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BEIJING — Just watching Jose Calderon by his lonesome on the Spanish team bench, you knew it was killing him.
The Toronto Raptors' point guard had injured his right thigh this week while playing for his country in the men's Olympic basketball tournament. So after a magnetic resonance imaging scan on Thursday revealed a partial tear in the adductor muscle, the Spanish team shut him down before a 91-86 victory over Lithuania in a semi-final game on Friday.
Spain will play the United States, which defeated Argentina 101-81 in the other semi-final, for the gold medal on Sunday.
"The doctor told us it is best that he doesn't play," Spanish head coach Aito Garcia Reneses said. "We will observe the situation for the next game, but he couldn't play today. He wasn't ready to play because of his medical condition."
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But he wanted to play. Calderon's attire said it all. In the NBA, injured players often wear suits on the bench.
Not so with the Raptors' guard. Calderon led his team out of the tunnel and into the arena in full uniform: warm-up top, jersey, shorts, socks and shoes tied tightly. He did not join his teammates in layup drills and instead walked directly to the bench and sat down by himself.
A familiar face locked eyes with him, and Calderon shook his head from side to side, indicating his so-so condition and his unavailable status.
He watched the proceedings the way a puppy behind an invisible fence watches other dogs romp in the park. And when the game started, the bubbly Calderon turned into his team's top cheerleader: first to his feet, arms raised, after three-point shots, clapping and shouting encouragement. A de facto coach.
The Olympics have gone smoothly for Spain, which has just one loss, to the United States, on its docket, but not as well for Calderon.
In this tournament, Calderon, who did not talk with reporters after his team's last two games, is accustomed to not starting. He usually comes off the bench as though this tournament were his early days with the Raptors, when T.J. Ford was around.
Strange, that. Calderon is Spain's second most-accomplished NBA player, after forward Pau Gasol, but there are some other issues at work.
Reneses said Calderon, 26, was set back by not joining his countrymen when they gathered for Olympic preparations. He said Calderon missed 12 days of practice because, as a restricted NBA free agent, he did not have a contract and no insurance coverage to act as a financial safety net had he injured himself while with the national team.
"Everybody expects [minutes to be divided] in relation to the names of the players, not in relation to how do they practise and how do they play," Reneses said. "He didn't practise in the beginning.… He was a little [behind] the rest of the players."
The other theory floating around the Spanish team is that Reneses wants to showcase 17-year-old sensation Ricky Rubio, whom he coaches with Joventut in Spain's professional league. Rubio is considered a top-five pick in the 2009 NBA draft, should he declare for it.
"He is playing very well, so he is going to keep on playing," Reneses said.
Spain's team also features two other guards with NBA résumés: Rudy Fernandez of the Portland Trail Blazers and Juan Carlos Navarrao, who played with the Memphis Grizzlies last season before joining a Spanish team this summer.
To say that NBA international players — the committed, patriotic ones, anyway — take competing for their country seriously is an understatement. Gasol was pumping his fists and tugging on the "ESP" on the front of his jersey after the victory, minutes after the contests as he walked out of the Beijing Olympic Basketball Gymnasium.
Much like the first wave or two of European NHL players, there is some evidence that the basketball players value world and Olympic championships as much as NBA titles. Spain is the world champion and has also won the Eurobasket championship. All that is left is an Olympic title.
That compulsion to play for the motherland led to a bitter divorce between the Raptors and former forward Jorge Garbajosa, who insisted on playing for Spain last summer in the European championships, even though the country had already qualified for the Beijing Games.
The Raptors believed Garbajosa's leg, brutally broken in March of 2007, still required a second operation, and Toronto did everything to stop him. But the tournament was in Spain, and Garbajosa wanted to play, and the Spanish Basketball Federation's medical evaluation painted a rosier picture than what the Raptors doctors were saying.
A second operation, a dropped lawsuit and a contract buyout later, Garbajosa is playing for Spain this summer. He also signed with a Russian club.
Bryan Colangelo, the Raptors' president and general manager, spoke with Calderon on Thursday and said the player told him he felt fine, but that he would not risk worsening the injury. On Friday, Colangelo said the Raptors were following up with Calderon to determine the severity of the injury and the prognosis.
"With respect to myself, my only concern is the small pull that I felt in the groin almost at the end of the game," Calderon wrote on his website on Wednesday.
