By Eurohoops team / info@eurohoops.net
USA Basketball managing director Grant Hill explained how the national team focuses on mastering the differences between the NBA and the FIBA game in preparation for the 2024 Olympic Games.
“The main thing is the FIBA game is different than the NBA game,” Hill said in an interview for Andscape. “And that’s something that we will just continue to emphasize the whole way. And there are things that we’re doing from a film standpoint, from a drilling standpoint, to just reinforce and maybe change some of our habits that work in the NBA but need to be altered a bit with FIBA competition.”
All players of the USA team will march to the Olympics carrying at least some prior experience from a FIBA competition, except superstar center Joel Embiid who is debuting in an international tournament.
Hill also described how the lessons he acquired in the 2023 FIBA World Cup factored into compiling the team’s roster. For a second straight World Championship, USA didn’t manage to win a medal, finishing fourth after a loss to Canada in the third-place game.
“You can interview others who’ve gone through it. You can watch a ton of tape, but unless you go through that experience, it’s hard to really understand what it’s all about,” Hill mentioned. “And there’s just an understanding of how different the game is, how it’s officiated, how hard it is, how long it can be, how everything’s accelerated; the habits need to change. That played a lot for me in shaping this roster. And I think there’s more diversity and styles of play in the international game than there are in the NBA. Not [many] teams over there play two bigs in the paint like they did 25 years ago. We don’t see that in this game. But then you see a team like Canada who goes small and they spread it out. And so, you get different styles. We have the ability to play different styles and hopefully play well. Joel is someone that we haven’t had in years. Dwight Howard was the last true center in ’08. But Dwight was great defensively and rebound. He wasn’t necessarily offensively what Joel is. Prior to that, you got to go back to ’96 with Shaq [O’Neal], Hakeem [Olajuwon] and David Robinson.
The 2024 USA team is one of the most stacked ever in the country’s history. There’s future Hall of Famers LeBron James, Steph Curry and Kevin Durant leading the charge, joined by players like Jayson Tatum, Anthony Edwards, Tyrese Haliburton, Devin Booker, Bam Adebayo and Embiid.
“We had some versatility. We have flexibility. We can go big, we can go small,” Hill commented. “We have shooting and we have experience. Our guys last summer were great. They gave us everything. They were young and this was their first FIBA experience and I think they’ll be better for it if they get the opportunity down the road.”