As the women of Team USA go for their eighth consecutive gold medal, one question looms

PARIS – From a small, fluorescent-lit gym just north of Paris, Team USA coach Cheryl Reeve was asked about her team’s biggest lead at the Olympics.

Depth, she paused for a moment. No, buddy.

“1A, 1B,” she concluded.

Reeve isn’t wrong. With three players taller than 6-foot-1 and a bevy of guards in the 6-foot range, Team USA will have a size and height advantage, one to five, over almost every opponent who takes the floor during these Olympic Games. And when it comes to depth, while other countries have continued to build talented rosters over the years that may be able to compete well with the United States’ starting five for an extended period of time, the real blow to opponents comes when Reeve rolls her out. backups and rotation players, for whom the opponent’s six through ten cannot keep pace. It must feel something like, Oh, you thought those five WNBA All-Stars were hard to guard? Well, how about we try five more? And then, for good measure, two more?

Then there’s also the fact that the Americans have the two best players in the world, A’ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart, the most experienced Olympian, Diana Taurasi, and four members of the two-time defending WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces (including Wilson) .

So yeah, as usual, Team USA has more than a few advantages in these Olympics, even before mentioning the legacy this team brings to these games.

Because there is currently no dynasty as dominant in the sport as the American women in international basketball. For seven consecutive Olympic Games, the women have taken home the gold, building the anticipation (and assumption) with each successive victory.

Team USA has not lost a single Olympic match (including pool play) since the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, ​​Spain. The closest match in the Olympics since those 1996 Games – the start of the gold medal streak – was a four-point victory over Russia in 2004, but such close games are rare. Only three times in the last seven Olympic Games have opponents kept their losses to single digits.

So to say that this Team USA women’s basketball team knows nothing but Olympic gold medals isn’t just a figure of speech. For most of this selection it is factually true. Only three players on the roster were still alive the last time a Team USA women’s team lost an Olympic match – August 5, 1992 (and Alyssa Thomas was just four months old at the time).

And yet, despite all these advantages – both historically and at this particular moment – ​​Reeve is very aware of the disadvantages that come with a country with so much women’s basketball talent.

Because of the depth that Team USA has in its player pool, and not just with the last twelve players who made the Olympic roster, the staff rotates significantly more during the four-year cycles between Olympics than in other countries. When the team’s roster was announced in June, the entire dozen had never been in a camp together before. And when they took the floor in the All-Star Game earlier this month, the 12 had had just two practices with the full complement of players. That kind of reduced preparation time affects chemistry (which was quite evident in their loss to the WNBA All-Stars).

But Reeve knew this would be one of this team’s toughest challenges. In her first appearance as coach of Team USA in 2022, Reeve discussed the obvious with her team. They played against teams that knew each other better, that had played together more, that had practiced together more, but they could never use that as an excuse for not finding a way to play well together.

“Talent is not going to be the reason we win,” Reeve said. “It will be the chemistry of our talent. And we have to work hard and focus on that.”

Between the All-Star Game and Team USA’s friendly against Germany last week, the group made strides. Defensively (Reeve’s calling card), the group seemed more aligned. Reeve, who also coaches the Minnesota Lynx, leaned on her WNBA experience this season, when the Lynx, returning just five players, managed to perform well enough during the league’s two-week preseason to earn one of the most impressive first halves. the WNBA season with a victory in the league-wide Commissioner’s Cup in June.

Team USA knows that in its own pool – Japan, Belgium and Germany – the players from those teams have gotten more reps as teams, not only in this last Olympic cycle, but also with some cores that played together for many, many years. But with the talent, depth and all the other advantages Team USA has coming its way, the team hopes to use every minute on the floor together to accelerate its gelatinization and let its advantages overshadow any disadvantages of the lack of time together .

Because 13 days after Team USA’s opener against Japan on Monday, Team USA plans to stand on the podium with the program’s eighth straight gold medal, upholding the expectation that was perfectly clear to the seven teams before them had made.

Reeve has made this group try to separate the legacy of Team USA’s 55 consecutive Olympic victories from what this group hopes to do over the next two weeks, but make no mistake: Just as this program has done over the past three decades, goal and the expectation are one and the same. It’s gold, and nothing less. Big wins, nothing less. It’s the Team USA way, nothing less.

(Top illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletics; Juan Ocampo/NBAE/Getty Images; Ryan Stetz/NBAE/Getty Images)