Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

In the immediate aftermath of the Miami Heat’s thrilling seven-game victory over the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA Finals, college and professional basketball fans alike directed their focus not at the player draft looming one week ahead, but at the 2014 draft – the one expected to be populated by the most talented recruiting class, featuring one of the most talented players, of the past decade. Speculation of various teams “tanking” was abundant and widespread. General managers assumed futuristic, pick-stacking, salary-shedding free agency strategies. “Wig-out for [Andrew] Wiggins” entered the lexicon. Everyone wanted to get in on the talent bounty waiting in the 2014 draft lottery. Rightfully so. By now, the biggest prospects basically roll off the tongue as a reflex: Kansas’ Wiggins, Kentucky’s Julius Randle, Duke’s Jabari Parker, Arizona’s Aaron Gordon, among others. But there’s one name you might not be quite as familiar with. That name is Dante Exum, an Australian-born 6’6″, 188-pound slasher who had scouts swooning after stealing the show at the FIBA U-19 World Championships in the Czech Republic this summer (along with a standout performance at the Nike Hoop Summit), where he averaged 18 points per game, just under four assists, and dropped 33 points against a formidable team from Spain.

Even in a loaded 2014 draft class, Exum should be a lottery pick if he declares (Getty Images).

The NBA Draft chatter intensified, and Exum’s lottery bona fides soon hardened into a national scouting consensus, leaving little doubt he would join Wiggins and Randle and the like in upper reaches of the first round next June. Earlier this summer, ESPN.com draft insider Chad Ford ranked Exum third on his list of “Top 100 Draft Prospects” for 2014. The only lingering question about Exum, who is on track to finish his high school course work in October, making him eligible to enroll in any American university at the end of the fall semester, was whether he would bring his hyperbolically mythologized land-down-under skills to the Division I ranks for a few months before entering the draft. ESPN’s Jeff Goodman answered that question on Tuesday:

“Schools have been saying I can start in early December and play this season,” Exum told ESPN. “But if college is the option, I’ll stay in Australia, do workouts with the national team and then go to college next August. Playing this season in college is not an option.”

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Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

The hype leading up to the 2013-14 college basketball season will be immense. It already sort of is, when you really think about it: Andrew Wiggins’ announcement to join Kansas set the college hoops world aflame. Duke’s Jabari Parker was plastered on the cover a Sports Illustrated magazine comparing him to LeBron James. Kentucky’s recruiting class is being described in the loftiest echelons of hyperbolic recruiting praise. A host of talented sophomores spurned probable NBA riches for another go with their respective college outfits. Everything about the upcoming season looks great. I can’t wait.

A championship run at the FIBA world championships is yet another testament to the quality and depth of the young talent college hoops will have on offer this season (Craig Miller, USA Today).

Over the weekend, some of the USA’s best players age 19 and under put those expectations on the line in international competition, and held serve in convincing fashion. Team USA beat Serbia Sunday, 82-68, to earn the gold medal at the FIBA U-19 World Championships. Taking home first prize was no guarantee for the Red, White, and Blue, who have won just three of the last eight U-19 FIBA crowns, including 2011’s lamentable fifth-place finish. International basketball – and all the well-coached, cohesively groomed, fundamentally-drilled international players, international rules, and international travel quirks compacted within – is an entirely different breed of hoops. Former US teams as high as the senior level have struggled to adapt to FIBA-regulated play, and this team, for all its massive talent advantages, was not immune to those very same issues. Basketball’s recent popularity worldwide – plus, you know, us not winning every single time we step on the floor – has made one fact exceedingly clear: There are no foregone conclusions in international basketball. Team USA’s U-19 group was not willing to make any.

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Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

Most Team USA basketball gatherings come with a lulling standard disclaimer: we, the United States of America, produce the best basketball players in the world. We’re better than you. I like saying that today, because as the game sinks its teeth into burgeoning hoops hotbeds in far-flung locales across this here planet we call Earth, other nations are catching up. Before you know it, there will be Yao Mings and Dirk Nowitzkis and Tony Parkers sprouting up left and right, and my proclamation won’t sound so secure. Maybe we’ll actually enter international basketball events with serious doubts over our talent and athletic advantages. After all, hastily throwing a group of NBA superstars without a savvy coach to meld them into one consistent whole can, as we learned through humbling defeats at recent Pre-Coach K Team USA Tournament events, pose losing-sized problems and nation-sized freakouts. Not to worry: the day where Spain and Argentina and Russia become our competitive equals on the hardwood are a long way down the road. Our hegemony over Dr. Naismith’s game is safe for now.

Familiar names line the U-19 Team USA Roster. Elfrid Payton is not one of them (AP Photo).

Ensuring that relative strength extends down on through the youth ranks is especially important, and if you’re interested in seeing at least a prospective few of the next generation of Dream Team legends – some players opted against participating in the Team USA festivities – Tuesday’s announcement of the final cuts on the U-19 Team USA roster might be something worth looking into. Check out that list. Depending on how closely you follow recruiting, most of these names should be familiar to you. The most recognizable name is Marcus Smart, and you definitely don’t need me to tell you why. Rasheed Sulaimon had a nice freshman season for Duke and looks ready to help the Jabari Parker-upgraded Blue Devils make a real run at the Final Four this season. Jerami Grant could be this year’s version of Michael Carter-Williams in that, much like MCW, he is a highly touted recruit who played backup minutes as a freshman (he started a few games while James Southerland was overcoming his mid-season academic eligibility roadblock), but will benefit from a massive spike in floor time his sophomore year. Montrezl Harrell is an electric frontcourt presence you probably remember best for doing this in the midst of the Spike Albrecht-spawned insanity of the first half of the national championship game. For the recruitniks, Jahlil Okafor and Justise Winslow need no introduction. Across the board, even when you account for all the players who opted against participating, there are well-known, well-established, stars-in-waiting talents ready to compete –and hopefully, hammer home the idea that our international hoops dominance, so prominent under Coach K’s guidance, is birthed in the grassroots levels – for national pride against some of the best foreign amateurs in the world.

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Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

An obvious implication of the NCAA’s move two years ago to open up individual workouts to players enrolled in summer classes was an improved brand of non-conference performance. Teams would be better suited to kick off their schedules with gusto. Much of the sloppy rust that typically defines November and December would be cleaned up, replaced by a crisper and more cohesive style of play. There was little regard for what other rippling effects this new rule might have. Coaches seemed to love the idea, anyway, and for all the obvious reasons. A slightly disconcerting side effect of the NCAA cutting the tape on summer team workouts rose to the surface with Thursday’s release of USA Basketball’s list of accepted tryout invitations for the Under-19 Czech Republic-located FIBA World Championships. The list is not short on talent or, slippery as it is to define in today’s diffuse one-and-done landscape, star power – Louisville’s Montrezl Harrell, Oklahoma State’s Marcus Smart, Villanova’s Ryan Arcidiacono and Arizona’s Aaron Gordon are among the accepted invites. But it’s missing an important and highly touted subset of players: the top players from the class of 2013.

Summer practice time has forced players and coaches to rethink how they approach preseason preparation (Getty Images).

With the exception of Gordon, the second-ranked power forward and fourth-ranked player overall, according to ESPN Recruiting nation, the list features none of the breathtaking talents that have national recruiting analysts in unanimous agreement over this class’s distinguished eminence. 2013’s top tier of talents is a rare collection of athletic wonder and refined skill and future lottery potential, and almost none of it will go into putting the best outfit possible on Eastern European courts this summer to represent the stars and stripes. Scan the list yourself, then peek back at any 2013 class rankings, and the absence of essentially every consensus top-20 player is hard to ignore. The Jabari Parkers and Julius Randles and Noah Vonlehs are all passing up the opportunity. Many of these players are scattered about the nation’s traditional blue-blood programs, but Kentucky – as part of building the best recruiting class of all time, Andrew Wiggins’ exclusion duly noted – owns six top-100 commitments in 2013, and none of them decided to join up with Team USA at this summer’s event. John Calipari spoke with The Sporting News’ Mike DeCourcy about his players’ collective rebuttal of national team participation, and when you dig beneath the image of Calipari’s nebulously slick media guile and accept his words at face value, their decision is perfectly respectable (and not at all unpatriotic – just in case you were ready to summon one of those tortured “what about the old days?! These kids have no sense of what it means to wear the stars and stripes!!” blusterings). It makes the most complete sense.

“Most of it is, they didn’t want to play. I’m not forcing kids to do anything,” Calipari told Sporting News. “I think the reason they all turned it down is, they want to get started.”

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Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

Coaching the biggest basketball superstars on planet earth into one cohesive group with a compacted practice schedule and unflinchingly mountainous expectations, among other obstacles, is not as easy as it seems. With minimal exceptions, every player is accustomed to being “the guy” on his own NBA team, where the frequency and type of shots taken are, for better or worse, monitored liberally – superstars are going to get their shots up whether you like it or not. When you mash these egos together on one, putatively dominant, practically unwieldy Team USA squad, vast philosophical and schematic adjustments melding is required. Ego-massaging is another part of the gig. Reduced shots and individual credit-basking glory is part of the cost of doing business. It’s an entirely different style and breed of basketball, this quirky thing we like to call international play, and without the right head coach in place, things can get out of hand pretty quickly. Matter of fact, Before Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski arrived on the scene, they did: In 2002, a George Karl-coached Team USA became the first American team composed of NBA players to lose in international competition when it fell to Argentina in the preliminary rounds and finished sixth at the FIBA World Championships in Indianapolis. Two years later, then under Larry Brown, team USA lost a convincing semifinal game to Argentina at the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics. The days of Dream Team dominance and universal hoops royalty were slipping away. USA basketball needed a new face and culture and identity to offer a different spin on the stale and out-of-touch approach demonstrated by previous NBA coaches. It needed Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski.

Making another run at Olympic glory, and picking up Coach K to lead the charge, is a wise move by USA Basketball chairman Jerry Colangelo (Getty Images).

You know the rest: after an initial bronze medal toe-stub at the 2006 World Championships, USA polished off two Olympic gold medals and a 2010 FIBA World Championship with a second-tier layer of then-rising stars, not once losing a game over four years. Coach K has accomplished everything he set out to do during his reign as USA Basketball’s transformative leader – blend a group of ball-dominant stars into one functioning whole not once or twice but for three sizably important world events, restore the rightful preeminence of the red, white and blue’s international hardwood stature, forcefully remind the rest of the world that yes, there is good basketball being played in Europe and China and South America, but no, you don’t have Kevin Durant ripping threes on the wing, and LeBron James guarding centers and point guards on the same possession, and Chris Paul whipping cross-court passes with pinpoint accuracy. This is USA Basketball, unbeatable and dominant and good. Mostly just good. Beijing 2012 restored the customary USA-headed international hoops hierarchy, and Coach K – who still, in case you forgot, kind of has a pretty good thing going right now in Durham – had ground off every bit of tread on the international tires. It was time to move on. Pass the torch. Recruiting and leading Duke to annual national championship contention is prohibitively exhausting on its own; the added onus of Team USA must have been a terribly draining, but hugely fulfilling, experience. Enough was enough.

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For all the speculation that Anthony Davis could end up earning a spot on Team USA for the upcoming London Summer Olympics, it seems highly unlikely that the future #1 draft pick will make the final cut. The same goes for several other former college players – for example, Fab Melo and Scott Machado – who have had to focus their time this offseason on the NBA Draft Combine and other local workout preparations rather than try out with their respective countries to make their Olympic squads. But Basketball Australia announced Friday afternoon that Matthew Dellavedova, St. Mary’s rising senior guard, has made the 12-man Aussie squad heading to London. The release notes that there’s “a strong possibility [Dellavedova] will be the only current college player to participate in the sport of men’s basketball at this year’s Games.” Dellavedova joins Patty Mills, another former St. Mary’s star, as lead guards for the ‘Boomers.’

Matthew Dellavedova, the reigning WCC Player of the Year, has qualified for Australia’s Olympic roster (St. Mary’s Athletics photo)

There are some other college players or recent graduates who did not get invited to the NBA Draft Combine that still have a chance to make their international homelands for the Olympics. Yahoo! Sports‘ Jeff Eisenberg detailed seven NCAAB players vying to make the Olympics, but all of those players have faced challenging training camps to qualify for their countries, and none have yet made their teams. Deividas Dulkys has a good shot to make the Lithuanian team, but he’s also a recent graduate of Florida State and won’t return to the college game. Dellavedova, on the other hand, has already notched his spot for the Aussies and will represent his country in the Olympics as part of his training regimen for his rising senior season at St. Mary’s.

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In the 20th anniversary year of the original 1992 ‘Dream Team,’ USA Basketball is once again sending a team of elite NBA players in search of the 2012 gold medal. But could this become the final time we see such a collection of professional stars? Rumblings over the past few weeks from all corners of college, pro, and international basketball suggest that Team USA will instead send younger players to the Olympics, perhaps through the old school method of all amateurs or rather in a new combination of college and young pros. The most likely scenario includes an all Under-23 squad, resembling the way the USA selects for its Olympic soccer teams. CBS Sports’ Matt Norlander, among others, has highlighted what Team USA would look like this year if it was an Under-23 team. But any new method would not take place until the next Summer Olympics in 2016, so what would that team potentially look like? In order to qualify for the Under-23 team four years from now, only players who are 19 or younger right now could be under consideration. Today we take a look at some of the best candidates, considering both current accomplishments and potential future growth.

Michael Kidd-Gilchrist would qualify for the 2016 Olympics if Team USA goes with an Under 23 approach (AP Photo)

A quick 15-man list of the top 19-or-younger players goes as follows:

1. Anthony Davis
2. Tony Wroten
3. Michael Kidd-Gilchrist
4. Bradley Beal
5. Andre Drummond
6. Quincy Miller
7. Nerlens Noel
8. Shabazz Muhammad
9. Cody Zeller
10. James Michael McAdoo
11. Kyle Anderson
12. Jabari Parker
13. Julius Randle
14. Andrew Harrison
15. Andrew Wiggins

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On Wednesday night, NBA TV will air “The Dream Team,” a brand new documentary that relives the 1992 Men’s Basketball USA Olympic Team that’s better known by that same name. This summer marks the 20th anniversary of the team, the inspiration behind documenting the players, and their legendary run through the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. The national team of 12 players included 11 future Hall of Famers and some of the greatest players in basketball history all in one locker room. The forgotten member of the team is Christian Laettner, the lone collegian at the time to make the squad, who was coming off of one of the greatest NCAA basketball careers of all-time as a two-time National Champion for Duke. Looking back, how did the other 11 players fare in their amateur careers? Was their collective NBA and international success predicated by dominance in college? On the day the documentary airs, we reflect on the Dream Team from a college perspective.

Michael Jordan hit the game-winning shot in the 1982 National Championship game for North Carolina 10 years before he joined the Dream Team (AP Photo)

As it turns out, the team wasn’t just a collection of all-time great professionals. Exactly half the players on the roster also qualify as some of the greatest collegiate players ever. Six players on the Dream Team were included on ESPN’s list of the 25 greatest players in college basketball history, the highest of whom was Larry Bird at #9. Bird averaged 30.3 points per game in his career at Indiana State, and in his senior National Player of the Year season he led the Sycamores to a 33-1 record and a loss in the National Title game to Michigan State and Magic Johnson. Johnson is another one of the greatest collegians on the list (#15), averaging 17.1 points, 7.6 rebounds, and 7.9 assists per game in two seasons for the Spartans that became a preview of the stat-sheet stuffing machine he would become in the NBA.

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Who are some of the most college-ready freshmen players heading to school next season? Gain insight into that answer by following the USA Men’s Under-18 National Team tryouts, whose roster was announced this week. Twenty-three of the country’s top young players, comprised mostly of recent high school graduates, are fighting for 12 spots to compete at the FIBA Americas U-18 Championship. It’s a short tryout, as the team will fly out for competition on June 12. While there are plenty of factors that go into the team’s selection, the final cut could give us some insight as to which players’ games are most developed at this point. Of the group of participants, 15 are recent high school graduates. There are also seven high schoolers from the class of 2013, and the final player is Jarnell Stokes, already at Tennessee after reclassifying up last year to join the Volunteers in the second semester. Our biggest interest involves which of the 15 high school graduates will make the squad, perhaps proving that their college teams can expect big things next season after outperforming their peers and gaining some international experience.

Rasheed Sulaimon Has a Strong Chance to Play on the U-18 Team USA (AP Photo)

The 15 high school Class of 2012 participants are as follows:

• Ryan Arcidiacono, Villanova
• Robert Carter, Georgia Tech
• Sam Dekker, Wisconsin
• Kris Dunn, Providence
• Shaq Goodwin, Memphis
• Jerami Grant, Syracuse
• Montrezl Harrell, Louisville
• Joel James, North Carolina
• Jake Layman, Maryland
• Rodney Purvis, NC State
• James Robinson, Pittsburgh
• Rasheed Sulaimon, Duke
• Marcus Smart, Oklahoma State
• Robert Upshaw, Fresno State
• Adam Woodbury, Iowa

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Evan Jacoby is a regular contributor for RTC. You can find him @evanjacoby on Twitter.

As international basketball continues to gain steam, so does widespread intrigue in the Summer Olympic Games. The upcoming 2012 London Olympics will include some tremendous competition for the heavily favored United States, such as a Spanish team that can boast a monster front line of Pau Gasol, Marc Gasol, and Serge Ibaka. To counter that front line, and as a side effect of several unfortunate injuries, the Americans are in need of some serious size of their own. As a result, college basketball’s reigning National Player of the Year and projected No. 1 NBA draft pick Anthony Davis has already been named as one of the 20 finalists for Team USA this summer. Would Davis be a good fit for this team, and could “The Unibrow” possibly make the cut? Historical precedent says it could happen, and a roster breakdown shows that Davis might just be the big man inside that Team USA is missing.

Anthony Davis is now Shooting for a Spot on Team USA (AP Photo)

The USA Basketball Committee, led by chairman Jerry Colangelo and head coach Mike Krzyzewski, already selected the 20 finalists for the team back in January but several significant injuries has left Team USA in need of more bodies to compete for the final 12-man roster by the June 18 deadline. Specifically, there is a glaring lack of healthy size on the roster given injury troubles to Dwight Howard (back) and LaMarcus Aldridge (hip). The only true center currently on the roster is Tyson Chandler, with power forwards Blake Griffin, Kevin Love, Chris Bosh, and Lamar Odom in the fold as well. But there are issues with all of these forwards — Odom was released by the Dallas Mavericks after a terrible season, Griffin brings more ‘flash’ than production as an interior player, and Love and Bosh both thrive offensively on the perimeter. There is an absolute need for an interior presence to back up Chandler.

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