“If you took this whole squad away and bring in another group of girls, they will probably win a gold medal”, USA forward Angel McCoughtry said.
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And 10 teams – including the independent team – won their first golds, including Monica Puig in women’s tennis for Puerto Rico.
Victory was never in doubt after a dominant second quarter, inspired by Kevin Durant, which saw the Americans pull 23 points clear at halftime.
Anthony emotionally said this is his last Olympics at age 32. We stayed home on the 3s. They penetrated, we wanted DeAndre to kind of clean that up. “He did a hell of a job doing that for us”. The Americans also beat Spain in the 2014 world championship title game. In the context of gold medal games, anyway, they may have succeeded. When the United States went on a big run in the second quarter, Serbia had no hope.
The United States looked sluggish in the first quarter and seemed plagued by the same issues that dogged the gold medalfavorites earlier in the tournament. Meanwhile, Serbia dominated over Australia as well, and Croatia. His presence was especially noticeable in USA’s win over Spain, where he racked up 16 rebounds and four blocked shots.
As has become the norm, the men’s Basketball gold medal match is always the final sporting event of the Olympic Games.
With no LeBron James or Steph Curry, there’s been spells when the Americans winning streak that now spans 51 games has been under threat. I’m here today three gold medals later.
It’s unclear how this iteration of Team USA will be remembered, but George should be a significant part of the story – and no, not just because he came back from a serious injury that was suffered in a USA Basketball exhibition game two years ago.
The Serbians were struggling to hit their shots, and after their stunning win over Australia in the semi-final, they just didn’t have enough to live with a romping United States outfit. The victory sends Mike Krzyzewski out on top as coach of Team USA before Gregg Popovich takes over. They’re unbelievably well-coached; they’ve been together; in (Milos) Teodosic you have one of the great guards in the last decade in Europe; in (Bogdan) Bogdanovic they have one of the great shooters; and (Miroslav) Raduljica is one of the best big men.
The rout capped a brilliant tenure as Team USA head coach for Krzyzewski, who signs off after guiding the U.S.to three consecutive Olympic gold medals and an astounding 88-1 record in worldwide competition.
BBC4, but we’ll be covering the final RIGHT HERE, in exciting live blog format. The US will have to work for their gold medal. Klay Thompson even contribute to the win with his scoring and defensive play.
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“We weren’t sure we were going to have that kind of success coming in”, said USOC CEO Scott Blackmun, noting the track and swimming teams had plenty of first-time Olympians.
