41 players who should be in the mix for Team USA in 2028

After 'The Avengers,' it's time for the program to get back to the blueprint.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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Sunrise; Georgia O’Keeffe; 1916

USA Basketball’s men’s senior program has been on shaky ground for a while.

The grand vision of NBA stars committing to 4-year cycles incorporating summer camps, the FIBA World Cup, any necessary continental Olympic qualifiers and, of course, the Olympics — that vision fell away almost as soon as it was developed. It mostly held in the Beijing cycle (emphasized by Team USA falling short in the ‘06 World Championship), but in the very next cycle less than half of the London Olympic team (five of the 12 players) had played in the 2010 World Championship. In this Paris cycle, that number dropped even lower: only two Olympians were on the team last summer — Anthony Edwards and Tyrese Haliburton, who basically didn’t play in this tournament.

So that vision of committed players going just as hard in the World Cup and building multi-year camaraderie has disappeared. The impact: Team USA hasn’t medaled at the World Cup (as it is now known) since 2014, and few players are together for a couple of summers in a row.

Another key piece of the Colangelo-Stern redemption for USA Basketball was the concept of players competing for spots on each team. This died circa the Rio afterglow 2016 for unknown reasons. Under Grant Hill this cycle, the selected players were announced during the NBA season. There was no group of 20 or so candidates that then assembled in Las Vegas for a camp where the coach would pick his 12. The announcement was so early, in fact, that it briefly looked like USA Basketball might need to announce three injury replacements; in the end, they needed just one, for Kawhi Leonard, a totally unpredictable outcome.

Kyrie Irving made a good point about the lack of competition for Olympic spots, and this seemed to be an element that also annoyed Jaylen Brown, snubbed for a final spot in favor of teammate Derrick White. It was a central tenet of the Redemption arc, and it simply doesn’t exist any more.

All you can really credit the late 2000s renaissance of American men’s basketball with doing for 2024 is getting LeBron James and Kevin Durant really invested in the program, to the point where they committed to this cycle along with never-Olympian Stephen Curry (which is still a wild fact that makes sense when you look at the timing of his rise) as saviors of the national team. Durant absolutely rescued the last Olympic team by joining in 2021 for Tokyo. He did the same here, though LeBron had the bigger role.

As I’ve been writing, that’s not an option for either in 2028 in Los Angeles. I continue to be amazed by LeBron’s longevity. He’s going to be 43 in four years. There’s no way. Durant will be 39, so it’s conceivable that he could go for a sixth straight gold, but I’m quite skeptical. Curry has all but announced that this was his one shot.

All that and the narrow margins of this gold medal run make it imperative that USA Basketball gets back on track. The second golden generation is fading out. They really need to build a new one. There’s no way USA Basketball will convince stars to play in the 2025 FIBA AmeriCup next summer. In 2022, few NBA players representing any nation played in AmeriCup — the most well-known Canadian at the tournament was Dalano Banton — and this tournament is two years before the World Cup. The timing is to get a solid group of 30 candidates together in the summer of 2026 to start formulating an expected roster that then goes to the 2027 World Cup in Dubai. Most of that team should serve as the Los Angeles 2028 squad. That’s the old USA Basketball plan. It’s time to bring it back.

So who figures to figure in this cycle?