
Only 3×3 veterans Cierra Burdick and Hailey Van Lith are holdovers from the team that won the 2023 World Cup. USA Basketball selected two-time WNBA all-star Rhyne Howard over Linnae Harper and called up three-time WNBA all-star Dearica Hamby as a last-minute replacement after losing Cameron Brink to an ill-timed ACL tear in mid-June.
Howard played five games with Burdick and Van Lith at a tournament in April. Hamby had little to no 3×3 experience prior to Paris and has received a crash course from her teammates on the strategic differences from traditional 5-on-5 basketball.
“We’re the most inexperienced team here,” Burdick said. “We’ve got a lot of skill, a lot of talent, but that doesn’t win 3×3 games.”
Other 3×3 teams don’t have the WNBA talent that the U.S. boasts, but Van Lith, Burdick, Howard and Hembry have only practiced together for two weeks — and it shows. The U.S. has been stagnant at times on offense and has repeatedly botched pick-and-roll defense, sending two players to the ball or to the screener and leaving someone wide open.
Still, the Americans appear confident their chemistry and cohesiveness will improve.
“If we went back to the hotel room and didn’t see each other, I wouldn’t expect us to get better,” Van Lith said. “But we eat every meal together. We spend every off minute in a room playing card games or talking or going to the Olympic Village together. So we’re getting closer every day.”
The U.S. men can’t blame inexperience or a lack of cohesion for their 0-2 start. Fredette, Canyon Barry, Kareem Maddox and Dylan Travis have crisscrossed the globe playing tournaments together for two years. Fredette’s injury robbed them of their most accomplished player for both of Thursday’s games.
The obvious question for USA Basketball is whether this is the most talented quartet of players they could find. Why send a venture capitalist, an engineer, a former podcast producer and a special education teacher to try to win a gold medal when USA Basketball could simply select LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Steph Curry and be done with it?
The reality is that 3×3 players must accumulate points on the world tour in order to be eligible to play for their countries in the Olympics, a possibility for WNBA stars because of their shorter seasons but unrealistic for NBA players. As a result, USA Basketball has tried to scramble to find men’s players passed on by NBA and top-tier overseas clubs yet talented enough to challenge for a medal.
The talent gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world may not be as large as it is when Steve Kerr brings Durant off the bench against South Sudan, but the men’s 3×3 team seldom takes the court at a disadvantage. No one else had a former lottery pick like Fredette who dropped 41 points on the Houston Rockets in an exhibition game not that long ago. Even Barry is a former SEC sixth man of the year at Florida who later spent five years playing professionally in the G-League and overseas.
The bigger issue for the Americans so far is how poorly they’ve shot in Paris. Barry and Fredette went a combined 0 for 8 from behind the arc against Poland, difficult to recover from in a 10-minute game. Fredette’s injury in the final minutes of the Poland game only added to the Americans’ problems.
When asked why the U.S. struggles in 3×3 more than other disciplines of basketball, both Barry and Maddox pointed to how brief the games are and how that format leads to upsets. There’s more variance in a 10-minute, first-to-21 sprint than there is over the course of a 48-minute traditional basketball game.
“Tonight is a perfect example,” Barry said. “We didn’t make any shots tonight. If this is a 5-on-5 game, that’s the first quarter. We have three more quarters to make shots.”
Added Maddox, “I would look to the history books and see how many times the 5-on-5 team was down after the first quarter. That’s a full game for us. It’s a game where if someone gets hot fast, it’s hard to dig yourself out of the hole.”
