On Steve Kerr’s Aging Team USA, Experience Trumps Ability
Want to get into a game for the U.S.? So far, age matters a lot more than NBA performance.
The 2024 men’s U.S. Olympic basketball team was always going to be a weird mismash of past, present and future. This is the oldest roster in USA Basketball history, led by elder-millennials LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry and Jrue Holiday. But it also contains younger stars such as Anthony Edwards, Tyrese Haliburton, newly-minted NBA champion Jayson Tatum and Joel Embiid. Before the team came together, it was fair to wonder whether coach Steve Kerr would lean heavily on the old guys, or make room for the younger players based on how they have performed in the NBA recently.
Now that we’ve seen this team in action a handful of times, the answer is clear: The greybeards rule.
One need look no further than the fact that Tatum, Embiid and Haliburton sat out entire games so far, while James has played 48 out of a possible 80 minutes despite being a team-high 39 years and 216 days old.
There was a very interesting story in The Athletic yesterday about this simmering dynamic between the elder statesmen Kerr prefers and the young stars that are getting shut out of the Olympic experience. Kerr insisted that there was no issue (“We need to give these guys more credit. They’re here to win a gold medal. They’re pros. They’re committed to each other.”), but Tatum seemed irked that his burgeoning credentials didn’t correlate with more respect on this team:
“Definitely a humbling experience, right?” Tatum said about not playing at all against Serbia in the Olympic opener. “Win a championship, new contract, cover of (NBA) 2K (video game) and then you sit a whole game. Cover of Sports Illustrated. So it was definitely a humbling experience.”
In a way, he’s right to be miffed. Through two games, I looked at the relationship between Team USA playing time and two factors: Seasonal age during the 2023-24 NBA season, and Estimated RAPTOR during the 2023-24 NBA season. The former has a reasonably strong positive correlation with minutes per team game (0.51), while the latter has a reasonably strong negative correlation (-0.62):
In other words, being older — and worse, in terms of performance at the NBA level last season — is preferable to being younger — and better — if you want Kerr to give you a chance to play in Paris. Forget “what have you done for me lately?”; it’s all about how old you were on your latest birthday.
This probably shouldn’t be surprising, though. There is a “last dance” element to this team, with James, Curry and Durant knowing that this will be almost certainly be their final appearance at the Olympics. If the U.S. can still win while favoring age, there’s an argument it should do so to give these stars a gold-medal send-off. And they also can still play, even if KD and Steph are coming off their lowest RAPTOR ratings in years at the NBA level.
And as Team USA’s all-team leader in scoring at the Olympics, Durant is a particular example of a player who might be better in this setting than he is by the advanced NBA metrics at this phase of his career. (Carmelo Anthony had a similar arc of being a player whose pure scoring ability came to the fore in the international game.)
James, Durant and Curry are combining for 42 points per game and the U.S. remains heavy favorites (-550) to win gold, so it’s hard to second-guess Kerr’s reliance on the grizzled vets at the youngsters’ expense. But it is still striking how little a player’s value in the NBA last year has mattered when earning minutes in Paris so far.
Filed under: Basketball, NBA, Olympics
Interesting insight, but not overly surprising as you note given the sentimentality surrounding some of these players. The Olympic game is very different from the NBA. The competition is much lower and the U.S. roster far more talented than what you would find in any ordinary NBA game.
These factors significantly reduce the risks associated with using - or not using - certain assets on the bench in certain games. In the end, it just isn't likely to be material to the outcome. So, it makes sense that emotions start to crowd out intellect to some degree in the decision-making. The substitutions here are bound to be different.
The lone exception for me, however, is Joel Embiid. He's not young and only a year removed from a supposed NBA MVP season. Steve Kerr is a highly regarded and very experienced and successful NBA coach. Unlike with other players, Kerr noting that Embiid's lack of playing time was due to South Sudan being "fast" with great team speed and playing an up-tempo game - is alarming.
The fact that a thoughtful and cerebral coach like Kerr is reticent to put Embiid into a game against South Sudan because of pace suggests that his lumbering style up and down the court is a hindrance to the flow of the team. It also implies that he was unwilling to do so no matter who was surrounding him on the floor...even future Hall of Famers.
If I were a Sixers fan, I would be concerned.