Patty Mills and five more NBA players are on the Olympic men’s basketball roster for Australia, which eyes its first medal in the event in Tokyo.
Mills, a 32-year-old guard going to his fourth consecutive Olympics, is joined by fellow NBAers Joe Ingles, Aron Baynes, Dante Exum, Matthew Dellavedova and Josh Green. The full roster is here.
Australia’s most well known players to American basketball followers are absent.
Philadelphia 76ers All-Star Ben Simmons announced Tuesday that he is skipping the Olympics to focus on “individual skill development” after his club lost in the Eastern Conference semifinals.
Andrew Bogut, the 2005 NBA No. 1 overall draft pick and longtime face of Australia men’s basketball, retired in November at age 36.
Australia, the first team to qualify for the Olympics in September 2019, is the most accomplished basketball nation yet to earn an Olympic men’s medal. It finished fourth in 1988, 1996, 2000 and 2016, going winless in eight games with a medal at stake.
In 2019, Australia had its best-ever world championship finish of fourth, losing two games with a medal on the line. That roster included Bogut, Mills, Baynes, Ingles and Dellavedova, but not Simmons.
“Unfinished business is in the forefront of all our minds,” Baynes said, according to a Basketball Australia press release on Saturday.
OlympicTalk is on Apple News. Favorite us!
