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After a little more time of looking at the result, tactics, etc, all I'm clear about its that this result defies explanation. Two good guards and a well rounded SF feeding two good inside scoring centers against a weak 3-2 zone is a recipe for a huge USA win.

Apparently we took lots of late in the shot clock long range desperation 3pfg. Why? Look inside is the faster paced inside option, were those really the best opportunities over 24 seconds?

The only thing that stands out is the CT vs Normal. Effort and enthusiasm, love it.

Well, on the boards, 3-2 doesn't hurt rebounding. You would think with LI vs RnG we'd get more OReb's, but they were up 18-9 there, which is very odd.

As for the rest, yeah, there's definitely some frustrations. The crazy long 3s suggest we weren't able to get any inside passes off in time. I had hoped the high tempo good passing guards would help that, but apparently not.

Bronson definitely struggled. Only 1 assist from a high passing SG wasn't what we needed (compared to 5 for billingsley who has slightly worse passing). And we couldn't really have put more OD on their SG than we did, unless guys had been in better GS. There might be an argument that Bronson's low experience hurt, but that seems a little like grasping at straws.

Colombia probably TIE'd every game up til now, and so was probably a bit higher than us on enthusiasm. That with the extra effort was apparently enough to do it. I don't really like that explanation, though, because it implies that 2-3 enthus points + 1 level of effort was enough to flip a +42 point margin for us to +13 for them. Some of that 55 point swing must be improved tactics from them, but, well, that's a big swing.

wozz teaches me that 3-2 has virtually no influence on RB

Even says in the manual: 3-2 Zone: Increased perimeter defense at the expense of interior defense. Slow pace.

Nonetheless I'm still confused by the result. Makes the game planning process even more murky.

I think their 3-2 zone was not as weak as it may seem? We know what OD we put up at SG/PG/SF, and we still put up only a 9.5-10 OD in the team ratings, after our big men's OD was mixed into the team rating. They put up a 10.5 in the team ratings with probably an equal amount of dragging down from their big men. They get some bonus from the zone, but you can still imagine where their PG/SG/SF's OD must be at if they are putting up higher OD than Bronson/Dillard/Serrano. Plus I think I read somewhere (Parrot monologues?) that outside offenses will reduce the decline in perimeter defense slightly over the course of the game via reduced fatigue?

You can estimate the salaries too, and this is after using the database to estimate our own guys salaries right now, not what they began the season with:

USA -- Colombia
PG 76k 102k
SG 85k 85k
SF 51k 120k (PG)

If you think that Colombia has been training their own guys too (likely enough given their ages?) it's not hard to imagine that they actually had a fairly decent advantage on the outside. My impression is that they put up a really strong perimeter defense which smothered us into submission.

The rebounds are less clear but assuming 3-2 doesn't hurt rebounding, you can give the GE some credit and assume it mirrors real life pretty well, and imagine that playing RnG and jacking up 3's will result in a lot of long rebounds, and hence more ORs. I don't have any data to back that up, but my impression over this first season has been that a lot of results make sense if you ignore all the GE lore and just imagine what may happen in a real life basketball game.

Defensively, we played a M2M and it looks like they just got a nice SG matchup: Bronson is great but he's still only 21 and it looks like their starter was at worst Bronson's equal right now (and probably better if he's gotten any training). If Bronson wears down at all stamina wise they probably have a big game. Plus their backup is an aggresive player who gets a lot of FTs, may have gotten to the rim some despite RnG and been tough to defend on the inside, etc.

Throw enthusiasm, GS, and effort on top of that and I don't think it's unexplainable to lose by 13 at a neutral site.

Prominent OD in a 3-2 zone at the NT level is not good, particularly since they had guards at the 1-3. We put up just a few sub levels lower while having only 2 NT level perimeter outside defenders on the court, including a center subbing in at SF.

Can we point to the game against Argentina as a lack to the team's enthusiasm versus Colombia? We really should have TIE'ed that game. Even if we did lose, we still would have beaten all the other teams that we should have beaten (like Colombia).

We TIEd virtually every other game, and Normal against Argentina was the correct play. A loss to Argentina, and we're in the same boat.