With Tommy Lloyd as coach, Team USA could look like Arizona Wildcats in FIBA U18 AmeriCup (2024)

If Team USA looks a little like the Arizona Wildcats in the FIBA U18 AmeriCup this week, flowing quickly and unselfishly down an Argentinian floor en route to some triple-digit scores, that won’t be a surprise considering the coach.

But everything else about Tommy Lloyd’s summertime team is different. There are no current Wildcats on USA’s U18 roster and maybe not any future ones, either. Also, Lloyd’s red-and-blue gear represents something else entirely.

Lloyd spent part of USA Basketball’s training camp in Colorado Springs last week convincing a group of mostly five-star college prospects, some of whom he has been recruiting and most he has not, exactly what it was all about.

This was not club basketball or some sort of all-star circuit, and Lloyd was not in a cluster of coaches sitting on the sidelines trying to recruit them.

“I’ve told all the guys here, I’m their coach for USA Basketball and right now, my stuff in Arizona is on the backburner,” Lloyd said by telephone from Colorado as camp wrapped up last week. “I think they need to all put their recruitments aside and understand we’re all playing for USA Basketball. We’re on a kind of our own group mission right now. The other stuff we don’t need to intertwine.”

Lloyd said there were “checks and balances” in the roster-determining system to make sure that coaches don’t play favorites: Among other things, a separate Junior National Team committee made up of other college coaches mostly whittles the roster down from 29 invitees, with the coaching staff allowed input on the final few cuts that shaped up the 12-player team.

As it turned out, none of the four camp invitees that Arizona has shown recruiting interest in made the team, including four-star 2025 wing Hudson Greer of Austin, Texas.

“I think it would be short sighted” for recruiting politics to matter, Lloyd said. “The other thing is, there’s good players that don’t make the final 12. That’s just that’s how it is. You consider there’s 24 McDonald’s all-Americans, and only 12 guys in the U18 Team. You can do the math. Some really good players don’t make it.”

It happened to one of Lloyd’s best players at Arizona: Guard Dalen Terry was cut early in training camp for the USA U19 World Cup team in 2021, yet became an NBA first-round draft pick a year later.

Among the other 29 players invited to USA’s top junior team camp this time but not making the final roster was incoming five-star ASU center Jayden Quaintance, who was beaten out by two other incoming freshmen big men: Patrick Ngongba (Duke) and Daniel Jacobsen (Purdue), whom Lloyd said was one of the strong points that jumped out in camp.

Formerly of Albuquerque’s La Cueva High School before he transferred to New Hampshire’s Brewster Academy last season, Jacobsen faces the daunting prospect of having to help replace Zach Edey at Purdue. But first, the 7-3 center will be expected to help lead the USA’s U18 team to a gold medal, one of five big men that Lloyd said all distinguished themselves in different ways.

“He’s been impressive,” Lloyd said. “He’s pretty consistently played at a high level in camp and this is somebody who wasn’t on the top 100 list or anything like that. I think people are going to be surprised the impact he’s gonna have.”

On the perimeter, USA’s top players include incoming Alabama wing forward Derrion Reed, class of 2025 wing forward Nik Khamenia of Southern California, 2025 guard Trey McKenney of Michigan and 2025 point guard Mikel Brown Jr., who has committed to Mississippi.

“They’re very young, really talented guards,” Lloyd said. “They all have tremendous strengths and great upside. It’s been a fun group to work with.”

Together, Lloyd says, the Americans will play with a similar style as the Wildcats do, a style he said he’s comfortable with. Lloyd also has two UA staffers alongside him in athletic trainer Justin Kokoskie and player development director Rem Bakamus.

The goal will be the same as Lloyd faces at Arizona, too: To win it all.

Usually, that works out pretty well for USA Basketball in what used to be known as the U18 Americas Championship. Team USA has won six straight gold medals, and 10 of them overall in 12 iterations of the event, which is usually played every other year.

But just in case that history leads to complacency, Lloyd noted that there’s also this: The last time USA didn’t win the gold was when Argentina beat the Americans in a 2008 championship game … that was played in Argentina.

It just so happens that USA will open play against host Argentina on Monday evening at Estadio Obras Sanitarias, otherwise known as the “Templo de Rock” because of the many rock concerts it has hosted.

“We’re expecting it to be tough,” Lloyd said. “It’s gonna be a tough road game. We’re going in expecting good competition and we’re not going to overlook anybody.”

The Americans also have Group B games scheduled for Tuesday against Belize on Tuesday and Wednesday against Brazil, followed by a rest day on Thursday and championship-round games starting Friday.

If USA wins its three Group B games, it will play a quarterfinal game Friday against the last-place finisher from Group A, which includes Canada, Venezuela, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. While youth team rosters change every summer, FIBA’s latest overall youth rankings had USA at No. 1, with Canada at 9, Brazil at 11, Puerto Rico at 15 and Argentina at 16.

All four U18 AmeriCup semifinalists receive berths in the 2025 U19 World Cup in Switzerland, and Lloyd is expected to also coach the USA there if it qualifies.

That’s another reason for Lloyd, and his players, to take the U18 opportunity seriously.

“I’m taking a two-year approach to this,” Lloyd said. “I’m hoping a lot of these kids will be with us next year, so we’ll have a little bit of continuity. I think we’re organized and we’ll have a purpose when we’re playing. That’s what I wanted it to be.

“I didn’t want it to turn into an open gym, rat-ball scenario. I’m coaching ’em like I would be coaching them at Arizona.”