I find it interesting the Aussies have thirty words for "drunk" but only one for "work"... I keed, I keed...
I feel badly for Austrailia fans; they're in the same boat as Chinese fans. Their team has one great player, one nba prospect, and a bunch of scrubs who turn the ball over a lot. Yao and Bogut are their team's best ballhandlers, scorers, rebounders, and passers. That's no way to win gold or even medal. But what can they do?
They can try building a good team there are a lot of decent Australian players playing in Europe so it's not that impossible. Back at the '96 Olympics the Australians destroyed a good Greek team that finished 5th in the tournament by 40 points and went on to take 4th place. They didn't have any NBAer on that team I think but they had some good players like Andrew Gaze and Shane Heal who had perfected their game playing for very good European basketball teams. I think a lot of teams nowadays fall in the trap of building their teams around their NBAers but just because it has worked for Germany doesn't mean it will work all the time. It certainly didn't work for teams like Australia or Brazil or China because they expect everything from their star players and when they're on a bad day these teams are on big trouble. On the other hand, look at Spain or France, they can be pretty decent even without Gasol or Parker. Sure, it's good to have an NBA-caliber player in your squad but it's not like the other teams are going to surrender without a fight because of that... maybe that was happening 10-20 years ago, when the level of the NBA was much higher but it's not as impressive or scary anymore now that the distance between NBA and international basketball has shortened so much.
