Eric over at Offwing has an interesting reply to Jason Whitlock’s article that compares USA Basketball’s recent performance with Team Canada’s performance in the 1972 Summit Series. Read it if you have time….

I think Whitlock has a bit of a point here, to tell you the truth, and I don’t always feel that way about his work. These guys put their butts on the line when the rest of the league said no. Many of them have embraced all that’s good about the Olympics — Richard Jefferson has been seen at several other sports, Iverson is growing up before our eyes, etc. But they were not prepared to be here. Not like the softball team that spent all year playing any assortment of decent players they could find. Not like the soccer team that trained all year. Not like the water polo and volleyball teams, some of whom were even more disappointing. (Ahem … U.S. women … the Dominican Republic??!!)

I didn’t see a bunch of spoiled NBA stars sleep-walking their way through the tournament. I saw, like Michael Wilbon said, a bunch of guys working hard. But they weren’t ready. Blame the system, blame the coach, etc. Blame the players for never developing the jumpers and perimeter defense that would’ve helped them succeed at this level.

But the more I watched, the less I could pull against them. The stereotype of these players — of which race was PART but not all — didn’t match what I saw from them.

Skip — I like your idea of decentralizing, and I think the Summer Games should be split into a core of classic sports and a couple of smaller satellite Games. But I don’t see how the national federations will disappear. Even if you stripped away every national uniform, people will still cheer for whoever lives in their neighborhood, their state, their country, etc. Felix Sanchez, the latter-day Edwin Moses, had scant ties to the Dominican Republic before he decided to represent that country. The country embraced him anyway.

In effect, I’m proposing we coordinate all of the various “world championships” held in the Olympic off-years into one “Mardi Gras” of random sports.

In a sense, though, don’t the world records in the individual events already transcend nationality? The headline is: Tim Montgomery, an American, is World’s Fastest Man. As opposed to: Americans faster than other nationalities.

On second thought, maybe nationality is inextricably entwined. I suddenly recall rooting for Lance Armstrong precisely for being a Texan-American beating the Europeans.

As for the criticism that the basketball team wasn’t playing “team” ball, this goes more to what the real criticism should be: That USA Basketball failed in its job to assemble the best possible team. I would also question hiring Larry Brown as the coach; he is obviously qualified, but is his defense-based system the right approach for the international game? It’s the philosophy of coaches like Brown that have brought the NBA to the level it is today.

Now for Jim’s comments: I don’t disagree with anything he said, but his pitch is a little outside the contextual strike zone. The Olympics are expressly based on the premises of nationalism and statism. They require massive government interventions within the host nations and many of the participating countries. Every competition takes place in an express nationalist context. A true, individualist Olympics would eliminate national teams and olympic committees altogether.

It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that a bunch of shooters on a team just ain’t going to cut it. But up until the last game and a half that the team played, there was no real fire on the floor, IMHO. People criticized the team for not playing “team” ball, which they hadn’t been. Sorry, Mr. Whitlock, but if we put a team of all white players on the floor, and they stunk up the joint, they’d be hearing the same jeers from the crowd and the collective public.