Quick commentary: Was it a good thing Damian Lillard didn't make Team USA?

In the future, we'll be writing small, more speculative 300-500 word commentary pieces, instead of our larger more exhaustive ones, to keep the flow of content steadier here.  Enjoy the first:

With the FIBA tournament over, Blazers fans may rightly be speculating about what would have happened had Damian Lillard been included on the roster.

Well, not much, really, if one is to believe Yahoo! Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski.  Being free from the clutches of Duke basketball which hangs over the Team, which Wojnarowski complains about at length in his column yesterday, may have been a good thing for Portland’s rising star.

Many dismissed the column as mere Duke-bashing, but there were some very important points made as Wojnarowski articulated his case.

The most important charge Wojnarowski delivers against Coach K centers around the clear conflict of interest between his role as Duke’s coach and the freedom he gains from also being coach of Team USA.

The biggest and most egregious problem with this is that being coach of Team USA allows Coach Mike Krzyzewski to sell the Duke brand of basketball to potential high school recruits on the Under-19 team, where, for other coaches not affiliated with USA Basketball, the NCAA clearly prohibits any such contact from coaches or anyone else working for with college basketball programs from that matter. 

Wojnarowski frankly can’t believe what Coach K gets away with: “Krzyzewski never violated an NCAA rule,” Wojnarowski says incredulously, “when he climbed aboard a flight, flew cross-country and addressed the 2013 under-19 USA Basketball national team at its Colorado Springs training camp.” 

And yet, Wojnarowski alleges, this type of networking is crucial for the success of the Duke program: “Without the access of USA Basketball, there's a strong belief within the basketball community that Krzyzewski would've never landed Jabari Parker. Only, he had it, used it and signed him.”

But the wider problem has to do with the way the team gets reshaped each year around another set of Duke success stories.   Keeping Mason Plumlee on the roster at all rankles Wojnarowski, as it should.  With such controversial and questionable roster decisions being made, and being made relatively unquestioned, we have to ask ourselves, Wojnarowski says, whether the team represents, not the nation, but Duke basketball.

The larger difficulty however is not just material, on the basketball court.  It also has to do with the general rhetoric surrounding Coach K, and the wide influence it has.  The image of “teacher of success” which Coach K projects so well can alter powerfully the career narratives of the players he chooses for his team.  As Wojnarowski says, just “wait until the Duke coach is credited for DeMarcus Cousins' maturity with the Sacramento Kings this season.”

This is incredibly plausible, not just because in general people are waiting for a turnaround in Cousins’ behavior (which much of it will come naturally), but because of how much credit we do indeed give Coach K or his mentoring job.  There is a lot of hot air there, you have to admit.  And if you admit that, it leads Portland fans to wonder: couldn’t the same thing have happened to Lillard that is going to happen to Cousins?

Could a young, enterprising player, with clearly no maturity issues like Cousins, be similarly reduced to a Coach-K promotional tool?

Perhaps.  And that alone is enough to make Blazers fans happy he escaped the debacle—besides it significantly lessening the risk that Lillard would be injured before the season started.

Nevertheless, it would have been nice to see Lillard shine in international play the way he does in Portland, especially in a summer where his exposure as a cultural figure is growing—with his new ad campaign for Adidas with Derrick Rose (and the shoe to go with it), his appearance on the cover of NBA Live, his thoroughly random appearance in the Madden commercial.

But it is questionable how much exposure anyone got from doing FIBA in the first place.  In the meantime Lillard got to avoid any of the side-effects of having to work under such a brilliant, but such a formidible coach, in risky working conditions.