They’re fresh off a forty point victory over Venezuela. The United States, which edged off Serbia 94-91 on Friday, still held a 100-90 lead with 1:25 to go, but France scored the last seven points of the match.
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Barring a major comeback from France in the final quarter, Team USA will go through the preliminary round without a loss.
This is no aberration, folks.
For back-to-back games in Brazil, the basketball national teams from Australia and Serbia have tested Team USA. Not taking away credit of how Serbia played, because they played wonderful tonight.
Three wins from gold, and still no reason to think it will be easy for the USA men’s basketball team.
Prior to the matchup being set, Ginobili made it clear that he was hoping to avoid having to face off against the prohibitive favorites to win the tournament at this stage of the tournament despite the fact that USA Basketball struggled to put teams away in their final three games of pool play.
As CBS Sports’ Matt Moore pointed out, this edition of Team USA has slipped considerably compared to its predecessors.
Team USA center DeAndre Jordan of the LA Clippers has made the claim that an Olympic gold medal should be viewed by the American basketball community as a more substantive achievement than an NBA championship. That dynamic has been painfully clear on the court, where communication errors are so often leading to defensive breakdowns and chemistry is tough to come by on the offensive end.
“It’s a very unfortunate situation where the look could not be delivered on time”, Olympic Games Executive Director Christophe Dubi said Sunday. “You really can’t stress that enough”.
“I think our offense is hurting our defense as well”.
Lack of familiarity with the different rules of the FIBA game, and the officials who enforce them, is also an occasional issue. His best teams have always gotten a lot of points on defense and Green is right, it does help the offense and not just on breaks. “We’re lucky to have him on our team”.
Nicolas Batum (FRA) of France in action with Zhou Peng (CHN) of China and Yi Jianlian (CHN) of China as Boris Diaw (FRA) of France watches. I think everybody is doing that. On the previous two Olympic gold medal-winning teams, Paul or James controlled the floor, Kobe Bryant embraced the role as defensive stopper, Dwyane Wade and later Westbrook came off the bench as cold-blooded assassins and Chris Bosh and later Tyson Chandler served as the defensive anchor protecting the rim and covering mistakes. Or it is just their opponents improving and getting stronger?
Tom Thibodeau can’t be sleeping too well on that cruise ship they call home. But we’ve seen precious little progress from the Americans over these past three games, starting with the Australia scare.
These guys are the best team in this tournament.
US: F Kevin Durant, F Carmelo Anthony, C DeMarcus Cousins, G Klay Thompson, G Kyrie Irving.
Just fix all that and more, and maybe the blowouts they anticipated coming in may transpire after all.
Kevin Durant, the newest star on the Golden State Warriors, felt the same way.
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With an overall record of 63-3, Olympic losses are rare for the US, but Japan can claim one of them, although it occurred 40 years ago at the 1976 Montreal Games. (It was basically lingchi along the baseline for stretches, and this was all without Parker.) France would enter the half down nine, having shot 65 percent on attempts inside the 3-point line but just 2-of-8 from behind it, while the US rolled to 55 points on the same 56-percent shooting mark overall (assisting on every single field goal they hit in the half), the difference made up by a passive 19-6 free-throw attempt disparity.
