An interesting article popped up on the ESPN website. Written by Jemele Hill, the article titled For the black community, a Redeem Team gold is especially important indicates that the group most hurt by recent poor performances in the Olympics are black basketball players and the black community in general, and that, by winning the gold medal, the Redeem Team, as they're known by, not only redeems American basketball but the entire black community as well.

It's an intriguing story, one that definitely deserves at least a little bit of thought about, because of some of the facts in her story. One, if not all, the players on the teams have been overwhelmingly black. Two, the way they've paraded in the last couple of Olympic games, as though they're not really part of the entire American experience at all, looked bad. Three, it looked like they couldn't translate what's really more of an independent game into an organized and orderly world standard, and therefore looked exposed as overpaid "out for myself" ballers instead of men proud to win as a team.

However, appearances are deceiving. Andrew Bogut of Australia notwithstanding, the truth is that those past teams weren't put together all that well. Larry Brown being picked as someone to coach Olympians was one of the worst choices I'd ever seen. He's all about control, and he picked the style of players that work well in the NBA, but didn't pick the types of players that need to be on international teams in order to win. In other words, Larry Brown fell down where people thought he excelled; he didn't scout international basketball to know what was needed in order to compete. Oh, by the way, Larry Brown happens to not be black, by the way, and neither was George Karl, who coached the 2002 FIBA tournament team that got embarrassed. And neither is Mike Krzyzewski, this year's Olympic coach, who was also the 2006 coach of the team that ended up with the bronze medal.

I hate thinking that people might possibly see these games as redemption for black basketball players. Goodness, why do individuals need redemption in team games anyway? True, it's been embarrassing in a way not to see Americans win every single basketball game they play against international competition, but truth be told those international teams, for the most part, play with each other almost all the time, and the international pro leagues are much like the international games, whereas here in America the rules and the courts are different. That, plus so many players have elected not to go for different reasons in the past. Does anyone really think the 2006 team wouldn't have won if Kobe Bryant hadn't been there? What about Shaq in 2006, or 2004?

It's hard enough for any athletes to have to win knowing they're representing the United States; adding the pressure on by saying they're playing for their race isn't fair. If they win, everyone here wins, and that's good enough for me. After all, that's what diversity is supposed to be about.