LAS VEGAS – The U.S. national team made numerous mistakes in its first dress rehearsal for the Olympic Games on Wednesday night. But after a comfortable 86-72 victory over the Canadian national team in front of a record crowd of 20,756 spectators at the T-Mobile Arena, Anthony Davis was only focused on the U.S. national team's defensive potential.
“Unbeatable,” Davis said when asked how the U.S. would fare if it defended and ran like it did Wednesday. “Offensively, we were pretty bad, to put it bluntly. But it was a good awfulness in the sense that we tried to make the right plays. … [But] If we're worried about the offense, I think we're in a good position.
“We played to our strengths defensively tonight.”
Anthony Edwards led Team USA with 13 points off the bench and Davis had 10 points, 11 rebounds and 4 blocks as the Americans overcame a poor start and put the game out of reach early in the second half.
Team USA missed its first six shots and committed eight turnovers in the first quarter, but as the game progressed, the Americans gained momentum and eventually pulled away, defeating one of their biggest rivals for the gold medal next month by double digits despite a performance well below their best.
The Americans, playing in front of a raucous crowd that included former President Barack Obama, held Canada to 33.8% shooting overall, including just 7 of 33 three-pointers. Canada's star-studded backcourt of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jamal Murray combined to make 5 of 18 shots from the field.
“Good first game for us,” said Steve Kerr, coach of the US team. “We just started four days of training. You could see early on how rusty we were on offense. We had a lot of turnovers in the first half, [but] I liked the intensity of the defense and the work at the basket. It was a good first attempt to play the game the way we want to play it in the future.”
In addition to establishing a style of play, one of the most important questions facing Team USA is who will fill the five spots in Kerr's starting lineup.
Three of those spots are expected to be filled by Stephen Curry, LeBron James and Joel Embiid. On Wednesday night, the other two spots went to Jrue Holiday, who as arguably the world's best perimeter defender fits perfectly in Team USA's backcourt alongside Curry, and Devin Booker, who would have potentially filled the spot left by Kevin Durant, who was sidelined for the fifth straight day with a calf strain.
The second unit of Tyrese Haliburton, Edwards, Bam Adebayo, Jayson Tatum and Davis, meanwhile, dominated the game. It looked like a unit that could be very effective over the next few weeks should Kerr choose to keep them together.
Of course, Kerr, who is notoriously reluctant to talk about lineups, said that nothing should be read into his lineup decisions in Wednesday's opener.
“With this group, you can't go wrong picking a starting lineup,” Kerr said. “I'm going to do something different in the next two games. We're going to look at a few different combinations before we commit to anything. We wanted to use Joel early in the game because we knew Canada wasn't big enough. We wanted to put Bam and Anthony Davis in with the second group. We wanted to see what that looked like.”
Embiid, who was playing for the US national team for the first time, looked rusty and finished the game with 5 points, 6 rebounds and 5 fouls in 13 minutes.
He and Kerr had talked in recent days about increasing his conditioning and activity level as he recovers from a knee injury suffered late in the regular season that lost his Philadelphia 76ers to the New York Knicks in the first round of the playoffs. Embiid said he still has a long way to go, and so does Team USA.
“We could have been a lot better,” Embiid said. “We didn't take care of the ball. We were pretty good defensively. So we're going to rely on that, and offensively it's going to work out.”
It was also the first time Curry and James played together on Team USA, after Curry was part of two world championship teams in 2010 and 2014 and James won gold at the Olympics in 2008 and 2012.
They will get several more chances in the future. Team USA — missing both Durant and Derrick White, who replaced Kawhi Leonard on the team earlier Wednesday — travels to Abu Dhabi on Thursday, where it will face Australia and Serbia in two friendlies next week on the next leg of its pre-Olympic world tour.
“It's pretty amazing that we're at this point in our careers and we get to showcase our talent and do what we love and give back to the fans,” James said of playing with Curry. “So it's an absolute pleasure to play with one of the greatest to ever play the game and I'm excited for the rest of the summer.”