Rui Hachimura shining in pre-Olympic exhibition games for Japan

In his first games for Japan this summer, Rui Hachimura has looked like he’s in midseason form, shining in both exhibition contests before the 2024 Olympics.

While almost all eyes have been on Anthony Davis and LeBron James with Team USA this summer, Rui Hachimura will also participate in the Olympics with Japan. It might have taken much longer for him to commit to Japan than either LeBron or AD, he will be the leading figure of the roster.

Partially due to his late addition and likely partially due to wanting to mitigate the amount of minutes on his legs, Rui did not play in most of Japan’s pre-Olympics exhibition games. However, he has played in each of their two most recent contests, starting first against Germany on Friday.

To expand a bit more on the stats above, Rui shot 2-5 from the 3-point line and 5-6 at the free throw line to round out his shooting. Considering it was his first game since the Lakers’ loss to the Denver Nuggets at the end of April, it’s quite impressive how good he looked.

And that appeared to be just a launching pad as, on Sunday, Rui followed it up with an even better game.

Really, it’s nice to see Rui looking so smooth scoring the ball. While there may be critiques or faults to his game, it’s a very aesthetically pleasing one. Seeing those mid-range jumpers hit nothing but net just looks good.

Now, seeing a couple of those makes come over Nikola Jokic brings up some repressed memories, but we won’t dive into that. If I were really being critical, I’d point out the number of long twos and hope that they were threes but I’m not going to be that critical of guys playing for their national teams.

What’s exciting is that he will get to play in big games as the primary option. It’ll be interesting to see how his game looks after a couple seasons in a new role with the Lakers.

Admittedly, it’s hard to find an exhibition schedule for Japan ahead of the Olympics. There’s a non-zero chance this was their final warm-up as they are slated to play Germany to kick off Olympics play on Saturday. If you want to watch it, get some coffee brewing because they will tip-off at 4:30 a.m. PT with the game on Peacock.

You can follow Jacob on Twitter at @JacobRude.