Olympic men's basketball preview
By the numbers!
Numbers Game has uncharacteristically skied to the top of the file on this Newsletter Tuesday.
Reason being: I wanted to devote the whole section to the Olympic hoops tournament which starts Saturday in Paris and was thus moved to devote the week's most prime real estate to it.
So …
Your numerical men’s basketball breakdown for the onrushing Olympics:
🏀 3
Brooklyn's Dennis Schröder has been selected as Germany's male flag bearer for Friday's opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics, increasing the count to three current NBA players to hold that honor at these Olympics. Schröder will join the Lakers' LeBron James (United States) and Milwaukee's Giannis Antetokounmpo (Greece).
🏀 2
Yao Ming was twice China’s flag bearer at the Olympics — both in 2004 in Athens and again in 2008 in Beijing when his country served as Summer Games host.
🏀 8
Eight other current or former NBA players have served as their country’s Olympic flag bearer: Pau Gasol (Spain), Manu Ginobili (Argentina), Rui Hachimura (Japan), Andrei Kirilenko (Russia), Patty Mills (Australia), Dirk Nowitzki (Germany). Luis Scola (Argentina) and Yi Jianlian (China).
🏀 2008
Greece last participated in the men’s basketball tournament at the 2008 Summer Games … one year before Antetokounmpo became a full-time hooper. He started playing basketball seriously in 2009, was selected by the Bucks in the first round of the NBA Draft just four years later and won his first of two regular-season MVP awards after the 2018-19 season.
🏀 0
South Sudan is the only team in the men's Olympic field with no current NBA players on its roster after the recent withdrawal of Phoenix's Bol Bol.
🏀 17
Duke-bound center Khaman Maluach made the South Sudan roster at just 17 and is regarded as a certain first-round pick in the 2025 NBA Draft.
🏀 5
There are also five players on South Sudan’s roster with NBA experience — Deng Adel, Carlik Jones, Wenyen Gabriel, Marial Shayok and JT Thor — and it would have been six had Thon Maker received the FIBA clearance he sough this week.
🏀 2
Spain is currently No. 2 in FIBA's world rankings — one spot behind the United States and one spot ahead of 2023 World Cup champions Germany — but has only one current NBA player on its Olympic roster: Memphis' Santi Aldama.
🏀 39
Rudy Fernández, however, is still playing for Spain at age 39 (he's only four months and change younger than LeBron James) while Willy and Juancho Hernangómez ensure that the Spaniards still have a brother duo familiar to NBA fans even after the retirements of Pau and Marc Gasol.
🏀 10
Canada has 10 current NBA players on its 12-man roster — second only to the United States' 12 — and is regarded in some corners as the foremost threat in the tournament prevent the Americans from winning a fifth successive gold.
🏀 209
Canada's Jamal Murray is expected to sign a four-year, $209 million contract extension with the Denver Nuggets this offseason but that deal, curiously, appears unlikely to be finalized before Olympic play begins. Nuggets general manager Calvin Booth recently told Sirius XM NBA Radio that completing the deal should be "pretty easy" after the Olympics. You'll recall that Murray missed the entire 2021-22 NBA season after sustaining a torn left ACL in April 2021.
🏀 12
There are only 12 nations in the men's Olympic basketball field compared to 32 at the quadrennial World Cup.
🏀 3
The 12 teams are split into three four-team groups, with the top two teams and the two best third-place finishers advancing to the quarterfinals. Group A is by far regarded as the toughest since it houses Australia, Canada, Greece and Spain. Host nation France is joined by Brazil, Germany and Japan in Group B, while the United States headlines Group C alongside Puerto Rico, Serbia and South Sudan.
🏀 46
Olympics rosters are only finalized this week, but we are on course to see 46 current NBA players in France. The full list:
AUSTRALIA
Dyson Daniels (Atlanta)
Dante Exum (Dallas)
Josh Giddey (Chicago)
Josh Green (Charlotte)
Joe Ingles (Minnesota)
Jock Landale (Houston)
Duop Reath (Portland)
BRAZIL
Gui Santos (Golden State)
CANADA
Nickeil Alexander-Walker (Minnesota)
RJ Barrett (Toronto)
Dillon Brooks (Houston)
Luguentz Dort (Oklahoma City)
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (Oklahoma City)
Trey Lyles (Sacramento)
Jamal Murray (Denver)
Andrew Nembhard (Indiana)
Kelly Olynyk (Toronto)
Dwight Powell (Dallas)
FRANCE
Nicolas Batum (LA Clippers)
Bilal Coulibaly (Washington)
Rudy Gobert (Minnesota)
Victor Wembanyama (San Antonio)
GERMANY
Dennis Schröder (Brooklyn)
Daniel Theis (New Orleans)
Franz Wagner (Orlando)
Mo Wagner (Orlando)
GREECE
Giannis Antetokounmpo (Milwaukee)
JAPAN
Rui Hachimura (Los Angeles Lakers)
PUERTO RICO
Jose Alvarado (New Orleans)
SERBIA
Bogdan Bogdanović (Atlanta)
Nikola Jokić (Denver)
Nikola Jović (Miami)
Vasilije Micić (Charlotte)
SPAIN
Santi Aldama (Memphis)
UNITED STATES
Bam Adebayo (Miami)
Devin Booker (Phoenix)
Stephen Curry (Golden State)
Anthony Davis (Los Angeles Lakers)
Kevin Durant (Phoenix)
Anthony Edwards (Minnesota)
Joel Embiid (Philadelphia)
Tyrese Haliburton (Indiana)
Jrue Holiday (Boston)
LeBron James (Los Angeles Lakers)
Jayson Tatum (Boston)
Derrick White (Boston)
🏀 42
That number could still get closer to 50 if France's Even Fournier and Australia's Patty Mills, both NBA free agents, find new teams this offseason. Don’t forget that Mills scored 42 points in the bronze medal game at the last Olympics in Tokyo to help Australia beat Luka Dončić-led Slovenia and secure its first-ever men’s basketball medal.
🏀 4
A calf injury prevented Kevin Durant from playing in any of the United States' five pre-Paris exhibition games, but he remains one of the most feared forces in the history of the international basketball as he chases Olympic gold for the fourth time.
🏀 3
LeBron is seeking his third Olympic gold medal in four tries after a bronze in 2004 and golds in 2008 and 2012. He skipped the past two Olympiads.
🏀 36
At age 36, Golden State's Stephen Curry is making his Olympic debut. He previously helped the United States win World Cup titles in 2010 and 2014.
🏀 7
The United States has won the past four Olympic gold medals in men's basketball and seven of eight since NBA players became eligible to participate starting with the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona … but the Americans did finish seventh in the 2019 FIBA World Cup in China and fourth in last year's World Cup hosted in Indonesia, Japan and The Philippines.
🏀 25
A loss to France in its Olympic opener in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics that were contested in 2021 snapped a 25-game winning streak for the United States in Olympic play. And now Victor Wembanyama, who doesn't turn 21 until next January, joins Rudy Gobert on the French front line to make his Olympic debut as the star of the host nation.
The Stein Line is a reader-supported newsletter with both Free and Paid subscriptions available … and those who opt for the Paid edition are taking an active role in the reporting by providing vital assistance to bolster my independent coverage of #thisleague. Feel free to forward this post to family and friends interested in the NBA and please consider becoming a Paid subscriber to have full access to all of my posts.
As a reminder: Tuesday editions, on this and every Newsletter Tuesday, go out free to anyone who signs up, just as my Tuesday pieces did in their New York Times incarnation.
Photo Album
I didn't take a lot of pictures in Las Vegas because, as you can imagine, I wasn't in a real rush to go outside much when temperatures in the desert during the early portion of summer league actually cracked 120 degrees.
Also: I remain a stubborn words guy, as always, whose limited photojournalism skills and slow reaction time to seize photo opportunities are difficult weaknesses to overcome. (Perhaps you saw my feeble excuse in Monday's This Week In Basketball compilation in which I tried to explain how I failed to snap a single serving of the delectable chips and salsa found at Javier's in the Aria hotel.)
Anyway …
Will try to do better on the rest of my summer travels — with some undeniable surprises ahead! — but I can only pass along three (semi-)decent pics from the trip:
Offseason Analysis
In case you missed any (or all) of the various installments from the recent four-part series assessing summer business in the Western and Eastern Conference, as curated by longtime colleague
, I decided to put all of my musings in one place to scroll through:The Nuggets will say that they targeted two free agents this offseason and got them both: Dario Šarić and (eventually) Russell Westbrook. They are certainly going to land those guys on team-friendly contracts, but Denver's ambition since winning the first championship in franchise history ... let's just say I would love to hear unvarnished thoughts from Nikola Jokić on his team's approach.
Bruce Brown left town without compensation last summer. And now Kentavious Caldwell-Pope has followed suit this summer. Making and merely even taking 3-pointers was a major issue last season and the Nuggets just lost more shooting with KCP's exit. I'm not sure it's baffling — since the Nuggets have been regarded as cost-conscious/luxury tax-averse for as long as I can remember — but this all has to be so frustrating for Nuggets fans who surely expected their team to keep chasing titles after finally winning the first in franchise history ... and maybe Jokić, too, if he'll ever tell us.
The Nuggets will have to rely heavily now on young players like Christian Braun, Julian Strawther and Peyton Watson and they sadly just lost one of those as well when newly drafted DaRon Holmes II sustained a torn Achilles in summer league that will cost him his entire rookie season. It's a lot (as all these words suggest).
On the fascinating Klay Thompson:
Maybe it's because I will have a front-row seat for it all because of where I live, but Klay Thompson choosing Dallas fascinates me endlessly. The signs of Klay's discontent with how the last season-plus of his Warriors tenure played out are certainly evident now — with hindsight. I guess the basketball romantic inside me just didn't want to believe that he ever would want to play elsewhere.
Years and years of covering the Mavericks' whiffs in free agency only add to the shock of it all. Thompson clearly wants to show people that he can still be a key cog on a title team. There will be no shortage of skepticism that both he and the Mavericks can stay at that level.
I've had the privilege of covering more than a few chapters in Klay's career … but I never, ever expected his one. Fascinating with a capital F.
The Bulls put the B in baffling. I'm guessing this nomination will surprise very few, since I am hardly alone in highlighting several recent questionable decisions in Chicago, but we're going to need to hear some detailed answers at some point.
Why did the Bulls turn down the far richer offers for Caruso that were on the table at the February trade deadline if they were just going to surrender him — along with DeMar DeRozan — for such a modest return in June and July? Reminder: Caruso, DeRozan and Andre Drummond have all left town in recent weeks and only brought back Josh Giddey, Chris Duarte, two future second-round picks and cash. Bulls management surely had a strong inkling at the February deadline how challenging it would be to trade Zach LaVine — which still hasn't happened — and that should have been sufficient impetus to initiate a teardown then.
There are certainly some other teams in the East whose paths forward are muddled; Milwaukee, Miami and Atlanta all come to mind. But nobody inspires head-scratching right now like the Bulls.
Maybe fascinating is not the most precisely applicable word, but I don't know how this conversation can begin anywhere other than Philadelphia. Daryl Morey had to convince Tyrese Maxey that waiting an entire year for his max deal would be worth it for him and the team and then proceeded to pull off the cross-country pilfering of Paul George after so much of the league believed that the only current All-Star truly available on this summer's free agent market would never swap West Coast for East Coast.
Even the Sixers' smaller moves (wresting Caleb Martin from Miami, re-signing Kelly Oubre Jr. but with Oubre agreeing to waive his One-Year Bird trade veto rights, adding Andre Drummond and Eric Gordon on bargain deals, bringing back Philly native Kyle Lowry) all had some shine.
While there is still plenty to prove on the court, starting with health and how George handles the searing Philly spotlight after it appeared that staying in Clipperland or a move to the Bay Area were his preferences, Morey executed his entire year-in-the-making plan. A front office couldn't wish for more.
This was a fantastic read!
20 years removed from Athens, Puerto Rico will shock the world again 🇵🇷🇵🇷🇵🇷