The greatest story popping out of Team USA’s first Olympic pool recreation towards Serbia was that latest Boston champion Jayson Tatum didn’t play.
He and Tyrese Haliburton had been the one gamers on the crew to heat the bench for all the matchup.
But Team USA head coach Steve Kerr says that Tatum will certainly get to log some minutes within the nation’s subsequent recreation towards South Sudan.
“Jayson will play [Wednesday],” Kerr mentioned in Paris on Monday. “I’m not going to answer your next question, which is if he plays, who doesn’t. But we’re going to need him, and part of this job for me is to keep everybody engaged and ready, because my experience with this is crazy stuff happens.”
Kerr had previously explained that he “felt like an idiot” for not enjoying Tatum, however it’s a troublesome process to play everybody when you’ve got one of the vital stacked Olympic basketball lineups in historical past.
“The hardest part of this job is you’re sitting at least a couple of guys who are world-class, some of the very best players on Earth,” Kerr mentioned. “On one hand, it makes no sense at all. On the other, I’m asking these guys to just commit to winning one game and then move on to the next one. I have to do the same thing. And so, I felt like last night those were the combinations that made the most sense.”
Now, it appears as if Tatum’s teammate and Miami warmth large man Bam Adebayo could be the subsequent one to overlook out on minutes towards South Sudan, ESPN’s Brian Windhorst is reporting.
“When they play South Sudan on Wednesday,” Windhorst mentioned on The Pat McAfee Show. “South Sudan’s got a bunch of athletic wing players. Tatum’s gonna be out there. They’re gonna be switching all those screens because he’s gotta play the perimeter. There may be a guy like Bam Adebayo that gets benched in that game.”
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