Other than Kevin Durant’s masterful performance coming off the bench, the biggest story to come out of Team USA’s win over Serbia on Sunday was the fact that Jayson Tatum didn’t play a single second.
You weren’t alone if you thought maybe Tatum had a little injury pop up. A picture floated around social media showing his finger heavily wrapped. Or maybe he caught the virus that Joel Embiid and Anthony Davis were dealing with in the lead up to Sunday. There had to be something going on, right?
Nope. He just straight up got benched. Coach’s decision. Not a single second to be found for the best player on the best team in the NBA who has made first-team All-NBA three straight years. Not even when the Americans were up 21 early in the fourth quarter. Tatum, who was presumed to be one of the candidates to crack the starting lineup, never once took his warmup shirt off.
“It’s really hard in a 40-minute game to play more than 10 guys,” U.S. coach Steve Kerr told reporters after the game. “With Kevin [Durant] coming back, I just went to the combinations that I felt made the most sense. It seems crazy. I thought I was crazy when I looked at everything and determined these are the lineups I wanted to get to.”
In a separate interview with ESPN’s Brian Windhorst, Kerr admitted that he “felt like an idiot” for not playing Tatum, but he did iterate that “every game’s going to be different based on matchups” while indicating that Tatum “is going to play” as the tournament moves forward.
As an initial reaction, it seems pretty silly to hear Kerr say Tatum didn’t play because of “matchups” and “lineup combinations” when his greatest strength as a player is the fact that he fits any lineup in any role and can match up against any opponent. He can’t be hunted defensively. He can play on or off ball. The idea that a 6-foot-8 wing who can shoot, pass, dribble, defend and rebound doesn’t match up well with Serbia, or anyone else for that matter, is, frankly, a preposterous suggestion on its own.
Of course, this is an entirely unique context….
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