U.S. basketball team returns to practice at Worlds
Schedule has allowed for lulls
ISTANBUL – After one lackluster victory during pool play, Mike Krzyzewski encountered some feistier competition in his news conference than the U.S. faced on the court.
“Why didn’t the USA score more?” one reporter asked.
“Why isn’t the team practicing?” questioned another.
Maybe the two issues were related.
The Americans finally got into the gym for practice Saturday, the first step in what they believe will be cleaner play during the elimination round of basketball’s world championship.
“We haven’t played as consistent in the preliminaries as we wanted to for the most part, but I think this practice helps us get our execution and timing back and our aggression on defense,” guard Stephen Curry said. “So I like where we’re at going into Monday.”
The U.S. will play Angola that night in the round of 16, which began Saturday with Serbia ousting Croatia 73-72 and Spain taking on Greece. The Americans earned extra time off by winning Group B with a 5-0 record.
Krzyzewski said the practice Saturday was the Americans’ first since Aug. 27, the day before the tournament started. They then had games on three straight nights, opted not to practice on the group’s off day before closing with games on consecutive days.
The players were given a day off Friday, with Krzyzewski saying “they needed to just get away from everything” before finally having what he called a hard practice Saturday. They’ll work out again today.
“Somebody said, ‘Well, why aren’t you practicing?’ Well, we’re playing games,” Krzyzewski said. “And that’s just the nature of international tournaments, how they bunch everything up at one time and all of a sudden you’ve got time. But hopefully it’ll be productive time for us.”
Forward Rudy Gay of the Memphis Grizzlies took part in the practice after sitting out the second half of the Americans’ 92-57 victory over Tunisia on Thursday with a sore right groin.
That was just a four-point game early in the third quarter after a sluggish first half by the U.S. The Americans weren’t impressive in the 88-51 victory over Iran that preceded that, but they believe the lack of sharpness was because they were playing overmatched rivals in games that didn’t matter to their seeding.
“These practices are going to really help us, because we really didn’t have any practice time in those games,” forward Kevin Durant said.