5 ways the U.S. men’s basketball team’s defense has been garbage

If you caught any of Team USA’s exhibition games prior to the Olympics, mild struggles on offense could at least be foreseen. An 80-point showing against Venezuela highlighted a lack of perimeter shooting that has continued to pop up in Olympic play.

The ragged, uninspiring defense? That’s a different story.

Length and athleticism are at a surplus for USA Basketball, and ball hounds like Paul George, Jimmy Butler and Klay Thompson represent stiff tests for opposing perimeter players. Against China and Venezuela, Team USA more than answered the bell, pressing full court deep into games they’d closed out in earnest by halftime.

But against more talented opposition in Australia, Serbia and France, a combination of factors have left the Americans looking much more ordinary than their talent suggests they should be. In those three games, the U.S. allowed 98, 91 and 97 points (to a team that sat Tony Parker). Though the U.S. is 5-0 entering the knockout rounds, it arguably has the worst defense among top medal contenders.

What’s at the heart of the issue? A number of problems:

Team USA is seeing what many NBA playoff teams have to deal with every spring: weak links in the defensive unit are exposed early and often against better competition.

You can get away with minus defenders against the likes of the Lakers or China, but their flaws are amplified as the stakes rise. Kyrie Irving, DeMarcus Cousins and Carmelo Anthony are good enough on offense to overcome their issues on the other end, but when you stack those issues on top of one another, you run into real problems.

USA Basketball has long had big and/or ferocious defenders at the point of attack, from Jason Kidd to Chris Paul, in addition to a stable of rim protectors to erase mistakes. Irving’s shot making is essential for Team USA and Cousins has taken steps forward as a defender in the NBA, but both need to be supplemented by proper lineup arrangements in order to maximize Team USA’s two-way effectiveness.

The misfiring individual parts put USA Basketball’s chemistry issues on display, a problem the players must deal with even if it’s out of their control.

Team USA’s newness is obvious when you see breakdowns on both ends of the court. Having only played together for a month, this iteration of USA Basketball is still in the early stages of development. We’ve seen NBA superteams struggle on this front, highlighted by the Big Three’s early issues in Miami. Unfortunately, Team USA doesn’t have an 82-game schedule to work through the kinks.

But unless USA Basketball alters the selection process, every edition of this team faces the same problem. It alone can’t be used to explain away their mistakes.

Even when everything else is going wrong, a team’s effort level is always under their control. Team USA can’t run around like a bunch of headless chickens, but they need to up the intensity if they don’t want to get caught taking wins for granted.

Members of Team USA have already acknowledged this fact, most notably when George called it out following the tight win against Serbia:

Defensively is where we have to man up. In our game, there’s movement obviously. With these guys, it’s constant movement. We talked about it in the back. You never sit still. In our game, there are moments when you sit still. You can have a rest period. You might get action that guys just run on one side. You’re constant moving from side to side. They don’t get tired.

Team USA is still comfortably the most talented team in the tournament, and it’s easy to be complacent when you feel you’re a few notches above the competition. But every team in this tournament is gunning for the right to be the team that knocks them off their golden pedestal. Pedestrian efforts are not going to cut it, even with the talent advantage.

A single play encapsulated this problem, though it by no means is the only example. Early in their game against France, Kevin Durant made a layup on a leak out in transition.

With Durant jogging back to join his four teammates on defense, Nicolas Batum was able to get a wide-open corner three as Team USA played a game of “not my guy” that would look more at home at your local pickup game.

Those sort of plays are 100 percent preventable and must be cleaned up immediately.

Energy on one end of the basketball court feeds the other side of the ball. Turnovers create easy buckets in transition, and successful possessions on offense allow your defense to get set.

Though Team USA is scoring plenty of points, its offense has been far from picture perfect, as described by assistant coach Tom Thibodeau in a recent interview:

Right now on both ends of the floor I think when things aren’t going well we still have to stay within a team concept. We probably tried to go a little bit too much one-on-one, more a result of guys trying to get us going. We still have to stay within a team concept when things aren’t going well, you get into trouble together, you also get out of trouble together.

This is a team-wide problem, with offensive sets devolving into hero ball more often than is usual for an American squad at the Olympics. Anthony and Irving have bailed out stagnant possessions with expert shot making, but the team’s play has trended toward over-reliance on individual efforts.

Even in the best of times for the offense, many of the players haven’t lived up to their abilities. Thompson’s reliable floor spacing has been missing save for his dominance against France, and the long rebounds that come off missed threes have led to a plethora of transition looks for opponents. Paired with the aforementioned effort issues, it’s a recipe for disaster.

If Team USA runs better offensive sets, its defense will have a base of success to build from. At the moment, the Americans can’t seem to get either part of the equation in order.

Team USA’s defensive woes all combine to form the weakest part of their team: off-ball defense.

Defending on the ball is a straightforward task. As long as you can keep your man in front of you and stay focused on the basketball, you’ve done your job. Off-ball defenders, on the other hand, are navigating through a maze of cuts, screens and perpetual movement, particularly in the motion-heavy international game.

The Americans have been tortured by backdoor cuts throughout the tournament, most of them coming on baseline cuts from the corner. Team USA’s sleepy help defenders have given up far too many open layups on the exact same play, and the frequency has been high enough that fingers can’t be pointed at just one player.

International teams incorporate a lot more movement into their offense than the standard NBA opponent. Accustomed as Team USA’s players may be to facing teams like the Warriors or Spurs, the 40-minute games and group substitution patterns allow opponents to run these sets quickly and furiously.

This has manifested in several ways. On one play, Irving is losing his man on a cut and causing a rotation breakdown, leading to an easy look after some simple ball movement. On the next play, it’s Cousins sinking in pick-and-roll defense when he needs to show on the ball handler.

Team USA’s second unit has cleaned up a lot of the issues, though they’ve been far from perfect themselves. DeMar Derozan’s gambling tendencies have been exploited the last few games for wide-open buckets, thanks to simple head fakes goading him into chasing ghosts. The lack of discipline has run rampant through the team and threatens to explode a blood vessel in Thibodeau’s forehead.

On loaded teams, coaches often tend to get too much of the blame and not enough credit when things are going right. But that’s not the case in Rio. Coach K is ducking a lot of criticism, even as his lineup decisions leave a lot to be desired.

Over-tinkering is a dangerous proposition for Team USA given the chemistry issues at hand, but the rotations have been uninspiring and clearly not as effective as they should be. There’s an embarrassment of riches on hand for Duke’s overlord to craft lineups that get the best out of his talented cast.

Look no further than the arbiter of the Death lineup himself, Draymond Green. Coach K hasn’t played Green at center enough following a season in which he was the center for the best lineup in the NBA. Team USA’s strength is its superlative speed and length, bu it hasn’’t been able to use it to its advantage in lineups featuring Cousins (and even Jordan at times) in the pivot. Green has been subpar overall — and he did play center for stretches in a lineup that almost coughed up a late lead to Serbia — but the team needs to shake up its style in order to sharpen its identity.

Green’s misuse underscores a larger point — Krzyzewski has been mostly inflexible. Despite the obvious defensive woes of lineups featuring Irving, Cousins and Anthony simultaneously, he continues to go back to playing all three at the same time. They are talented players each deserving of their spots, but they’re not being used correctly.

Krzyzewski doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel. Small rotational tweaks would go a long way.

As an example, Kyle Lowry has been solid, if unspectacular leading the bench mob, and his job would get even easier were he to play alongside the offensive firepower of the starting unit. A quicker hook for Irving would allow Lowry to add a defensive edge to the point of attack, freeing Irving to bolster the firepower of the defensive-minded bench.

There’s no easy fix for what ails Team USA. The roster isn’t changing, the timeline is set in stone and their opponents smell blood. Consecutive three-point margins of victory underline the point that this is a vulnerable team playing beneath its potential. Team USA needs to shape up, fast.

If the recent surge of international talent headed toward the NBA wasn’t a big enough hint, Team USA’s performance in the last three games should be a wake-up call. A gold medal in Rio isn’t a given for the Americans, and they need to start defending like they acknowledge that.