USA Basketball flunks another exhibition, coach Gregg Popovich fails with postgame history lecture
Even after Australia’s Joe Ingles grabbed the basketball and the buzzer sounded to signal the end of his team’s exhibition victory over the United States senior men’s national team on Monday, U.S. coach Gregg Popovich wasn’t through taking Ls.
He now owns a 9-5 record in this position, a .642 winning percentage that would be perfectly adequate if he were in charge of a developing NBA team – which he is in his day job with the San Antonio Spurs. The person who preceded him as national team coach, however, finished a 12-year run in the position with a .987 percentage, so Popovich’s record appears less than stellar.
In the press conference that followed Australia’s 91-83 win Monday night in Las Vegas, Popovich wound up on the wrong side of the result yet again.
A reporter from The Athletic, Joe Vardon, asked Trail Blazers star Damian Lillard, “What it’s like for you to have watched your colleagues go through some of these tournaments and blow these teams out, and now you are experiencing a much closer, a much tougher experience.”
Lillard presented a reasonable answer, stressing the improvement in world basketball and the cohesion of teams with more constant rosters though tweaking the history a bit by saying, “In the past, when I have watched, you’d see one guy on a different team that is in a rotation in the NBA and they might have a guy on a bench that is just on a team.” That might have been true of the weaker teams, but surely not of Spain, Argentina or France in recent Olympiads.
When Lillard was finished, Popovich subjected the history to much greater torture. Popovich scolded Vardon for asking a similar question following USA Basketball’s weekend loss to Nigeria, “where you assume things that are not true, when you just mentioned blowing these teams out – that’s never happened.”
