Josh Weinfuss, ESPN Staff WriterJul 26, 2024, 09:30 AM ET
- Josh Weinfuss is a staff writer who covers the Arizona Cardinals and the NFL at ESPN. Josh has covered the Cardinals since 2012, joining ESPN in 2013. He is a member of the Pro Football Writers of America and a graduate of Indiana University. You can follow him via Twitter @joshweinfuss.
Every championship run has its moment.
For the U.S. women’s basketball team, Monday’s practice might end up being the catalyst that propels the Americans to their eighth consecutive gold medal at the Paris Olympics.
After resting Sunday following a 10-hour flight from Phoenix to London, Team USA held its first practice since losing to Team WNBA in the WNBA All-Star Game over the weekend. And it was everything coach Cheryl Reeve wanted from her squad.
“I thought it was a practice that we needed,” she said in London. “You don’t get many opportunities and I loved our approach. … There were a lot of intangibles that occurred in the practice that were great for us.”
Reeve described the practice as “very active,” but A’ja Wilson said it felt more like “we died” because there was “a lot of running.” The session got the players’ bodies moving, it got them up and down the court, it got them locked in.
“This is Day 1,” Wilson said. “This is Practice 1, Step 1 to the standard and where we want to go, so we can’t really take a lot of practices off or lightly.”
That practice set the tone.
“We’re going for No. eight,” forward Napheesa Collier said. “No one wants to be the one to break that streak.”
Immediately after Team WNBA upset Team USA on Saturday night, Reeve wasn’t sure what she had learned about her squad.
But she needed to know if her players learned anything from the loss and how — or if — it would fuel them and get them to buy in to what Reeve and her staff were trying to do.
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Jackie Young dishes a no-look dime to Alyssa Thomas for a USA basket
Jackie Young drives and drops a no-look dime to Alyssa Thomas to pad USA’s lead over Germany in the fourth quarter.
Tuesday’s 27-point trouncing of Germany brought some answers for Reeve. It also couldn’t have come at a better time as the exhibition was Team USA’s final tune-up before its Olympic opener on Monday against Japan.
“A good game for us,” Reeve said, “and some of the things that we were trying to accomplish that we worked on in the one day that we had prior to the game.”
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Since the national team reconvened in Phoenix last Friday, getting Team USA ready for the Olympics has been a crash course for Reeve, her staff and the players. They practiced Friday, held a walk-through Saturday morning, played Saturday night, flew to London after the game, practiced Monday and played Tuesday. By the time the national team walked off the court in London’s O2 Arena, they had only been together as a team for about a week-and-a-half in total, including the two weekend-long training camps held in February and April.
“I think it’s probably the least amount of time we’ve had together,” Diana Taurasi — who has won five Olympic gold medals — said after Tuesday’s win. “It’s go-time now. This was a great preparation game for us. We saw improvement.
“It takes time to jell and know what we like to do, what we don’t want to do. So [Tuesday] was a step in the right direction.”
The process of bonding as a team began late Saturday night on the flight to London, where the U.S. women stayed for a few days before taking a train under the English Channel to Paris on Thursday.
Once the boarding door closed behind them, the noise of the weekend was sealed out and the national team was able to start focusing on what awaited in France, Wilson said.
“I’m so glad that All-Star was over and we can just finally be away from all the noise and just be within ourselves and understand we have to keep the main thing the main thing,” Wilson said.
For now, much of the outside noise has been silenced and the work has intensified.
Team USA coach Cheryl Reeve knew the key thing during training camps and practices was to keep things simple. Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images
Knowing she wasn’t going to have a lot of time with the players, Reeve, who’s the coach of the Minnesota Lynx, and her Team USA staff worked ahead. They were familiar with the players from facing them in the WNBA and the time they spent together with USA Basketball in previous years, and the staff knew what kind of offensive and defensive schemes they wanted to run.
The key when she installed everything over the two training camps and the last week has been to keep it simple. Her hope is that a player will let her know when something isn’t “instinctual” for them, and then she’ll adjust accordingly. There’s a definite learning curve when players jump from their WNBA teams to the national team in a matter of days, whether it’s adjusting to the schemes or language or trusting Reeve’s process and buying in, Wilson said.
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“Doing less is better so that these guys can be in a place where they’re just playing and so not imposing too much on them, giving them some space to be able to be the great players they are,” Reeve said.
The majority of the designed schemes will be on defense, Reeve said, while the offense will be a bit more unscripted. Team USA already started flexing its defense, holding Germany to 29.4% shooting from the field on Tuesday night.
“We always want to have the best shooting night, but you can always rely on defense,” center Brittney Griner said. “One thing that coach talked about is our ability to play with pressure, defend, really cause havoc out there, and I think that we really rely on that and the physicality, as well.
“That’s just something you always see with us, is defense first, then we go to offense.”
Players left their WNBA teams a week ago, but some might find themselves playing another position just to see court time in France.
Jackie Young practices Monday ahead of putting up eight points in Team USA’s victory over Germany. Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images
To Reeve, it’s a sacrifice that players on the Olympic team have to make if they want to play for their country. Players like Alyssa Thomas and Collier may have to play out of position if they want to be on the court with the likes of Breanna Stewart or Wilson, Reeve explained.
“I think they probably each prefer to play their own position but I think being on the floor with the best players on our team, I think that’s important to us,” Reeve said. “And it’s our job to try to help them bring out the best in them despite the position that they’re playing.”
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Making the jump from their WNBA teams to the national team, without much of a break and doing it seamlessly is just “what we do,” Stewart said. For years, many did it regularly when they bounced between their WNBA teams and the international teams they played for in the offseason and then, for a select few, the national team.
“We’re chameleons,” Taurasi said. “Whatever jersey we put on, that’s what we do.”
Throughout the past week, the national team has echoed similar sentiments on how they approach the organized chaos of the schedule. Sabrina Ionescu prefers to focus on what she can control. Collier never looks too far ahead, always focusing on the next game and next team.
Reeve, who has coached since 1988 and coached with USA Basketball in some capacity since 2014, is impressed with how the players juggle and balance all their different teams and everything that comes with it.
“Wherever their feet are, they have this ability to compartmentalize. I think it’s really special. I think they make it look easy so people don’t talk about it,” Reeve said. “They’ve got to turn off wherever they are and just got to walk in and get that complete buy-in to whatever system they’re in. And I marvel at their ability to do it.”
ESPN’s Brian Windhorst contributed to this report.
