If Argentina — and, Spain, the other international program that has challenged U.S. hegemony in basketball the last decade — is transitioning to a new generation, there are other nations looking to make major inroads in basketball for the first time.
Australia has been on the periphery of international competition for a generation, but has yet to win an Olympic medal. The Boomers are determined to end that drought during these games, having clinched second place in Group A with a 4-1 record after defeating Venezuela on Sunday. Their only loss was a hard-fought 10-point loss to the U.S. men last week. Australia led at the half, the first time the U.S men had trailed in an Olympic game at halftime since 2004.
Australia’s had NBA players like Andrew Bogut, Patty Mills and Matthew Dellavedova to build around the last few cycles, but it’s the future that’s most exciting. Young vets like Joe Ingles (Utah), Cameron Bairstow and Aron Baynes (both with Detroit) are already steeped in the national culture and playing for the Boomers.
The pipeline is rapidly filling. Australia’s Under-17 team won the silver medal at both the 2012 and 2014 FIBA Under-17 championships, the latter coming in a close seven-point loss to the U.S. team in Dubai. U.S. college coaches flocked to the country’s national development program, the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), for Australia’s first national prospects camp, featuring up-and-coming talent like Tom Fullarton and Lachlan Dent.
And like Canada, another program that’s on the rise (but which, cruelly, can’t seem to get over the hump consistently and qualify for the Olympics), Australia is benefitting from an immigrant influx.
Forward Thon Maker, who was taken 10th overall in June’s NBA Draft by Milwaukee one year after he left high school, arrived in Perth with family members from Sudan when he was five years old. He learned the game in Australia before going to the States and Canada to play as a teenager.
Many years before Maker arrived, a guard named David Simmons came to Australia from Oklahoma City University. He played 12 seasons in the country for five different teams before becoming coach of the Hunter Pirates in 2003. His son, Ben, grew up in Melbourne and grew to a coordinated 6-foot-9. In June, Ben Simmons went No. 1 overall in the NBA Draft, to the Philadelphia 76ers.
Maker and Simmons didn’t really go through AIS, located in Canberra. The program, in existence since 1981, serves as the national umbrella entity that oversees boys’ and girls’ teams throughout the country, specifically with Olympic medal potential in mind. AIS is in the midst of a decade-long program called “Winning Edge” that seeks to develop multiple Olympic, Paralympic and world champions across the board by 2022.
Simmons was briefly in AIS before coming to the States as well for high school and a year at LSU. Point guard Dante Exum, the fifth pick overall by the Utah Jazz in the 2014 NBA Draft and another major hope for Australian basketball in the near future, was an AIS player.
Maker, Simmons and Exum are all in the national team pipeline, however. The hope for Australia is that the current team will still have enough tread on its collective tires by the time those three are ready. (Exum is rehabbing a torn ACL he suffered playing for Australia last summer, an injury that cost him the entire 2015-16 season.)
“I think it’s been rising for a while,” said Luc Longley, the former Chicago Bulls center during the second Chicago three-peat (1996-98), who is now an assistant coach for his country’s national team.
“We’re certainly trying to make it so,” Longley said. “We do have good juniors development at home. And certainly, our gene pool, to be crude about it, has really gotten interesting. We’ve got a lot of Sudanese kids. And the sons and daughters of the imports of the 80s are (some of) the first ones coming out. Cal Bruton (the New York native who starred as a player in the Australian Basketball League in the ’80s and then coached in the ABL for many years) came out in the early ’80s, and his son has come through and finished.”
Simmons and Maker have both committed to playing on future national teams. Simmons begged off playing in the Olympics this time around as he got his feet wet with the Sixers in Summer League play in July. It was a juggle for the Australian team with Bogut as well. The veteran center hadn’t played since spraining his left knee during Game 5 of The Finals against Cleveland in June while he still with the Golden State Warriors.
“Simmons, I think, I don’t know what the details were, but I know he’s got a big job to do, and he’s probably taking that as his first priority,” Longley said. “I think he could have made the team, but he would have had to come to camp. We respect that decision. I was in some of those decisions myself with the Bulls, where I had to choose (between) the Olympics and what the Bulls needed me to do. I think we’d all be a bit naïve to see that we’d all make a decision in favor of the country. We support Ben in that.”
In the meantime, the current team is in the Olympic quarterfinals, one win from having a chance to get that elusive medal.
Bogut’s presence changes the entire team dynamic. He hadn’t played with the national team in seven years, having missed the 2012 London Games with injury. He warned his teammates before the game against the U.S. team not to be sappy and intimidated, like opponents of the Dream Team in 1992 were.
“The dynamics of the group are complicated, but it’s really clear what he’s brought — a degree of, confidence is not a good enough word, and arrogance is too strong,” Longley said. “It’s somewhere in there. There’s a few four-letter words we could use. You can use them. But he’s definitely brought some mass, some attitude, some bearing to our group. MJ did it with the Bulls in my experience, and even with MJ on the bench we all carried that, because he was around. Andrew does that with us. He’s so respected and he’s such a good basketballer. When he’s not playing and he’s sitting on the bench, it’s like having a fourth assistant coach … I’d never worked with him before and so I didn’t know what to expect, and I’ve been very impressed.”
Mills, an Aborigine, arranged for the team to visit Uluru, in Australia’s Northern Territory, in early July, just before the start of training camp for the Games, for several days of bonding and fellowship. The team also dedicated a basketball court for members of the Mutitjulu community, an indigenous Aboriginal people who live at the eastern end of Uluru, near a national park.
Mills wanted his teammates to think about, as he put it, what it means to wear “the green and gold,” the Boomers’ colors. It is not guaranteed, but it is quite possible that the Aussies will play the Americans again here before the end of the tournament — in the gold medal game.
“Hopefully, it’s inspiring, the way we play, the style we play,” Mills said Saturday. “And the way we represent ourselves. It’s inspiring for other young Australians to want to be greater than we are now. That’s what it’s all about. I’ve said it before — I think this is the greatest team that Australia’s put together for an Olympic Games. And that’s what we should strive for each time — try to be better.”
