Let the recriminations begin.

When USA Basketball set about to rebuild its system after the twin debacles of Indianapolis and Athens, the idea wasn’t to bring home another bronze medal. But that’s what the U.S. ended up with at the World Championships after a stunning 101–95 semifinal loss at the hands of Greece.

In a way, Athens was easier to handle, because there were plenty of available scapegoats then. The wrong players were selected, everyone agreed, most notably because the team had no shooters. The coach, Larry Brown, was on an ego trip, and the team was dysfunctional.

So everyone felt like if the U.S. just picked the right players, got a good coach, and played hard, they’d go back to winning by 40 like the Dream Team did. Turns out it’s not that easy. This year’s squad was genuinely likable. They played unselfishly, they competed, and they accepted their roles. They just didn’t win.

Thus, it’s back to the drawing board for USA Basketball. They have to assess what went wrong — and what didn’t — as a prelude to the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Since the U.S. didn’t win at Worlds, the first stop on the road to the Olympics will be a qualifying tournament in Venezuela next summer.

With that in mind, now seems a good time as any to review how it is that a team full of NBA superstars could come up short in a big international tournament.A lot of people who didn’t see the tournament are resorting to tired clichés — “too much one-on-one,” “nobody knows how to move the ball,” “we can’t shoot,” etc. — but the real causes are much different.

It was the system, not the individuals.

The U.S. lost not because of shooting, or selfish play, or an inability to defend one-on-one. It lost because it couldn’t stop the most simple play in basketball: the pick-and-roll. Pick-and-roll defense depends on five players reading each other and making the right adjustments — defending as a team, rather than a group of individuals. It’s tough to build that kind of unity in the short time our side had to train together, while most international teams have been playing as a unit for years.

In a way, this is how our embarrassment of basketball riches hurts us — if we were Argentina and only had seven good players, they’d work together like clockwork because they’d be our national team by default. With the U.S. players having a three-year commitment, hopefully they can be much more in sync by 2008.

The deck is rigged. If this tournament had been played with NBA refs and NBA rules, the U.S. would have won handily. But the international game is just different enough to throw everything off. Two changes in particular are important: a smaller, slicker ball that some of players had trouble shooting and handling, and the lack of an illegal defense rule that made it much easier for teams to clog the lane. The foreign players aren’t better than ours, but they’re close enough that these adjustments can give them a leg up.

The coaches didn’t respect the opponent. Virtually every U.S. coach for the past decade has gone in assuming victory and seemed shocked and bewildered when it didn’t play out that way. Mike Krzyzewski was no exception. A good example was his defensive approach — the U.S. didn’t play zone all tournament except for a brief stretch in the bronze medal game, because he couldn’t imagine needing anything other than pressure man-to-man against supposedly inferior opponents.

Greece played out of their minds. The tournament is set up to have a one-game elimination round, and in one-game situations almost anything can happen, as we’ve seen too many times in the NCAA Tournament. In this case, the Greeks banked two shots by accident, had their best 3-point shooting day of the tournament, and made several difficult floaters from mid-range.

Hopefully the U.S. squad will learn from these mistakes in 2008. But regardless of what kind of team the U.S. sends to Beijing, gold is far from guaranteed: The playing field levels enough under international rules that several dogs can have their day against us. The challenge is getting USA Basketball, not to mention the American public, to accept this.