A Pathetic Performance

There is no excuse for Team USA's performance today. Early news reports are pointing out our 3 for 24 effort from beyond the arc, nodding knowingly, but that was hardly the problem. Admittedly, I did not see the game, but I'm assuming that most of those threes were fired after we were already down 20 points. If you want to place blame, look at these numbers:

Puerto Rico had a .564 fg % for the game.
Puerto Rico hit 8 of 16 threes.

That's not a lot of defense, folks. And this Puerto Rico team is no mystery European team, filled with NBA and ought-to-be NBA talents. I mean, Jose Ortiz? Are you kidding me?

Team USA may not have many deep threats, but they do have a collection of amazing athletes, many of whom have succeeded because of their agressive style of play. Where is that here? Where is the defense? Team USA ought to be able to stop this band of Puerto Ricans from even crossing half-court, and yet we're making their enter I roster look like a Pack of Pejas. I don't get it, and I'm disgusted.

I'll finish with a post-game quote from Miami's own Dwyane Wade:

Dwyane Wade
On tonight's game:
They came out and wanted it more than us. I don't know why, but they did. They executed great in the beginning, we didn't and we dug ourselves into a hole that we weren't able to get out of tonight. We didn't make shots, but we had some great looks. I think we just came out flat, it happens, we have to learn how to come out more aggressive for the next game.

We lost today, but we have another game, we'll learn from this and we have to continue to compete. We can't worry about the practices we didn't have, or how long we've been together. Everything happens for a reason and so hopefully our reason is to learn from this and continue going forward.

We weren't really playing together as a team the way we should. Tonight we didn't utilize our big fella Tim Duncan as much as we should so therefore the ball was out on the perimeter too much and once you keep passing the ball back and forth, back and forth, something's liable to happen. Tonight something bad happened. We've been careless with the ball a lot and tonight it came back to bite us.