Granted, the Tampa Bay Rays have sustained me through the summer thus far, but I’m amped about the U.S. Olympic basketball team kicking into gear.

U.S.A. Basketball stunk it up in the last Olympics. The chemistry looked shaky; they didn’t play as a team. Finished with the bronze. The ’08 edition looks and feels better; more care seems to have gone into finding players to fill roles rather than just amassing a gang of gunners.

The U.S. squad begins pre-Olympic games tonight vs. Canada (8 p.m., ESPN). It sure seems like the American players are motivated to re-establish hoops dominance on the international stage. Most of the players made long-term commitments to get to this point.

Here’s a quick breakdown:

This article appears in Jul 23-29, 2008.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...