Want a better Team USA three-on-three roster?
Get more NBA players — past and present — to participate in FIBA 3×3 competitions.
Team USA was thoroughly dominated, 22-14, by reigning gold medalists Team Serbia to start their pool play in the 2024 Paris Olympics on Tuesday.
The biggest takeaway was the discrepancy in talent from USA Basketball’s five-on-five roster, which is headlined by future basketball Hall of Famers LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant, to Team USA’s obscure 3×3 roster led by BYU has-been Jimmer Fredette.
The drop-off in talent, however, is due to the FIBA rules determining roster construction in Olympic 3×3 competition, now in its second set of games after its inception in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
After all, no active NBA players satisfied the criteria needed to make Team USA’s men’s 3×3 roster this Olympic run.
That’s because three-on-three teams are composed of four players:
- Two of those players must be ranked top-10 in FIBA 3×3 competitions in their country
- The other two players must be ranked within the top-50, or have the minimum number of ranking points, which are earned by playing in FIBA-approved 3×3 tournaments leading into the Olympics
Ironically, Fredette led the planet with just under 992,000 individual world ranking points. Serbia is home to the players ranked second (Strahinja Stojacic), fourth (Dejan Majstorovic) and fifth (Stefan Milivojevic), while Team USA’s Canyon Barry ranks sixth, Kareem Maddox ranks 11th and Dylan Travis ranks 16th.
Fredette, you’ll remember, went No. 10 overall in the 2011 NBA Draft after winning college basketball player of the year award as a senior at BYU before it became clear his game as an undersized scoring guard and defensive turnstile did not translate at the pro level. He spent three years with the Sacramento Kings then bounced around — eight games in Chicago, 54 in New Orleans, a cup of coffee at Madison Square Garden, then a last hoorah in Phoenix — before his career ended in 2019.
Maddox was working as an audio producer following an early end to his five-on-five career before he dove head-first into the three-on-three game. Barry is a full-time scientist, a system engineer for a defense contractor. And Travis led all of Nebraska in scoring as a high school senior yet somehow emerged with no Division-I scholarship offers. He is a special education teacher who plays basketball on the side.
Many other countries, Serbia included, send representatives who have the luxury of playing basketball all year long.
It’s also why the men’s 3×3 team should take a page from the women’s threes team: the women’s 3×3 team is positioning itself to compete for gold for the long haul.
Cameron Brink was a decorated college basketball player at Stanford who helped Team USA to FIBA gold after her senior year last summer. She was slated to represent USA Basketball in the 2024 Paris Olympics, but an ACL injury rendered her ineligible. The 3×3 committee replaced Brink with Dearica Hamby, a WNBA champion and three-time All-Star who averages 19 points and 10 rebounds for the Los Angeles Sparks. Hamby played 3×3 for the first time in December to help Team USA win gold at the 2023 FIBA AmeriCup.
Rhyne Howard won FIBA AmeriCup MVP as a college senior, then went on to win WNBA Rookie of the Year and earn two All-Star appearances. And Hailey Van Lith is a current decorated college basketball star at TCU who has already won two gold medals.
The ladies’ 3×3 team lost to Germany in the pool play opener, 17-13, but there is a road to gold laid out given both the talent influx in WNBA and the players eligible to compete on the Olympic roster.
The same cannot be said for the men, and until USA Basketball markets the 3×3 game to its next generation of basketball stars, Team USA’s three-on-three squad will be stuck in the past, banking on part-time hoopers who don’t pass the eye test to protect America’s basketball throne and bring home gold.
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