Bon travail, Paris. You did it. Hats off to perhaps the most memorable Olympic basketball tournament (and Olympic Games) ever.
The U.S. men’s basketball team needed all it could muster from its aging (or should we say ageless?) superheroes, and based on the state of their NBA teams, one can fairly wonder if that is the last time any of Stephen Curry, LeBron James and Kevin Durant play in this big a moment again. If so, man, did they go out with a bang.
How about this stat, courtesy of Warriors PR maven Raymond Ridder: Curry had only made four 3-pointers in the final 2:47 of a game once in 1,103 NBA games. Saturday’s gold-medal game was part deux.
STEPH WAS ICE COLD DOWN THE STRETCH. 🥶
Four three-pointers in TWO MINUTES AND 11 SECONDS to close out France for the gold medal. 🥇 #ParisOlympics pic.twitter.com/2dR7UUE0Hn
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 10, 2024
But now, we move on. It’s going to be a big transition for USA Basketball to the next cycle, when Durant, James and Curry are likely to be too old to be of much help. The narrative that the world is catching up is perhaps a little overdone — for one, most of the catching up happened a generation earlier (the U.S. beat Lithuania by just two points in the Olympic semis in 2000). Since the 2004 debacle in Athens, the U.S. is 35-1 in the last five Olympiads.
Nonetheless, the single-elimination format and 40-minute games make for some incredible drama and don’t necessarily guarantee the best or most talented team wins
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Can USA Basketball mend fences with Tatum, get younger for L.A. 2028?
Everyone is talking about the U.S. vs. France in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, but the next major international competition is the 2027 FIBA World Cup in Qatar. The U.S. owns the Olympics but generally has sent weaker teams to that event
No injuries
When I was on the team side, we always freaked out about players getting hurt playing for their national teams
That said … we made it, everyone. No NBA stars were harmed in the making of these Olympics.
The only notable malady was the Los Angeles Lakers’ Rui Hachimura, who left Japan’s second game with a “left calf injury” that one hopes will be healed by the time camp starts in early October.
Old guys aren’t done yet
Speaking of the Lakers, if you’re a fan of them, the Phoenix Suns or the Golden State Warriors, the Olympics had to leave you feeling a lot better about your team’s prospects than you did in April.
However, James, Curry and Durant were Team USA’s three most important players in the medal round
The Suns already have pushed all their chips in, of course, but the Lakers and Warriors have held back some of their powder
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‘Everything I imagined, and more’: Team USA’s gold medal game seals NBA stars’ legacies
