Steve Kerr and Team USA fall to Germany in the 2023 FIBA World Cup semi-finals

MANILA, Philippines — It’s typically a risky endeavor to proclaim a player who is unknown outside of the NBA as the *insert nationality here* *insert prominent NBA player here*. I’m certainly guilty of this — but it’s mostly done in jest or in a facetious manner.

But let me indulge in this exercise one more time, since Steve Kerr and Team USA have now been knocked out of gold medal contention in the 2023 FIBA World Cup by Germany. The Germans preyed on a leaky American defense that just did not have the required cohesion necessary to string together stop after stop.

The operative phrase of the Americans’ performance on defense was “coverage confusion” — and one of the first instances of such was on this possession:

The series of events above was a harbinger of the problems Team USA were to face against…