Obviously having prime Bron is a massive advantage that certainly made K's life easier, that goes without saying, lol. And there's also no doubt that the international teams are improving.

But outside of Johnson and McGee, *every player* on this roster has been an All-Star. Like, this is a substantially better roster than the 2004 Bronze roster. There are thirteen All-Stars in the field, ten of them on our roster. There are six All-NBA players in the field, three of them on our roster. Like, winning a couple of games by single digits because the team's sleepwalking? Okay. But we should be winning Olympic basketball games by an average of 18-20+ with this roster. The talent advantage is just enormous.

K had those spells where the team was sleepwalking too-- obviously look at 2016, where we only had something like two returning Olympians, and we won one-possession games against Serbia and France, because you can't sleepwalk against a team that's played together as long as some of the international teams have. But then, of course, in the gold medal game, we beat that same Serbia team by 30 (the spread was something like 15, I remember because I smashed USA to cover, lol). And I think the lowest average margin of victory was also 2016, and it was still easily over 20 points per game. Even if 2021's talent is worse, it's still easily enough to be winning on average by, at minimum, 15+.

And we've got a PG in Lillard who should be fine for what we need. The roster honestly has a ton of guys who can pass and move the ball really well. We needed a better game plan for their bigs. (Which, as we may recall, is why Pop said Kevin Love was on the roster originally-- specifically to play against Gobert in the France game.) Credit to France-- going two centers when the NBA goes increasingly with no true centers is something that the USA players just weren't equipped to handle unless they were knocking down 3s (which they weren't).