USA Basketball Will Miss Two Promising Supertstars in Aliyah Boston & Sonia Citron

Bad news first, because that’s how we do it.

Aliyah Boston is out. Sonia Citron is out. Both of them picked up injuries during Unrivaled and neither will be suiting up for the USA FIBA World Cup qualifying run. For Citron, she missed Hive’s final regular season game. For Boston, she missed the Phantom playoffs entirely, and if you watched any of that Unrivaled run, you already know how much her absence hurt.

Kelsey Plum basically said it herself: “Aliyah Boston was their anchor. Defensively, she could guard guards, guard bigs, rebound, protect the paint, she was the whole damn foundation of what that team built.”

Losing her stings, and it stings even more on a USA stage where the stakes are higher and the margin for sloppiness gets thinner.

And Citron? She was going to be a starter or damn close to it. This was supposed to be a real showcase moment for that young frontcourt — Boston, Angel Reese, and Citron all on the same roster, all in the same system, all getting reps together ahead of a bigger Olympic picture.

That frontcourt combination was something people genuinely wanted to see.

The Good News: Two Names Deserve Their Flowers

Now here’s where we pivot, because two players getting their call-up deserve actual recognition and not just a footnote after the injury news.

Shoutout to Rae Burrell. She has been on an absolute tear coming out of Unrivaled and if you weren’t paying attention before, you should be now. The second half of her Unrivaled season was a different level. Rae was putting in real work nightly and was dropping 30-piece nights, often. So much that in the second half of the year, she ended up leading  her team in scoring, and carrying them all the way to the semifinals in Brooklyn before running into Kelsey Plum’s Phantom squad.

She didn’t just show up — she arrived.

The first half of the season she was building. The second half she was a problem. Getting a USA call-up off that momentum is exactly how this is supposed to work, and she’s earned every bit of it.

Monique Billings is also on this roster and honestly that’s just a good basketball decision. She is the definition of a plug-and-play veteran. You need her to start? She can start. You need her off the bench providing energy and rebounding for fifteen minutes? Done.

She can stretch the floor, she’s a locker room presence, and she brings a level of professionalism that younger rosters need around them. On a team that is going to win this thing regardless, having Mo out there just makes the whole operation cleaner.

The One Question Mark I Can’t Shake

Now I do have to say this, the Rickea Jackson situation is a little confusing to me. I don’t know if she had prior commitments, I don’t know what the story is behind the scenes, but I felt like her name should have come up in this conversation. Same goes for a couple of other players who’ve been putting in real work, Allisha Gray and Cameron Brink because they’ve been doing their thing in 3-on-3, a few others who had cases to be made.

I’m not here to blow this up into a whole thing because I genuinely don’t know the full picture — but it’s worth noting because some of those omissions feel a little like “okay, why though.”

That said, congratulations to Burrell and Billings. The two are both some of the better players in the W, and now we get to watch them on an Olympic stage.

The festivities tip off March 11th against Senegal. Next will be Puerto Rico on the 12th, Italy on the 14th, New Zealand on the 15th, and Spain to close it out.

The question is will the USA win, but rather how they look doing it, and what the starting lineup ends up being.

That’s a whole other conversation.