The Americans won 109-83 en route to the gold medal. Through five games Team USA’s averaging 104.8 points and has outrebounded each opponent by an average of 7.2 boards per contest.
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“We had a distracting situation during our training camp and many players missed many, many practices”, Spain coach Sergio Scariolo said.
“We’ve got to build on it”, Durant said, “but we’re not satisfied at all”.
“We have been in this situation before”.
“What a remarkable run by Argentina and so we knew we had to match that energy tonight”.
Argentina’s loss Monday night in its Group B finale against Spain, combined with Croatia’s big win over Lithuania, dropped the Argentines to fourth in the group while Brazil was eliminated. They just handled the wind better than us, that’s basically the difference.
Spain opposed the United States in each of the last two gold-medal games, losing by scores of 118-107 and 107-100. That’s always something that we have to fight in putting a team together for these global competitions.
Argentina’s Manu Ginobili, left, gets a hug from teammate Luis Scola, right, after a quarterfinal round basketball game against the United States at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Wednesday, Aug. 17, .
Those questions were answered in the form of a 105-78 rout against Argentina as the US extended their Olympic winning streak to 23 games. Both Spain and Argentina feature National Basketball Association players who are familiar with competing against the likes of Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony and the rest of the United States and will not be intimidated with medals on the line.
Three-point plays by Cousins and Jimmy Butler around Durant’s 3-pointer in an 11-0 start to the second made it 36-21 before Facundo Campazzo stopped the onslaught with a three-point play. “It was our fifth game, we played 48 hours ago, two overtimes”.
“Calling the USA struggling is a long shot, you know?” Wins were not enough, they must be decisive, authoritative and by a wide margin.
As for Argentina, regardless if they won or lost Monday, they had already punched their ticket to the quarter-finals. Its seed won’t be determined until after the last game of pool play, Lithuania-Croatia.
Team USA asserted itself in the quarterfinals, and reminded everyone that there’s a reason they’re the favorites to win this tournament.
They opened a 25-point lead in the first half and were in control from that point, the first time since their second game in Rio they had it easy.
Now they have to stay there two more games. They were more aggressive and they played sharper than us. “I want to make clear we wanted to win too, it’s not that we didn’t care”. Group A finished in a well ordered manner, but Group B plays resulted in a four-way tie that eventually went to Croatia via tiebreakers.
And that sets up the following quarterfinal matchups for Wednesday… Lithuania would have clinched the top spot in Group B with a win, but falls to No. 3 and plays Australia (4-1) on Wednesday.
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The winners of USA-Argentina and Spain-France will meet in the semifinals on Friday.
