As Team USA women go for eighth-straight gold, one question mark lurks

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

Depth, she paused. No, size.

“1A, 1B,” she decided.

Reeve isn’t wrong. With three players taller than 6-4 and a bevy of guards in the 6-foot range, Team USA will have a height and length advantage, one through five, on nearly every opponent that takes the floor during these Olympic Games. And when it comes to depth, though other countries have continued to build talented rosters over the years, which might be able to compete well for an extended time with the States’ starting five, the real gut punch for opponents comes when Reeve rolls out her backups and rotational players, for whom no opponents’ six through 10 can hold pace. It must feel something like, Oh, you thought those five WNBA All-Stars were tough to guard? Well, how about you try five more? And then, for good measure, another two?

There’s also the fact 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, yes, per usual, Team USA has more than a few advantages in these Olympic Games even before mentioning the legacy this team carries into these games.

Because there’s no dynasty as dominant in sports now as the U.S. women in international basketball. For seven consecutive Olympics, the women have brought home the gold, building the expectation (and, assumption) with each consecutive win.

Team USA hasn’t lost a single Olympic game (including pool play) since the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. The closest game in Olympic play since those 1996 Games — the start of the gold medal streak — was a 4-point win over Russia in 2004, but those close games are rare. Just three times in the last seven Olympics have opponents kept their losses to single digits.

So, to say that this Team USA women’s basketball team doesn’t know anything except Olympic gold medals isn’t just a figure of speech. For the majority of this roster, it’s factually true. Just three players on the roster were alive the last time a Team USA women’s team lost an Olympic game — Aug. 5, 1992 (and, Alyssa Thomas was barely 4 months old at the time).

And yet, with all those advantages — both historically and in this specific moment — Reeve is hyperaware of the drawbacks that come with a country this full of women’s basketball talent.

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

But Reeve knew that would be one of the hardest challenges of this team. In her first on-floor appearance as Team USA’s coach in 2022, Reeve addressed the obvious with her team. They would play teams who knew one another better, who had played together more, who had practiced together more, but they could never use that as an excuse for their not finding a way to play well together.

“Talent is not going to be the reason why we win,” Reeve said. “It’s going to be the chemistry of our talent. And we have to work hard at that 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 looked more together. Reeve, who also coaches the Minnesota Lynx, leaned on her WNBA experience from this season, when the Lynx, returning just five players, managed to jell well enough during the league’s two-week preseason to put together one of the most impressive first halves to the WNBA season with a win in the league-wide Commissioner’s Cup in June.

Team USA knows that in its own pool — Japan, Belgium and Germany — the players on those teams have gotten more reps together as teams, not just in this last Olympic cycle but also with some cores playing together for many, many years. But with the talent, depth and every other advantage Team USA has going its way, the team hopes to use every minute on the floor together to accelerate its jelling and allow its advantages to overshadow whatever drawbacks might exist from its lack of time together.

Because 13 days from Team USA’s opener against Japan on Monday, they plan to be on the podium with the program’s eighth consecutive gold medal, holding up the expectation that the seven teams ahead of them made perfectly clear.

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

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