Doug Gottlieb: “Can I tell you what REALLY is the problem by my estimation as somebody who loves the sport and loves our country? BASKETBALL CULTURE IN THE UNITED STATES SUCKS and it’s our own fault. It’s not LeBron’s fault, but what LeBron did epitomizes what basketball has become. Our fight for college players to be able to get paid and then to be able to change teams without having to sit a year is all part of the problem. If you watch both of those last two teams who beat USA you would say ‘I like watching them play more.’ You know Kevin Durant and Damian Lillard one-on-one or over the duration of an NBA season are better players, but they’re not a ‘TEAM’, and we don’t teach the value of ‘team.’ Those guys [The US opponents] play together for years because they WANT to play for their country and they’ll do anything it takes because it’s an incredible honor… The culture of basketball SUCKS in the country. We have these camps where basically it’s like whoever gets the ball goes one-on-one and if they score we put it on social media and we call that kid a top 20 player in his class. We publicize ‘hE’s iN tHe lAb dOiNg wOrK!’. He’s not working on passing, he’s not working on sliding, playing defense, or doing anything other than what they do against a cone, and ‘lOoK aT tHaT eUrO sTeP!’ Our culture sucks and EVERYBODY KNOWS IT AND NOBODY WILL SAY IT EXCEPT ME. We teach people not to value ‘team’… That’s what happened [to Team USA}. They’re [Austalia and Nigeria] a TEAM, we’re not. They value the front of the jersey, and we just think it’s an ‘honor.’ No, no, no, no, no – when you represent the greatest country in the history of mankind, you have to PLAY as though you’re representing the greatest country in the history of mankind. We don’t take pride in ‘team’, we don’t take pride in sharing the ball, we don’t take pride in team defense, and we don’t take pride in representing our country… It’s an exposure of the problems in the sport of basketball. The second a kid doesn’t get his touches, or get his reps, or get his shots, he’s off to another team or another school. And now in the NBA we’re not surprised that they don’t know how to play as a team a week in?” (Full Video Above)
Listen to Doug Gottlieb discuss USA Basketball’s back-to-back shocking losses to Nigeria and Australia during pre-Olympic warmup games this past week, and detail his theory on why it represents a larger problem of the deteriorating basketball culture in the United States.
Check out the video above as Gottlieb straight up tells you why basketball culture in this country SUCKS.
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