Draymond Green criticizes his own coach for Tatum benching

However, Green said that shouldn’t matter. Instead, he pointed to what happened in the 2020 Olympics, when Green and Tatum were teammates on the gold-medal-winning men’s national team, as a reason why Tatum should be one of the featured players for the 2024 team.

“2020 Olympics, our team, our offense was built around Jayson Tatum and Kevin Durant,” Green said. “It was almost kind of set up as KD was passing the torch to JT to now take it because, at the time, I don’t Kevin’s mind was set on Paris.

“I think there was kind of this forgone conclusion or thought that, ‘Yeah, [Durant’s] passing the torch to JT. And then JT come out and not play? I couldn’t believe that.”

As Green said, Tatum was arguably the second-best player for the United States team that won the gold medal in the Tokyo Games. He was their second-leading scorer in the tournament, averaging 15.2 points per game. He also stepped up in the gold medal game, scoring 19 points to help the Americans beat France.

Following the win over Serbia, Kerr explained that he “went with combinations that made sense” and pointed to Durant’s return from a calf injury as a reason why Tatum didn’t play. Durant was the team’s lead forward off the bench in that matchup, making his first eight shots.

Tatum has started the last two games, scoring 10 points and grabbing 10 rebounds in Saturday’s win over Puerto Rico to round out group play. As Tatum got the starting nod, other players were left out of the rotation in each of the last two games. Joel Embiid sat out against South Sudan on Wednesday while fellow Celtics star Jrue Holiday didn’t play on Saturday, having been ruled out with an ankle injury.

Green isn’t a fan of the way the lineups have been shuffled.

“I’m sure it’s part ‘We can rest the ankle a little bit’, but it’s part, ‘We gotta not play somebody.’ Quite frankly, I don’t like it,” Green said. “Come out with a rotation and stick with it. These teams aren’t good enough to where we’re trying to match their lineup. They gotta match our lineup. We’re not matching their lineup because we’ve got the best players in the world.”

It should be noted that Green never mentioned Kerr by name during his analysis of the situation. But he made it pretty evident that he disagrees with the way his NBA coach is handling Team USA’s minutes while expressing some empathy for Tatum, who is a friend of his.

“JT goes from out of the rotation, zero minutes, to the starting lineup? That don’t make him feel good because this is the story,” Green said. “‘Now, I’m all of a sudden in the starting lineup. I’m Jayson Tatum and it’s almost like [I’m getting this] so [I] don’t feel bad.’ Like, that don’t make him feel good. I’m sure it probably made him feel worse about it.

“So, I just disagree with what’s going on with the lineup stuff.”

The United States earned the top seed in the knockout stage and will take on Brazil on Tuesday.