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Opinion: With competition more fierce than ever, U.S. women's basketball team will have to rely on talent down low

TOKYO – Four years ago, fresh off winning her first NCAA championship, Dawn Staley brought her South Carolina team here for a summer exhibition tour that included three games against the Japanese national team.

It wasn’t pretty. The ball movement, the spacing, the ability to play small and frustrate with pace – it was all too much, even for one of the best teams in college basketball, albeit one that wasn’t exactly in midseason form.

“We were trying, and we still lost by 25,” Staley said.

As eye-opening as that experience might have been, it was instructive in a very specific way as it related to the challenge Staley has now as head coach of the U.S. women’s basketball team at the Tokyo Games. In any international event, the Americans still have the most talent, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. But what’s happening in the women’s game has started to track with what’s already happened in the men’s game, where styles and continuity can help other countries shrink the personnel gap.

For now, that only goes so far. Team USA ultimately beat Japan on Friday in group play here at Saitama Super Arena, only making it comfortable in the last three minutes of an 86-69 victory. When paired with the Americans’ nine-point win over Nigeria in their Olympic opener earlier in the week, it paints the picture of a world changing and a gold medal that will be far more difficult to secure than at any time in recent memory.

“It’s just good basketball going on right now in the world, and I think we’re going to be fine,” said Brittney Griner. “Everybody’s kind of looking at it like, ‘Oh my God,’ but it’s not an ‘Oh my God moment.’ We’re doing what we need to do right now.”

United States center Brittney Griner is pressured during Team USA's win against Japan.
United States center Brittney Griner is pressured during Team USA's win against Japan.

There will, undeniably, be some concerns about the manner in which Team USA has won its first two games here, with group play concluding Monday against France. The Americans have turned it over a combined 42 times in two games, many of them coming against a full-court press. On both occasions, they’ve held 10-point leads in the fourth quarter and been unable to go on that big run to put it away. Their perimeter defense has been average at best, and they’ve struggled with the pace at which their opponents have tried to play.

There’s a blueprint now for how to at least bother a team that five years ago in Rio won its games by an average margin of 37 points.

“I don’t think America likes to go that fast for that long,” said Japan coach Tom Hovasse, who grew up in Colorado and played at Penn State in the 1980s.

But what ultimately separates the U.S. from everyone else, and why the Americans didn’t let Japan come back Friday: They have Griner and A’ja Wilson and the other teams don’t.

For as long as the U.S. has sent teams to international competition, the ability to play with bigs who are skilled at scoring in the low- and mid-post has been the primary separator from the rest of the field. In past years, it made the U.S. completely untouchable. Now, it’s covering up a plethora of sins and holding the rest of the world at bay.

Against Japan, Wilson and Griner combined for 35 points, made 16-of-26 field goals and had 15 rebounds. When the chips are down, that’s the identity of U.S. women’s basketball. That’s how they’re going to win. Truth be told, it’s how they must win.

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A'ja Wilson shoots the ball against Japan.
A'ja Wilson shoots the ball against Japan.

“It’s great knowing that we have players who can sit in the paint and score with their back to the basket,” Staley said. “Nobody really else in the world has centers who are mobile, that are able to defend on the perimeter and scores facing up or with their back to the basket. In a lot of ways, the rest of the world has taught us some things, but they haven’t produced the type of post players we’re able to produce being true centers.”

In America, the women’s game has not necessarily followed the migration to pace-and-space that has taken over the men’s game from the NBA on down. In general, it’s remained a far more traditional product because of the dominance of players like Wilson, who was the driving force on Staley’s national championship team and quickly became the MVP of the WNBA.

Japan is a good example of what can happen when a national program puts resources and effort into figuring out how to compete. Unable to match the Americans’ size, they’ve built an effective five-out system where they’re going to create driving lanes, shoot lots of threes and force bigs to come out and guard.

For more than a quarter, it worked beautifully against the U.S. The Japanese team made shot after shot, got the U.S. to speed up beyond its comfort level and took a 30-28 lead after 10 minutes. Ultimately, Japan couldn’t sustain the kind of shooting it needed to, making 10-of-38 threes. But for the most part, they weren’t bad looks. What happens if a few more of those go down? It wouldn’t have been much of a leap for this 10-point game with four minutes left to be a legitimate scare in a one-and-done tournament scenario like what the U.S. will face next week.

“When you play America, 28 percent from three isn’t going to beat them,” Hovasse said. “I think we learned that our defense is good enough and we can do some things physically, and the next time we face them will hopefully be in the championship game and we’ll be better prepared.”

At the last few Olympics, that kind of talk would have rightly been dismissed as delusional. But this is a different year, a different U.S. team and a world that sees the gap shrinking just enough to believe.

Team USA is still likely to go home with its seventh straight gold medal. But the evidence is mounting that this will be the most difficult one to win in quite some time.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A'ja Wilson, Brittney Griner key for Team USA women at Tokyo Olympics