USA Basketball: Injuries, Peer Pressure Influencing Dwyane Wade's Olympic Status

A bit of Olympic news, courtesy of David Aldridge of NBA.com:

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Dwyane Wade sounded slightly less than 100-percent certain he'll be in London no matter what, even after accepting the invite to what would be his third Olympics after being prodded by his 2008 Beijing teammates ("Kobe was like, 'if my old self is playing, you can,'" Wade said—and I'm sure Kobe said "self" there, aren't you?) into putting the band back together one last time.

"I told them, I said, listen, I'm just going to see how I feel," Wade said last week. "This is about being healthy—I think, for all of us, going into the summer healthy—and taking it from there."

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Based on these latest comments, it seems fair to say that Dwyane Wade is less than fully committed to joining Team USA in London this summer as a matter of pragmatism—a very natural response for any player nursing aches and pains, and particularly one who just recently saw two of his most talented contemporaries go down with serious injuries.

Wade and every Team USA candidate should indeed carefully assess their own health and fatigue heading into the offseason before determining their status for the summer games. This abridged season has been a physical and mental grind on seemingly all involved, and though playing in the Olympics is a distinct honor to most, even that privilege doesn't erase the need for rest and time away from the game.

That said, what's perhaps most interesting about Aldridge's report isn't that Wade might miss the Olympics for the sake of health—an ongoing complication to players' participation in any offseason basketball event—but how much of a role peer pressure might eventually play into Wade's decision.

All of the cool kids are playing in the Olympics, and though America's international basketball program was once considered an afterthought at best, program director Jerry Colangelo has succeeded in creating a self-perpetuating institution that instills value in competitions like this one.

It remains to be seen how the dynamic of USA Basketball might change once Wade, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, et al decide to take their leave of international ball, but for the moment, this kind of peer pressure seems to create a highly valuable dynamic of inclusion that will likely only be extended through the next generation of stars.

Kevin Durant, Kevin Love, Russell Westbrook, Derrick Rose and company are similarly driven, and though USA Basketball will eventually lose Bryant's coercive power, the program will hopefully mitigate his absence with a slew of committed stars with charismatic personalities.