The biggest story coming out of Team USA’s first Olympic pool game against Serbia was that recent Boston champion Jayson Tatum didn’t play.
He and Tyrese Haliburton were the only players on the team to warm the bench for the entire matchup.
But Team USA head coach Steve Kerr says that Tatum will definitely get to log some minutes in the country’s next game against South Sudan.
“Jayson will play [Wednesday],” Kerr said in Paris on Monday. “I’m not going to answer your next question, which is if he plays, who doesn’t. But we’re going to need him, and part of this job for me is to keep everybody engaged and ready, because my experience with this is crazy stuff happens.”
Kerr had previously explained that he “felt like an idiot” for not playing Tatum, but it is a difficult task to play everyone when you have one of the most stacked Olympic basketball lineups in history.
“The hardest part of this job is you’re sitting at least a couple of guys who are world-class, some of the very best players on Earth,” Kerr said. “On one hand, it makes no sense at all. On the other, I’m asking these guys to just commit to winning one game and then move on to the next one. I have to do the same thing. And so, I felt like last night those were the combinations that made the most sense.”
Now, it seems as though Tatum’s teammate and Miami heat big man Bam Adebayo may be the next one to miss out on minutes against South Sudan, ESPN’s Brian Windhorst is reporting.
“When they play South Sudan on Wednesday,” Windhorst said on The Pat McAfee Show. “South Sudan’s got a bunch of athletic wing players. Tatum’s gonna be out there. They’re gonna be switching all those screens because he’s gotta play the perimeter. There may be a guy like Bam Adebayo that gets benched in that game.”