French resistance puts U.S. in danger
Men’s basketball winning streak snapped at 25
SAITAMA, Japan — Excusezmoi?
Turns out that loss to France in 2019 wasn’t a fluke for USA Basketball.
France, which knocked the United States out of the FIBA World Cup two years ago, once again stunned the theoretically best basketball team in the world, coming from behind to beat a disjointed U.S. team 8376 on Sunday.
This loss could have much more dire consequences than 2019: It puts the Americans in an early hole in their quest for a fourth straight gold medal.
The last time the U.S. team lost its Olympic opener was in 2004, when the Americans lost to Puerto Rico to start things off in Athens, then lost to Argentina in the semifinals and ended up settling for the bronze medal. Since the loss to Argentina, the Americans had won 25 consecutive Olympic games and, while not exactly
“dream teams,” seemed to have no real peer.
But coach Gregg Popovich took exception to those who would paint Sunday’s outcome as a surprise.
“It’s a little bit of hubris to think the Americans can just roll the ball out and win,” Popovich said. “We’ve got to work for it like everybody else.”
The uneven play of the team, in fact, isn’t a surprise. In a Las Vegas training camp, held as the NBA playoffs were still going on, the team lost two games — to Nigeria and Australia. It also dropped players to COVID protocol and to injury and had to make lastminute replacements.
Three players who were involved in the NBA Finals — Jrue Holiday, Khris Middleton and Devin Booker — flew by private jet Saturday, arriving at their hotel at 1 a.m. Sunday in Japan, just 20 hours before game time.
Yet all three of them played. Holiday, in particular, played well. The U.S. team led 4537 but was outscored 2511 in the third quarter. But then Holiday, whose body clock would have thought it was time for breakfast, took over with a 12point barrage at the start of the fourth that gave the Americans the lead again. But they couldn’t hold on. And they couldn’t get stops.
“We haven’t been together that long, but we’ve been together long enough to have that consistency,” Warriors forward Draymond Green said. “We have to defend better down the stretch. We had an eightpoint lead (actually seven) with three minutes to go. We have to close games out.”
Instead, the team missed three consecutive wideopen 3point shots — from Zach LaVine, Kevin Durant and Holiday. A broken play on the French end — Guerschon Yabusele dove to save a ball from going out of bounds and flipped it to Evan Fournier, who then buried a 3pointer — gave France the lead for good.
In the old days, the French team would have fallen behind by double digits and succumbed to the greatness of basketball’s original country. But basketball is now a global sport, and 11 of the 12 teams in the Tokyo Games have at least one NBA player.
You can send a thankyou card to the original Dream Team for that development. That 1992 team popularized basketball around the globe and has turned the NBA into an international league. Athletes who play each other all through the regular season aren’t intimidated just because one team is wearing red, white and blue.
“Basketball is an international sport, and there are very good teams around the world,” Popovich said. “The gap in talent shrinks every year. … Give the French team credit.”
And, unlike the American team whose roster changes radically every cycle depending on the availability and desires of its players, teams like France manage to keep a core group together. They come up through youth national programs, playing and jelling together for years. The difference in consistency, which both Popovich and Green emphasized, isn’t a shock.
Still, the loss was just one more strange development in these delayed Olympics. For some reason, the Tokyo Organizing Committee decided to place basketball in this city, an hour bus ride from Tokyo. The large arena on a train line might have seemed like a great idea, prepandemic, but now it is just a cavernous building connected to transit no one is allowed to use.
At halftime, a Japanese basketball robot came out for entertainment. The large robot, in a miraculous display, hit a free throw, a threepointer and a halfcourt shot.
Maybe Popovich should have suited up the robot in the second half.