Team USA arrives at the FIBA World Cup semifinals believing its best basketball is still in front of it, and the reason players keep giving is the same one every time: Kara Lawson has been challenging them. That is the whole story, and if you have watched this program for any length of time, you know it is not a small one.
Here is why it matters. The American women win so often that the hardest part of any tournament run is manufacturing edge. Pool play does not supply it. The gap in talent does not supply it. It has to come from the bench, from a coach willing to tell a roster full of stars that the version of them that beat a lesser team by 30 is not the version that survives a semifinal. Lawson has apparently been doing exactly that, and the players are talking about it like a gift rather than a grievance. That is a tell about the room.
Lawson is a good fit for that job because she has sat in every chair. She won a WNBA title in Sacramento in 2005. She won Olympic gold as a player in Beijing in 2008. She coached the American 3x3 women to gold in Tokyo the first time the discipline appeared at the Games, which is a very different beast than the five-on-five program but tells you she can hold a small group together under pressure. And she has spent the last several years at Duke running a program that is not allowed to coast either.
checked the almanac: the last time the US women lost a World Cup semifinal was 2006 in Brazil, when Russia knocked them out and they settled for bronze. Twenty years is a long time to hold a door shut.
What comes next is the part nobody on that roster wants to say out loud, because semifinals are where dynasties get interrupted. One cold shooting half, one whistle-heavy stretch, one opponent that hangs around into the fourth. The thing I will be watching is whether Lawson's message shows up in the first six minutes rather than the last six, because urgency that arrives late is just panic wearing a nicer suit.