Brian Windhorst breaks down the biggest takeaways from USA Basketball’s second Olympic win over South Sudan.
— Team USA is through to Tuesday’s Olympic basketball quarterfinals after a 103-86 victory over South Sudan secured that berth on Wednesday.
The game was a far cry from the first matchup against South Sudan in a pre-Olympic exhibition earlier this month, when LeBron James needed a last-second layup to secure a 101-100 win.
The Bright Stars are technically the lowest-rated team in the Olympics at 33rd in the FIBA World Rankings. But that is misleading, and they will have a reasonable shot at advancing to the quarterfinals, as well, depending on the outcome of their meeting with Serbia on Saturday.
After playing zero minutes in Team USA’s opening game, Jayson Tatum was back in the starting lineup, replacing Jrue Holiday, and put up four points in 17 minutes. While Tatum, Tyrese Haliburton and Derrick White didn’t play in the first Olympic game, Joel Embiid was the only player kept out of the second game after scoring four points in 11 minutes on Sunday.
The bench racked up 63 points, led by Bam Adebayo’s 18 points on 8-of-10 shooting and seven rebounds and Kevin Durant’s 14 points.
Team USA wraps up pool play on Saturday against Puerto Rico.
Here are the biggest takeaways from Team USA’s second Olympic game.
There may come a time when it’s fair to criticize coach Steve Kerr for his performance in these games; that’s the fragile nature of the event. But now is not the time. What he is doing — whether it be unorthodox, against tradition or perceived as disrespectful — is working.
His game plan against the fast and 3-point-shooting South Sudan team was to go with a wing-heavy starting lineup featuring Tatum at power forward and James at point guard. Out of that lineup were Embiid and Holiday, two players who represented a significant part of the game plan against Serbia.
Then he had a second unit of defensive stalwarts paired with the offensive firepower of Durant and Anthony Edwards.
