Isaac
Years ago
WSJ on Boomers: Australian basketball gets more Australian
The last three NBA champions had some unbeatable advantages: the coaching of Gregg Popovich, the shooting of Stephen Curry, the existence of LeBron James. They also had Australians.
The Australians in the NBA are the guys who everyone wants on their teams partly because they don't want them on anyone else’s. They tend to be selfless players who understand their roles—and their roles are to make the workplace more enjoyable for their colleagues and utterly miserable for opponents.
But what if there were a basketball team made up of only Australians? It turns out there is one: the Australian basketball team.
The country that could beat the U.S. in the Olympics is a team with five NBA role players and seven more players who aren’t even in the NBA. But those 12 players happen to be Australians, which makes them a more troublesome proposition entirely.
"Before the tournament," said Bogut, the team’s center, “we said that we need to be pricks defensively.”Full story
In other words, Australia’s basketball team wanted to be more Australian.
