The camera froze on an unlikely duo.

Across the globe, there was Syracuse head coach Jim Boeheim cracking a joke with the reigning NBA MVP Kobe Bryant. Boeheim laughed and gave Bryant a playful whack on the shoulder. He returned to the bench. Bryant returned to the court. And the road to redemption continued for United States Basketball.

This time, the U.S. team wasn’t a running punch line at the Olympics. Order was restored, and Boeheim was the center of it all.

‘They play 100 games a year,’ Boeheim said. ‘They’re the most talented players in the world. It was fun coaching those guys.’

Fun because the complete re-haul of U.S. men’s basketball worked. As an assistant coach, Boeheim helped bring justice to the ‘Redeem Team’ moniker the squad embraced so fervently. As head coach Mike Krzyzewski’s right-hand man, Boeheim wasn’t his engaged self, pacing the bench back and forth as if doing the shuttle run.

Instead, Boeheim was a quiet, behind-the-scenes influence for a program besieged by an embarrassing bronze-medal finish in 2004. The result for Team USA was an undefeated finish and a return to the top of the basketball pantheon.

To Boeheim, the reclamation project was fueled by a culture shift, jumping at that notion before the question is finished.

‘Yes, no question,’ the 33-year Syracuse head coach said. ‘We wanted to get everybody on the same page. That was the theme, and the players responded to it.’

Four years ago, Team USA was chastised for disinterested, frozen-footed defense. Puerto Rico’s Carlos Arroyo – a fringe NBA player that has played for five teams in seven years – became the highway billboard for everything wrong with U.S. hoops, corkscrewing his way to 25 points in a 92-73 win.

Boeheim remembers it, calling the ’04 Games ’embarrassing.’ A change in personnel wouldn’t be enough. The team needed a cultural shift, away from the era in which NBA stars turn down international requests as if it were a slapdash pickup game. Away from the perception of laziness that was fortified by the team’s off-court antics at Athens.

Boeheim was part of the antidote to shed this image and build a new one.

No stranger to the international scene, Boeheim has coached in 10 different international championships at all levels, accumulating five gold medals, three silvers and two bronze medals. Familiarity was the tipping point in adding Boeheim to the Redeem Team. Finding great basketball minds can be fish-in-a-barrel. After all, 2004 U.S. head coach Larry Brown was considered a defensive genius.

But the program’s assistant executive director Sean Ford and other Team USA execs looked further, reuniting Boeheim with Krzyzewski, who coached together at the 1990 World Championships.

‘(Boeheim) has been involved for a long time, and he takes pride in making sure USA Basketball is on top because he had a lot to do with us being on top for years,’ Ford said. ‘So I knew he takes great pride in USA Basketball.’

Boeheim wasn’t in Athens, and wasn’t part of the bronze-medal muck. In the gap that USA Basketball slowly eroded to reality – between 2001 and 2006 – Boeheim wasn’t on the senior team staff. But in a way he was. He speaks of the Athens performance in first-person.

‘We didn’t play well,’ Boeheim said. ‘We didn’t have a cohesive unit. That team hadn’t played together. It was obvious that we had to get a team to play together a couple years and to develop unity. Develop a team.’

And Boeheim assumed a complementary role. Ford said on a practice-to-practice, game-to-game basis, Boeheim pulled players aside individually to explain intricacies.

As head of the men’s program, Ford organizes and oversees practices, trials and exhibition games for the team. As a kid growing up in St. Bonaventure country, he was drilled to despise Boeheim. Back then, Ford’s dad was the Bonnies’ personnel director and the two schools battled for recruits, which harvested a heated intrastate rivalry.

They laugh about the rivalry today. No longer a childhood dartboard, Boeheim was Ford’s hands-on coach, offering the isolated details to the concepts Krzyzewski instilled. All with a completely different cast of characters.

‘He’s a head coach at Syracuse, but he did a great job in taking on his role as an assistant coach,’ said Ford, who has been Team USA’s assistant executive director since 2001. ‘He did the little things. And these players respect Coach Boeheim. A lot of them played against him or were recruited by him. I always saw Coach Boeheim working with an individual player during practice, after practice, during a game, at halftime.’

The Americans committed to a pressure-heavy, man-to-man defense that routinely wore opponents down. The team’s athleticism led to a myriad of traps-to-pickoffs-to-breakaway dunks and the U.S. won its games by an average margin of 28 points. The Americans held their opponent under 85 points in seven of the eight games, compared to only three of eight in ’04.

Beneath the highlight reel fastbreaks is where Boeheim’s expertise was needed. While the Americans stuck to Krzyzewski’s aggressive man defense, Ford said Boeheim’s decades of knowledge in Syracuse’s stringent 2-3 zone seeped into several games at Beijing. It’s been the one key area where NBA players are a step behind other countries, a product of the NBA’s three-second violation. And since many international teams lean on several variations of the pick-and-roll, Ford pointed to Boeheim’s zone IQ as a ‘weapon’ for the Americans.

‘The NBA players are used to not being allowed to play an area of the court for too long because you’ll get called for illegal defense,’ Ford said. ‘As you’re guarding a pick-and-roll and two guys are defending it directly, there are some zone principles for the other three players on the court.’

Reunited with Carmelo Anthony, whom he coached to a NCAA title with in 2003, and a slew of the best players in the world, Boeheim’s presence in Beijing may have juiced up Syracuse’s recruiting power. Daryl Gross, Director of Athletics at Syracuse, thought that much.

‘To see Jim up there all the time was great,’ Gross said. ‘It can’t hurt recruiting, the fact that he’s been exposed to those kind of guys.’

But in Beijing, Boeheim’s focus was redemption, not recruiting. The memories piled up throughout, but one clearly stood out. That final feeling of elation, knowing the cultural shift had come full circle. That’s what he’ll continue to clutch to back in the states.

‘Just winning the gold medal,’ Boeheim said. ‘It was great to win it and bring that back home. There were a lot of good individual experiences but to bring the gold medal back home was the key.’

thdunne@syr.com

Published on September 9, 2008 at 12:00 pm