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Team USA: D-Wade the embodiment of Redeem Team
SHANGHAI, China -- If the Redeem Team moniker is going to stick, we'll have to anoint Dwyane Wade the embodiment of that nickname.
Two years and two months ago, he was the young phenom the NBA couldn't embrace enough.
Six months ago, he was the broken-down, human-turnover machine whose best work was being done in television commercials.
But as we move into August -- the month in which we'll all learn whether Wade and the rest of Team USA will end America's eight-year gold-medal drought -- we're seeing a Wade 2.0 who's finally back to looking like the Wade who led the Miami Heat to the 2006 NBA championship.
"Last year was not a fair indication of the player he is," Kobe Bryant said Saturday. "He's healthy, he's strong, he's ready to go. The other night he caught a lob and windmilled it, so he's back all the way."
Wade has been the second-leading scorer for Team USA through its first three exhibition games, averaging 17.4 points on 71 percent shooting (80 percent on 3-pointers) as the Americans have rolled past Canada, Turkey and Lithuania.
Wade scored 15 of his team-high 19 points in just seven second-half minutes Friday as the Americans defeated Lithuania by 36 points, pulling away after a 19-point lead had dwindled to nine early in the second half. Wade was the offensive catalyst in the decisive surge, earning player of the game honors as the Americans finished off their five-day trip to Macau with a performance that boosted both their individual and their collective self-confidence.
Wade's teammates lauded him for his three-game body of work, but also for the work he's been putting in behind the scenes, working overtime to add the catch-and-shoot jumper to a repertoire best known for his ability to get to the hoop.
"Well, first of all, any compliment you get from your peers or your teammates means more than compliments that come from outside," Wade said. "So I appreciate LeBron [James] and the guys for saying that and really being behind me the whole time. Like I've been preaching and I've been saying, I've worked my tail off to get healthy. I haven't been healthy in two years after going through that long season, winning the championship, coming right back to compete in the FIBA World Championship.
"I didn't have time to rest my body, so it wore down over the next year, and that's when I had two surgeries. I'm healthy again, I'm as healthy as I've been in two years, and I'm excited not only about this opportunity, but I'm excited about the rest of my career because now I know what it takes, and that weight room has become my best friend."
Like his teammates, Wade bounded off the team bus with a little extra zip in his step late Saturday as the team arrived at its new hotel in Shanghai and immediately made a beeline to an adjacent California Pizza Kitchen, outfoxing the few fans who had received advance notice of their impending arrival and were staking out the front entrance.
[+] EnlargeMN Chan/Getty Images
Wade says he's 100 percent healthy and is showing it with explosive moves to the hoop.
Bryant, Jason Kidd and Dwight Howard represented the team at an early evening news conference, whispering and passing inside jokes to one another as they sat through English and Mandarin translations of every question and answer. (The only time they all knocked off the goofiness and snapped to attention was when a question was posed regarding Argentina's comeback from a 19-point deficit against Australia the previous night -- a game in which Luis Scola scored 28 of his 32 points in the second half as the defending Olympic champion squad showed itself to be starting to hit its stride at last after two exhibition losses to Spain and a closer-than-expected victory over Iran.)
The Americans' next match comes Sunday at 3 p.m. local time (3 a.m. ET, ESPN2) against defending European champion Russia (there won't be another afternoon game until the final day of the Olympics, Aug. 24), and coach Mike Krzyzewski already has told them they can have Monday off before playing their final pre-Olympic tune-up Tuesday against Australia.
Chief American scout Tony Ronzone sat outside a Starbucks and greeted the American players as they disembarked from their bus after a two and a half hour commercial flight from Macau to Shanghai. He dispensed nuggets of information gleaned from his trip to Nanjing, China, to scout the FIBA DiamondBall Tournament -- and wondered aloud why Lithuania had used two of its best players, Ramunas Siskauskas and Linas Kleiza, so sparingly Friday, and why the Lithuanians had not given any playing time to one of their more versatile big men, Darius Lavrinovic?
As impressed as he was with the accounts he had read and heard about the victory, Ronzone seemed to believe the Lithuanians were playing possum to a certain degree, showing the Americans very little of their repertoire in the hopes that Team USA would be lu
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