King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Olympics: Lisa Leslie is the big sister the U.S. men need. Plus: A gold and two bronzes for Michael Phelps? What a failure! And: Take your best shot.
Aug. 17, 2004 | The U.S. women's basketball team routed the Czech Republic Monday, cruising to an 80-61 win. The Americans had struggled early, falling behind 21-18 after the first quarter and trailing well into the second. They turned it around with a 14-0 run in the second quarter based on hustle and energy.
They pressed on defense and moved the ball and attacked the basket on offense. The Czechs simply wilted and the rest of the game was a formality. The U.S. now has two lopsided wins in two starts.
In a postgame interview, with very little prompting from NBC's Craig Sager, center Lisa Leslie used the example of the women's victory to rip into the underachieving American men.
"They have yet to adjust their game to play team basketball, they're still playing individually," she said of the boys. "If you get after it and have the heart and play with some passion, I think that's what the men were missing, just that passion and that fight. Have a little bit more pride about losing and wearing this USA uniform."
Sager asked Leslie what the men could learn from watching the women.
"Well, first of all they have to come and watch us," she said pointedly. "I think they should get out here and support us and see just how it is playing international basketball. I think they maybe right now could learn a little bit of something from us."
Play-by-play man Mike Breen quickly explained that the men were practicing at the moment of the U.S.-Czech women's game, but it was still a pretty stiff jab.
Leslie actually lectured the men for some time and even, in a fairly sophisticated pedagogic move, talked about the women when she was really talking about the men: "International basketball is a lot different style from the way we play in the U.S.," she said. "You have to move the ball around, not come out here as individuals the way we play on our WNBA teams, but just be a team. The ball will find the open player. Secondly, defense ..."
And so on.
A few minutes later veteran point guard Dawn Staley, who is both the head coach at Temple and an active player with the Charlotte Sting, was much kinder: "They'll make adjustments," she said. "They're going to be all right."
The men play the host Greeks Tuesday afternoon. The women play South Korea Wednesday.
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The golden boy gets bronzed [PERMALINK]
Who could have guessed that swimmer Michael Phelps, the most hyped American athlete coming into these Olympics, wouldn't live up to the hoopla? Gosh, I was sure he'd win those eight gold medals, because he was on all those magazine covers.
Even though anyone who knows anything about swimming said he wasn't fast enough to beat Ian Thorpe and Pieter van den Hoogenband, the titans of the short sprints, who won gold and silver.