Why U.S. men’s basketball should bounce back

The U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team has put together a roster worth its weight in gold — even if it didn’t look like a gold-medal team in Sunday’s opening 83-76 loss to France.

Other than the two emergency replacement players, JaVale McGee and Keldon Johnson, the other 10 U.S. players will average $29.6 million in salary for the 2021-22 season — topped by Kevin Durant’s $40.9 million for the Nets.

On the Tokyo floor in the opener, Team USA had 10 of the 11 highest-paid players. French center Rudy Gobert will make $35.3 million next season for the Jazz, cracking into that top 11.

The 12-man Team USA roster’s aggregate NBA payroll for next season is $303 million. (That factors in McGee making next season what he did in 2020-21 at $4.2 million). The NBA salary cap is projected to be in the ballpark of $112.4 million.

The payroll total doesn’t include Team USA coach Gregg Popovich, who earns a reported $11 million a year coaching the Spurs — tops for an NBA coach.

The Olympic squad (0-1) will next face Iran on Wednesday in what figures to be a breather. After the French loss, Popovich sounded like the loss shouldn’t be regarded as a major upset. Apparently, Popovich didn’t look at the financials.

“When you lose a game you’re not surprised, you’re disappointed,’’ Popovich said. “I don’t understand the word surprise — that sort of disses the French team, so to speak, as if we were supposed to beat them by 30 or something. That’s a hell of a team.’’

Other than Gobert, the only other big-money Frenchman is Evan Fournier, who starred Sunday and as a 2021 free agent is expected to net a contract starting at $15 million. That figure would still make him the 11th-highest paid player on Team USA.

In addition, France was missing one of its NBA players, injured point guard Frank Ntilikina, the Knicks’ 2017 lottery pick who was a key force in beating Team USA in the 2019 World Cup when he outplayed Kemba Walker.

“I think for one, you got to give credit to France,’’ Damian Lillard said. “They got a pretty good team, too.’’

From top to bottom, Team USA’s pay scale for next NBA season is such:

Durant ($40.9M), Lillard ($39.5M), Khris Middleton ($35.5M); Devin Booker ($31.6M); Jrue Holiday ($30.1M); Bam Adebayo ($28M); Jayson Tatum ($28M) Draymond Green ($24M); Jerami Grant ($20M); Zach LaVine ($19.5M); McGee (unrestricted free agent who made $4.2 million last season) Johnson ($2.1 million). Only Grant didn’t see the court against France.

Besides Ntilikina, the Knicks had another tie to the French squad — center Vincent Poirier — whom the Knicks obtained in the Austin Rivers trade-deadline dump for three days and was promptly waived.

Only Durant had no excuses for Team USA getting outscored 16-2 at the game’s close.

“We all had good looks, we just didn’t knock them down,’’ he said.

Now there are 303 million reasons Team USA should bounce back with a vengeance.