PARIS – Here we are, standing in the middle of the Place de la Condorde, face to face with newly minted bronze medalist Cierra Burdick from the US women’s 3×3 basketball team.
I feel sorry for him because the question everyone really wants to ask is not the kind of thing you ask an athlete after what should be one of the best times of their life. . So, instead, everyone pulls together: What do you want to see from 3×3 in the future? How can it grow in America? How do we keep pace?
Meanwhile, what we mean is clear: WHY THE HECK IS TEAM USA NOT WINNING GOLD MEDALS AT THIS GAME?
We invented basketball. Name its type: 5×5, 3×3, Streetball, Slamball, HORSE. It doesn’t matter. We have the deepest talent pool in the world to draw from. We deserve to win. We’re not celebrating bronze medals here, and if this was a USA Basketball game it was really solid, everyone involved in the men’s 2-5 Paris game (after disqualification for Tokyo) would be fired.
“It’s obviously not the award we were looking for,” Burdick said. But I don’t want to quit now. I want to be here, you know, I’m grateful to be here.”
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So that tells you all you need to know about where the US stands on the 3×3, and the people in charge will spend the next four years in Los Angeles trying to figure out how to fix it. because goodness knows that our country will not exist. take this kind of shame on home soil.
There will be hand wringing. There will be intelligent people making very serious suggestions about what we can do to prevent our men from losing in Latvia and Poland as they did here. There will be more tournaments, more 3×3 camps, more pressure on NBA players and top WNBA players to participate.
And I’m here to tell you something after watching it near Paris: The effort is worthless.
Because this game stinks.
Sorry to be the party pooper here, but it’s true. And deep down, you know it too. if you really love the game of basketball for its strategy and art and athleticism in the end … well, this is not it. It will never be.
That’s what pickleball is to tennis. It’s a fake Rolex you can buy for twenty bucks in Times Square. That’s what Stars & Stripes Cola is to Coke.
It’s not mine.
“I mean I’d like it to grow,” Burdick said. “I would like to have 3×3 camps on the youth side. We are starting and launching a professional 3×3 league in America, and I want to continue to progress and see that grow, and I hope that girls and boys will play.
That’s when I jumped into the conversation. In my heart I am thinking: WHAT would you like to have? WHAT do you start? What do you want to find more girls and boys playing?
But what I asked was more subtle, about whether all this points to behavior in 3×3 so that the Americans can chase gold medals once every few years four?
He said: “I don’t think so. “I think it’s a good example that you shouldn’t do it. I mean I come to Europe and play 5×5 for eight months out of the year and then I go back home to play for my country in 3×3, so I have the best of the world in my opinion. I think if you can play 3×3, you can play 5×5.”
Let’s hope so, because one thing American basketball doesn’t need is a game where people grow up thinking this schlocky product is nothing more than it is.
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It would be one thing if 3×3 actually looked and felt like real basketball. Instead, it’s a lot of fouls (and a lot of pay for fouls) and a lot of bad shots taken at the end of the 12-second clock. And since the game only lasts 10 minutes, with nature will be sudden.
A lot of the talk back in the US this week was about why we can’t get junior NBA players or G-Leaguers who can’t sniff the Olympic team to commit to playing 3×3 . Just watch one play of the players touching each other while running around half of the basketball court and you will see it very quickly.
Which leads to a bigger question. If the Olympics are the pinnacle of international sports, and basketball is already an international sport that showcases the world’s best players, why do you need a lesser version of it? If 3×3 can’t attract what could be considered a few hundred other players in the world to their chosen sport, what’s the point of having it in the Olympics?
Apparently it has become popular in Europe and is growing rapidly. I commend them.
But there is no reason to panic because the two American teams came home with only one bronze medal in 3×3.
Being in the Olympics makes it a real sport, but it will never be better than bad knockoff basketball.
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