US team not as good as gold

SAITAMA, Japan -- There is a simple reason why the United States will be playing Argentina in tonight's bronze medal game of the world basketball championships rather than preparing to play Spain for the gold tomorrow night.

There is a reason why there were Greek players dancing in a circle at midcourt after they played the Americans yesterday. There is a reason why Greece coach Panagiotis Yannakis was accepting the congratulations of prime minister Costas Karamanlis via cellphone minutes following the conclusion of the game. There is a reason The Place to be on this earth was anywhere in Greece last night.

US coach Mike Krzyzewski will give you the reason.

``We lost to a team that played a great game," said Coach K.

Yes, it's true. Team USA lost to Greece by a 101-95 score. The Greeks now join the Argentines (twice), Yugoslavians (OK, Serbians and Montenegrins, but they were ``Yugoslavians" to the International Olympic Committee), Spaniards, Puerto Ricans, and Lithuanians as conquerors of the US in this New World Order of international basketball. Beating the NBA representative is no longer a miracle. It is an accepted rite of passage for any upstanding basketball country.

I must admit, I didn't see this one coming. Spain and Argentina? Trouble there, and everyone knew it. But the Greeks?

Don't ask me how they ever won the European championships; that's what I was saying. The Greeks are always slow and they can never shoot. No one is tougher, or plays harder, but the traditional Greek team of the '90s was always a classic wannabe.

But this Greek team has nothing in common with those squads. This Greek team has the game of basketball figured out.

Their calling card en route to a 7-0 record entering the game was defense. ``Defense is the coach's heart," is the way Krzyzewski had put it, the coach being Yannakis, a cagey fellow who has both played on (1987) and coached (2005) a European champion. That would be the same Panagiotis Yannakis who had singed the nets for Brookline's Hellenic College a quarter of a century or so ago, and who had walked into Celtics camp as a late-round draftee and damn near made the club, and who had teamed with Nick Galis, yet another Celtics draftee, to give Greece as fine a backcourt as any European team during the '80s.

Defense, defense, defense . . . that's what ``Pano" has been preaching to his team. Offense was a matter of sharing and caring. The Greeks entered the game with eight men averaging between 7 and 11 points per game. There was no ``go-to" guy.

So what were the Greeks doing running up 101 points on the Americans? In his wildest and craziest fantasies, Yannakis never dreamed he'd ever beat the Americans by scoring 101. He was thinking 75, 73, something like that.

And maybe it all was a fluke, but if it was, it was the most artistic fluke in the history of the world championships. For after struggling to create offense during the first quarter in the face of some stern American defense, and after falling behind, 33-21, 14 1/2 minutes into the game, the Greeks turned into an offensive monster, outscoring the stunned NBA guys, 44-18, over the next 9:46 (or to put it another way, in less than a quarter) to go up by 14 (65-51) and, frankly, never do much in the way of looking back.

How did they do this? Better yet, how didn't they? They must have run the same pick-and-roll play successfully at least 84 times. They nailed threes. They posted up. The fairly amazin' final stat sheet revealed that Greece had shot 63 percent overall and 71 percent (27 of 38) on twos. The Americans? Well, they shot a respectable 50 percent overall and 63 percent (24 of 38) on twos. They were good, but the Greeks were better.

``We talked about the high pick-and-roll they were running," said Chris Bosh. ``We tried to make adjustments, but they were running the same play."

``They had one screen-and-roll," confirmed LeBron James, ``and the big guy -- and he is a big guy -- rolling in front of our guards. It caused matchup problems and we just couldn't stop it."

In case you're wondering, the 12-man Greek roster contains no current NBA players, although guard Vassilis Spanoulis is expected to sign with Houston and that aforementioned ``big guy," Sofoklis Schortsanitis, is expected to find his way into the NBA someday (he's already a 2003 Clippers draft pick). Schortsanitis goes by the nickname ``Baby Shaq," you see, which is what happens when you are 6 feet 11 inches or so and weighing somewhere between 300 and Meat Scale. As the product of a Greek father and a Nigerian mother , he is somewhat hard to miss when the Greeks take the floor.

Baby Shaq had a nice little game, scoring 6 straight points (of his 14) during a key second-quarter stretch when the momentum was changing irrevocably. The young fellow has no lift, but he has the wide body and good hands, and a good feel for the game.

Coach K reserved his special praise for three other Greek players, all of whom he identified by number, claiming that as someone whose own name gets mangled often enough, he didn't want to disrespect anyone by mispronouncing theirs. And so . . .

``I thought No. 4 [guard Theodoros Papaloukas] was spectacular in the first half," said Krzyzewski. ``No. 7 [Spanoulis] was spectacular in the second half. And No. 15 [Mihalis Kakiouzis] had some huge shots for them, especially at the end of the clock."

Later on, Krzyzewski returned to the subject of Papaloukas, who had 12 assists.

``I just couldn't devise a defense to stop him," he admitted.

The US somehow scored 95 points, but it was very hard work and pretty much the product of individual play. The Greeks made it all look easy and natural and downright logical. ``Their offense beat our defense, and I'll take responsibility," said Coach K. ``Our players played hard. You win together and lose together, but when there's a loss, the coach has to take more responsibility."

That first loss to Argentina back in '02 was a shock. Then the US lost two more and everybody ripped the players. Then came the failure in Athens. Now that the US team of NBA players has failed to win a major championship for the third time in succession, Americans might finally be getting the message. It's not ``our" game anymore. It's everyone's. If we don't play good basketball, we can lose to any Mindaugases and Mihalises we may happen to encounter, any time and anywhere.

Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is ryan@globe.com.