RBS #110 Steve Kerr ‘felt like an idiot’ for benching Jayson Tatum….

RBS #110
Steve Kerr ‘felt like an idiot’ for benching Jayson Tatum….

Other than Kevin Durant’s masterful performance coming off the bench, the biggest story to come out of Team USA’s win over Serbia on Sunday was the fact that Jayson Tatum didn’t play a single second.

You weren’t alone if you thought maybe Tatum had a little injury pop up. A picture floated around social media showing his finger heavily wrapped. Or maybe he caught the virus that Joel Embiid and Anthony Davis were dealing with in the lead up to Sunday. There had to be something going on, right?

Nope. He just straight up got benched. Coach’s decision. Not a single second to be found for the best player on the best team in the NBA who has made first-team All-NBA three straight years. Not even when the Americans were up 21 early in the fourth quarter. Tatum, who was presumed to be one of the candidates to crack the starting lineup, never once took his warmup shirt off.

“It’s really hard in a 40-minute game to play more than 10 guys,” U.S. coach Steve Kerr told reporters after the game. “With Kevin [Durant] coming back, I just went to the combinations that I felt made the most sense. It seems crazy. I thought I was crazy when I looked at everything and determined these are the lineups I wanted to get to.”

What he’s saying, in essence, is that he thinks Devin Booker, who is damn near the same player as Tatum, is a better fit through the lens of supporting the starting lineup, and he thinks Anthony Edwards is a better player, period.

You can argue that Derrick White maintains second-unit offensive clarity as a non-scorer with a clear-cut duty to defend in the same way Jrue Holiday does for the starters. Anthony Davis and Bam Adebayo are positionally necessary, and Durant is, well, Durant. Edwards is the one who could, on paper, be most easily swapped out for Tatum.

I’m not saying Kerr should’ve gone that route, because then we’d be sitting here saying why the hell didn’t Edwards play. I’m simply saying you can’t tell me for one second that Edwards “matches up better” with Serbia than Tatum.

#JasonTatum