Hah. Three points: (1) The Greeks were playing over their heads, as the final demonstrated. (2) The one-and-done format isn’t a way to determine the best team, as those of us who remember Villanova and N.C. State in the 1980s can attest. (3) And once Kobe joins this team in 2008, it will be lights out for the rest of the world.

The English rugby team draws from a player base at least ten times larger than the Australian and New Zealand teams, and is routinely thumped by either (with the early part of this decade an honorable exception). Player base is no measure of national team strength.

Neither is tradition. Again taking rugby union as an example, the Welsh and South Africans have learned this the hard way.

No team is entitled to dominate a sport. You have to have good players, good tactics and strategy, respect your opposition and play to your strengths and their weaknesses. It also helps if you’re lucky (how the ball bounces off the rim, or for rugby and football, off the ground).

Given all this, a healthy dose of humility helps you to enjoy the highs and move positively and gracefully through the inevitable lows. Kipling knew what he was on about.

If you shoot 59% from the free throw line and 32% from 3 point range against a team that shoots 70% from the field in the last three quarters you deserve to lose.

Unfortunately too many American basketball players don’t play the fundamentals well. Through Tuesday’s stats not one US player was in the top 10 in free throw percentage for this competition.

Its hard to criticize NBA players for not playing in the international competition. If you’re Kevin Garnett, that could take years off your career and cost you $30-50 million dollars.

Oh please. Major professional soccer players in Europe like Ronaldinho, Thierry Henry and numerous others play regular league games, League Cup games as well as Champions League or UEFA Cup games from August to May and consider it an honor to play for their national team.

This had nothing to do with poor attitudes, or lack of effort, or lack of team unity… none of those things that get unfairly applied to NBA players. The fact of the matter is that the Greeks play with a continuity and intelligence that takes literally years for a team to develop, and that they had better fundamentals. And it was just proven, beyond any doubt, that you can’t put an all-star team together and make up for that difference, no matter how talented those all-stars are, in three or four weeks. You just can’t.

And the Greek teams Panathinaikos and Olympiakos have been dominating the European cup/Euroleague from the early 90s.

Tommy Cooper was a fine man, all the same. He wore a fez and made deadpan, daft jokes like these:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~peter/humour/cooper.html

Are you getting Henry Cooper mixed up with Tommy Cooper? ‘Enery was a heavyweight boxer.

Re: a-ro’s comments. You’re absolutely right. The 100,000 best basketball players in the U.S. could beat the 10,000 best players anywhere else in the world. When it comes down to some subset of the 50 best players in each country, it can often be a question of luck.

They don’t play well as a team? They’ve just won 12 straight games by double digits, averaging 27 points a victory during FIBA and more than that in the exhibitions. A loss to the Euro champion by 6 after a poor day at the charity stripe isn’t particularly humiliating.

In 04, when the US lost to teams like Puerto Rico, it’s fair to say they weren’t playing as a team. But even after this victory, I don’t think you’ll find many commentators, particularly outside the US, who would spot the US points in a matchup against anybody.

One interesting thing I’ve seen this year is that there are now a few NBA level talents making enough overseas that they aren’t coming to play stateside; the Greek at CSKA Moscow and Navarro at Barcelona are good examples. As a Celtic fan, I wouldn’t mind the Celts bringing over Baby Shaq/Sophocles, as he certainly looked good today and the Celts drafted him a few years back when he was 18.