Kyrie Irving, DeMarcus Cousins

Cleveland Cavaliers' Kyrie Irving (23) drives past Sacramento Kings' DeMarcus Cousins during a USA Basketball minicamp scrimmage, Tuesday, July 23, 2013, in Las Vegas. Twenty-eight of the best young players in the country are in Las Vegas for four days of workouts that essentially mark the kickoff of 2016 Olympic preparations. Davis is the only player in camp with Olympic experience. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

LAS VEGAS -- Tyler Zeller still can't quite believe he's here, wearing a USA jersey and taking part in the USA Basketball mini-camp against the best young players in the country.

The Cavaliers' young center never envisioned he'd be part of something like this, the first step toward selecting the men's senior national team that will compete in the 2014 World Cup in Spain and the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

"I was awful at basketball as a little kid, so I didn't even think I had a chance of being here,'' he said. "I was terrible at it until high school.''

So what's it like to be here then? "Extraordinary,'' he said with a huge smile.

Zeller and teammates Kyrie Irving and Dion Waiters have been practicing with Team USA since Monday, and they'll take part in Thursday's night's intrasquad scrimmage that will mark the end of this minicamp. The game will be four 12-minute quarters, with the possibility that extra time could be added to work in all the players.

Irving's selection was no surprise after his Rookie of the Year and All-Star seasons, and he is all but assured a spot on the World Cup team and perhaps even the Olympic team, depending on which current members of the men's senior national team return for 2016.

The selection of Waiters and Zeller was a bit more surprising, and it made the Cavs the only NBA team with three players here.

"It shows our general manager has a little bit of sense in what he's doing,'' coach Mike Brown said, joking about his good friend, GM Chris Grant. "The last two drafts, he's picked some very good young players. If Tristan [Thompson] wasn't Canadian, he'd probably be here also. It says the organization is headed in the right direction. It gives the organization confidence.

Kyrie Irving has some fun with Denver's Kenneth Faried

"It gives the city a lot of confidence and hope in the direction we're going. In reality, it shows that Chris Grant and his staff have been working very hard in doing their due diligence and making sure they've added the right pieces to the program to keep it going forward in the right direction.''

That increasing confidence extends to Irving, Waiters and Zeller as well, Brown said.

"Two of the biggest things they're going to get out of this is the confidence level to know that you've been selected as one of the best, young, up-and-coming players in this league where you separate yourself from the rest of the pack is an honor in itself,'' Brown said. "That should give each one of these guys a lot more confidence.

"The next thing is, they're together for a while. They obviously came out when Kyrie organized the player workouts before summer league started, so they were together then. They were together for summer league. Kyrie was sitting on the bench while Tyler and Dion played. Now they're together throughout this experience in a very, very competitive environment. So the maturity, the confidence and the camaraderie that they gain from this whole experience is hard to replace.''

While each of the players spoke about what an honor it was to be invited, they see the minicamp in the short term as opposed to the long-term goal of the Olympics.

Whereas Zeller said he had no specific memory of any U.S. men's Olympic basketball team, Waiters and Irving remembered the same Olympic team -- the one that won bronze in the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens -- for vastly different reasons.

As a kid growing up in Philadelphia, Waiters idolized Allen Iverson, who emerged as a spokesman for that team.

"I'm a big AI fan,'' Waiters said. "He had a big influence on why I'm here today. But just growing up, watching the last few years of USA games, I told myself I would like to participate in it one day and look, I'm here, getting a chance to show my talents and hopefully make the team one day.''

Irving grew up in New Jersey, and also remembered the bronze-medal winning 2004 team that featured Iverson as the senior statesman on a team that also included a young LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony.

"I'm pretty sure everybody in America thought they were going to win the gold medal,'' Irving said. "They were all young. Seeing them out there, the camaraderie wasn't there, so it was a different team. The national coverage wasn't as prominent as it is now. The media was writing them off. I remember my dad talking to me about it. I still remember that team. I'm pretty sure those guys were saying they deserved to be written off, too.

"The effort that was out there, I still remember it and I'm pretty sure those guys remember it, as well. That was a team that we all use as an example for us to grow and remember that we have to hold ourselves to a high standard.

"When they came back together [to win gold] in 2008, that was a great experience and a great team to watch mature."