An all-college Team USA, portal costs and benefits, ACC discourse: Buzzer Mailbag

Also: A former Virginia transfer goes back to the high-majors

Thought exercise: Adam Silver for some reason decides that NBA players are no longer allowed to compete for Team USA in the Olympics citing health/injury risks for players with ballooning salaries. The onus now falls on amateur basketball players. You are in charge of selecting a roster that would have competed at the Paris Olympics this summer. Who is on your college Team USA? — Ross

A top-tier mailbag tipoff toss from Ross. Here’s the group I would have sent to the 2024 Paris games:

Starters
Mark Sears
R.J. Davis
Alex Karaban
Cooper Flagg
Hunter Dickinson

Bench
Johni Broome
Johnell Davis
Caleb Love
Ryan Kalkbrenner
Braden Smith
Ace Bailey
Koby Brea

Coaches: Bill Self, Dan Hurley, Nate Oats

If I do say so myself: This is a really good squad! That starting five is not just a list of five of the best (ostensibly) amateur basketball players in the country, but it also works extremely well as an actual team, particularly for the style of play we want to install here. We’ve appointed Bill Self head coach, because all of us here at USA Basketball have an immense respect for his ability to get the most out of any group of players, and he has earned the big job throughout his Hall of Fame career.

We should say, just at the outset, respectfully, our technical staff is very keen to see Coach Self orient this team’s style of play more toward the Alabama approach. Not all the way, necessarily, Bill, but partly, in spirit, much as Coach K took inspiration from his own Team USA assistant, Mike D’Antoni. Cool? We want Sears and Davis getting the ball up the floor early in possessions, and we want no more than one player at or near the rim offensively at any given time. The Dickinson-Flagg frontcourt combination, with Karaban floating between the spaces, works perfectly to this end. (Also, we want to sprinkle in a bunch of Hurley’s half court sets.)

Initially, we had Dylan Harper on the list, but swapped him in favor of Koby Brea — when in doubt, take more shooting than you think you need. We would also maybe consider a similar swap for Caleb Love. Maybe Liam McNeeley? The problem, of course, is that we haven’t actually seen McNeeley display his allegedly prodigious shooting talent at the collegiate level, whereas we know what we’re going to with Love, which is to say roughly 85 percent excellence and 15 percent crazy, with the caveat that on this team he just needs to be a super-confident energy guy off the bench and not the star around which the entire offense rotates.

Is there a way to squeeze Robbie Avila on this team? Maybe we just take Avila instead of Love and let Johnell handle the bench guard minutes. Upon further review, that 13-point, 5-of-18 night against Clemson in March is making us anxious for what Love might try in a close semifinal, say.

Anyway, this feels like a good representation of college basketball’s modern strengths: some bulwark center talent, tons of good guard play, more positionally flexible wings and forwards, diverse and experimental coaching schools of thought, all topped off with a dash of truly elite NBA level talent (Flagg). Let’s be real: A college Team USA isn’t beating any team with Nikola Jokić. But assuming Silver’s new ruling applies to Serbia and France and the rest, Flagg and Co. would just as proportionally hard to beat as our actual Olympians were. (Arguably more so.)

Do you get the sense that any coaches think the transfer portal makes some parts of roster building easier? I'm a Wisconsin fan, and on paper it seems like the replacements that were brought in for Connor Essegian and AJ Storr will have an outside shot at contributing more immediately on both O and D than the players they are replacing, enough that it might outweigh the PG downgrade. I could see some coaches appreciating the ability to make "instant" changes to their roster and trading the risk of bad chemistry / bad read for the reward of "maybe this is an instant gel" - it seems like that's more likely in basketball than football because there's less roster and less "playbook" that needs to be memorized. — Sam Gardner

It cuts both ways.

Any current college coach will tell you that the job has never been harder. You are, in essence, constantly re-recruiting your own roster. You are investing a steadily increasing amount of time (because someone out there is always trying to outwork you) selling kids on a vision that everybody now understands could end as soon as one season. You are fending off approaches from other teams and scuttling around to donors and NIL collectives to find the money to match overenthusiastic financial offers that may or may not actually be real. Just when you put a good roster together, even at a place like Wisconsin but It’s messy and difficult and Sisyphean and would make the wrong kind of person totally crazy. It’s not for the faint of heart, and talking to coaches during recruiting periods the past few seasons has often felt like the last panel of this meme: