Team USA's Struggles: Don't Blame The Players, Blame Coach K

In the 2016 Olympics, Team USA has not been playing particularly well and all the blame has been going to the players, but I think Mike Krzyzewski, Coach of Team USA should be getting all the blame, here’s why.

He Is Not Creating a Defensive Identity

    This years Team USA is a team filled with defensive studs, you have Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, DeAndre Jordan, Jimmy Butler, and Kyle Lowry and they are allowing teams like Serbia and France score 90+ points on them. First off in the game against Serbia, the only players that the Serbians have are Nikola Jokic and Bogdan Bogdanovic and they let that team score 91 points on them. Now let us look at France, sure, France is a good team, but they only have 4 NBA players who played in today's game, and USA let them score 97 points. But the big reason why this happened is not because of the players, it’s because it’s almost like Coach K forgot how to make a defensive lineup. Whenever a team has gone on a run, exposing the defense that Team USA has on the floor, Coach K doesn’t seem to worried about it and is keeping a lineup that is not a strong defensive unit on the floor. The best unit that Coach K could put on the floor that would play lockdown D and still score the ball would be: Jimmy Butler, Klay Thompson, Kevin Durant, Draymond Green, and DeAndre Jordan. How come Coach K hasn’t done that yet? I don’t understand why not but all we can do is speculate.

He Isn’t Letting the Team Have Fun

A big part of coaching a basketball team is letting the players be themselves and have fun while still having a serious and competitive nature. But whenever this USA team has fun, Coach K makes them stop, and when they were having fun, USA would beat teams by 50 because they were being themselves out on the court.

Comment below what you think is going on with Team USA!