The Importance of the Lithuania Game

                For the first time this Olympics the US Olympic basketball team was tested and showed some serious flaws.  They beat Lithuania by only 5 points and were trailing halfway through the 4^th quarter.  This Lithuania team has only one NBA player, Linas Kleiza and one player who will be a rookie in the NBA Jonas Valanciunas and yet was able to push the US to the brink.  Actually if Lebron James didn’t take over in the last couple of minutes scoring 9 points in the last 4 minutes then the US would probably not have won that game. 

                This game was kind of just a perfect storm for team USA if they were going to lose a game.  They had just come off the 83 point beat down of Nigeria where they played as well as they could possibly play against a team that frankly shouldn’t be in the Olympics.  Thus you were expecting a bit of a letdown game after that as the US was probably walking in expecting an easy win and really an easy rest of the tournament.  What happened though is that the extremely hot shooting from the Nigeria game became extremely cold shooting in this game.  They went from shooting 29-46 from three point range to shooting to shooting 10-33 and combining that with only make 19 of 31 free throw attempts.  Then you were playing a team that while not necessarily high on NBA talent was a veteran team coming from a proud basketball tradition that believed that could beat USA.  The Soviet Team in 1988 that won gold was mostly made up of Lithuanians, they won bronze medals in every Olympics from 1992 to 2000, including the awesome 1992 team that beat the dreaded CIS team and was sponsored by the Grateful Dead, and was 4^th in 2004 and 2008.  They have fought hard with the US recently, as the last 5 games played between the 2 teams at the Olympics have all been single digit decisions.  Thus you combine an overconfident, cold USA Team with a veteran Lithuanian team the idea that this game could be an upset seems far more likely. 

                Personally though I think this close game against Lithuania, a team which they were 35 point favorites over, is a good thing for the US and can be a useful learning experience.   They showed some flaws in the way they play and changes and adjustments that they need to make.  To me the biggest thing it showed that despite how cool the idea of a frontcourt of Lebron, Durant and Carmelo is, against good basketball teams all you are doing is giving up to many easy layups.  This team needs to play either Tyson Chandler or Kevin Love at all times, personally I would even like to see some Anthony Davis thrown in, I think he could contribute.  The team also cannot become overly reliant on threes like it dead against Lithuania, against Nigeria when they are wide open every time that’s fine, but against a good team it is not an effective strategy.  The most important thing though is that it will prevent the team from being overconfident the rest of the tournament.  They now know that a team like Lithuania can hang and compete with them.  The team will now be completely focused for games against superior teams like Argentina, Spain, Russia and Brazil. 

Stay Hungry My Friends