Team USA teammates Joel Embiid and LeBron James are two of the certain three starters in Paris, but head coach Steve Kerr might need to play another role — mediator — after Embiid critiqued the team’s elder statesman for diminishing skills.
Embiid told New York Times Magazine that LeBron today “is not the LeBron that was a couple of years ago. So it’s a big difference. Everybody would also tell you, and you can see for yourself, the athletic LeBron, dominant that he was a couple of years ago, is not the same that he is now. I think people get fooled by the names on paper. But those names have been built throughout their career, and now they’re older. They’re not what they used to be.”
Embiid shared the comments for a podcast giving his thoughts on the United States winning the gold medal in Paris.
James, 39, scored clutch baskets in back-to-back exhibition wins over South Sudan and Germany leading into the Paris Games.
He’s a surefire starter for Team USA, Kerr said, along with Embiid and Steph Curry. Kerr has shuffled his lineup at other positions after opening with Devin Booker and Kevin Durant when camp started in Las Vegas earlier this month.
“We’ve been looking at other guys around them and we obviously do have great options, but I like those three guys together,” Kerr said.
Curry, 36, and Durant, 35, are in the same elite peer class with James and Embiid as former NBA MVPs.
Durant said before a regular-season game in February that he could see James playing at his current level “five more years,” which would be age 44. So he didn’t take Embiid’s opinion to heart.
“We’re all different as we get older,” Durant said. “But the thing about greatness is that you adjust and find ways to continue to be effective. And that’s what LeBron has done at that age.”
Embiid, 30, missed 29 games in the regular season due to knee surgery. He has appeared sluggish at times in the exhibition schedule with Team USA but looked more like his former MVP self against Germany.
“We’ve got one goal, and that’s to win the gold, and we’re coming together with that mindset,” Embiid said. “We are not here to compete against each other. We just here to make each other better so we are on the same page so we can go out and do our best to win the gold.”
–Field Level Media
