Anthony Edwards And Tyrese Haliburton Are Among The Headliners For The 2021 USA Basketball Select Team

USA Basketball’s has its 12-man roster for the upcoming Summer Olympics all set. While the team lacks a host of traditional big men, the Americans will head into Tokyo with a remarkable amount of firepower on the offensive end of the floor, with guys like Kevin Durant and Damian Lillard among the players that Gregg Popovich will rely upon to give the United States its fourth straight gold medal.

Prior to their participating in the Games, the team will head to Las Vegas for a training camp. As is usually the case, that camp will involve going head-to-head with a Select Team made up largely of NBA youngsters, and on Thursday, USA Basketball announced the 17 players who will help get the Olympic squad ready to go.

“This USA Select Team continues the legacy established by previous Select teams of helping prepare our USA National Team for the Tokyo Olympic Games,” Jerry Colangelo, the director of USA Basketball, said in a statement. “With all the uncertainty of how many of our Olympic Team members will be available for the USA training camp because of the overlap with the NBA Finals, we chose a USA Select Team consisting of many of the top young NBA players and four players who not only own international experience, but who played recently for USA Basketball in important national team qualifying competitions.If we need to add players to fill out our roster for any of our exhibition games, we feel this USA Select Team has an excellent variety of skilled players to choose from.”

The roster features a number of promising youngsters who could make it onto the senior team some day — guys like Edwards, Garland, and Haliburton, among others — and older players (Jenkins, Magette, Mathias, Reynolds) who are being rewarded for the roles they played in either helping the team get through World Cup or AmeriCup qualifiers. The team will be coached by Erik Spoelstra, with Mark Few and Jamahl Mosley serving as his assistants.