Other than Kevin Durant’s masterful performance coming off the bench, the biggest story to come out of Team USA’s win over Serbia on Sunday was the fact that Jayson Tatum didn’t play a single second.
You weren’t alone if you thought maybe Tatum had a little injury pop up. A picture floated around social media showing his finger heavily wrapped. Or maybe he caught the virus that Joel Embiid and Anthony Davis were dealing with in the lead up to Sunday. There had to be something going on, right?
Nope. He just straight up got benched. Coach’s decision. Not a single second to be found for the best player on the best team in the NBA who has made first-team All-NBA three straight years. Not even when the Americans were up 21 early in the fourth quarter. Tatum, who was presumed to be one of the candidates to crack the starting lineup, never once took his warmup shirt off.
“It’s really hard in a 40-minute game to play more than 10 guys,” U.S. coach Steve Kerr told reporters after the game. “With Kevin [Durant] coming back, I just went to the combinations that I felt made the most sense. It seems crazy. I thought I was crazy when I looked at everything and determined these are the lineups I wanted to get to.”
In a separate interview with ESPN’s Brian Windhorst, Kerr admitted that he “felt like an idiot” for not playing Tatum, but he did iterate that “every game’s going to be different based on matchups” while indicating that Tatum “is going to play” as the tournament moves forward.
As an initial reaction, it seems pretty silly to hear Kerr say Tatum didn’t play because of “matchups” and “lineup combinations” when his greatest strength as a player is the fact that he fits any lineup in any role and can match up against any opponent. He can’t be hunted defensively. He can play on or off ball. The idea that a 6-foot-8 wing who can shoot, pass, dribble, defend and rebound doesn’t match up well with Serbia, or anyone else for that matter, is, frankly, a preposterous suggestion on its own.
Of course, this is an entirely unique context. Perhaps the most important thing Kerr said is that “our guys know the key to this whole thing is to put all the NBA stuff in the rearview mirror and just win six games.” That’s where a team with this much overlapping talent gets tricky. On a regular team, Tatum is the best player. On this team, there are half a dozen guys, at least, who can do all the same things he does, and that’s where you have to read between the lines of Kerr’s words.
What he’s saying, in essence, is that he thinks Devin Booker, who is damn near the same player as Tatum, is a better fit through the lens of supporting the starting lineup, and he thinks Anthony Edwards is a better player, period.
You can argue that Derrick White maintains second-unit offensive clarity as a non-scorer with a clear-cut duty to defend in the same way Jrue Holiday does for the starters. Anthony Davis and Bam Adebayo are positionally necessary, and Durant is, well, Durant. Edwards is the one who could, on paper, be most easily swapped out for Tatum.
I’m not saying Kerr should’ve gone that route, because then we’d be sitting here saying why the hell didn’t Edwards play. I’m simply saying you can’t tell me for one second that Edwards “matches up better” with Serbia than Tatum.
If anything, the argument could be made that Durant’s presence, if we’re talking pure lineup combinations, would make Edwards less necessary as a go-to scorer on the second unit, while Tatum would make sense in a do-everything support role similar to one Booker occupied with the starters. Trying to make this about “matchups” is a euphemism for a harsh truth: Kerr didn’t think Tatum was a necessary component to beat one of the better teams in the tournament. When he says Tatum will be out there next game, well, the U.S. is playing South Sudan on Wednesday. Kerr could throw blind darts for his lineup decisions in that game and Team USA could still win by 30 (as long as the Americans don’t repeat their performance from earlier this month).
So let’s get to the heart of the question: Are Booker and Edwards better players than Tatum? Reasonable minds can disagree here. If you were ranking NBA players, those three would be very close to one another on any list worth its salt.
Perhaps it factored into Kerr’s decision that Tatum didn’t play or shoot all that well through the exhibition schedule. But neither did Booker, who connected on just 33% of his 3s in the Olympic lead up.
I guess you could argue that Booker does feel like a slightly better suited support player than Tatum does in a starting lineup controlled by two alphas LeBron James and Stephen Curry, but you really have to squint to accept that reasoning. If you’re going to go with the spacing logic, Tatum was actually a better catch-and-shoot shooter this past NBA season, and he just won a championship on a team whose greatest strength was the sum-of-its-parts blending of elite talents. Tatum didn’t shoot well throughout the playoffs and yet was awesome in all the margins that tend to tie lineups together.
We do this a lot in NBA parlance as well, getting obsessed with these “matchup” and “fit” buzz words. The reality is this: good players, particularly ones who land squarely in the center of the size-and-skill spectrum and, perhaps most importantly, can play multi-positional defense, fit anywhere.
This is the blessing and curse of having your hand on the switches of a team with this much redundantly elite talent. Pretty much all these guys can do everything. The only other player that didn’t see the court was Tyrese Haliburton, but that has a clear explanation. He’s not the defender that White is.
In Kerr’s defense, while Tatum is certainly a capable and versatile defender, Edwards is clearly better, and Booker is probably a little better, on the ball, and point-of-attack pressure is a big part of the FIBA game. The easy answer would’ve been to split minutes between Booker and Tatum, but then you’re cutting into the flow that takes time to create for both the individual player and the lineup as a whole.
Kerr also could’ve put Tatum, and Haliburton for that matter, in the game in the fourth quarter when the outcome was decided, but that almost feels more embarrassing than not playing at all. These guys are superstars. They don’t want to sub into garbage time like some high school scrub.
In hindsight, Kerr’s decision to go with Booker and Edwards over Tatum looks pretty damn good after they combined to score 23 points on 6-of-8 3-point shooting while the Americans put on a collective basketball clinic. And that doesn’t bode well for Tatum moving forward.
Yes, he might or even probably will play in these next two group-stage games against South Sudan and Puerto Rico because there’s almost no way the Americans can lose those matchups, and when the U.S. potentially faces an opponent against whom they might be wise to play smaller (Canada, for instance), Tatum could see time there, as well.
But when all things are equal, he is clearly not Kerr’s choice at this point. That’s a tough pill to swallow, and you wonder how it might impact Tatum’s enthusiasm for future Olympic endeavors when the Americans will need him a lot more once LeBron and Durant finally age out. Only time will tell for that. But for now, Kerr is playing this tournament with the guys he feels give him the best chance to not go down as the coach who blew a fifth straight gold medal with one of the most talented teams ever. If Tatum’s ego has to take a hit in the spirit of that mission, so be it.
