PARIS – The ball bounced off the ring five times.
Five!
Stephen Curry broke freed from Joel Embiid's brick-house block late within the fourth quarter, Serbian guard Ognjen Dobrić bumped into the wall like he was Wile E. Coyote and fell to the ground, and the best shooter of all time fired a shot from above which may as well have landed on a craps table.
With just 144 seconds left on this FIBA-style game where the clock isn’t any one's friend, the ball dropped through the web, giving Team USA its first lead since midway through the primary quarter. Eventually, Team USA pulled off one of the impressive comebacks of all time, in some way overcoming a 17-point deficit against Serbia (95-91) and heading to the Olympic gold medal game against France. At some point, we'll truly appreciate how close this team – with names like LeBron James, Curry, Kevin Durant and so many other all-time talents on board – got here to a level of infamy that might have surpassed the 2004 team that took bronze in Athens and, in consequence, sparked a reckoning inside the national program.
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) 8 August 2024
Phew.
I truthfully don't know what else to say.
When covering international tournaments just like the Olympics, one in all the things that’s off-putting is the support some non-American media outlets show for his or her respective teams, which is, to be honest, quite off-putting. Some reporters cheer on the press, which is taken into account taboo within the United States, and others even shout derogatory things about American players like Joel Embiid (true story).
But once you watch these Americans push themselves to the limit, and anticipate the form of criticism they'll get from people like me after they miss, you’ve to secretly hope that shots like Curry's late three-pointer fall. That dynamic just doesn't exist within the NBA; it comes from knowing one group of individuals so a lot better than the remainder. And when Curry did his job, stealing Bogdan Bogdanović's pass and running coast-to-coast for a left-to-right layup that put Team USA up 91-86 with 1:01 to go, you felt relieved that the Golden State Warriors star had finally had his moment in his first Summer Games.
As Steve Kerr, the US team's coach, said afterward, Curry gave the impression of a player who applied pressure from the beginning. He scored in single digits in three of the US team's 4 Olympic Games and averaged 7.3 points in the primary 4 games. The only highlight of his first Olympic experience was the friendly against Serbia on July 17, by which he scored 24 points.
That was child's play in comparison with this one. Curry was knocked out and scored 36 points while making 12 of his 19 shots and sinking nine of his 14 threes.
Do how again and again in his entire profession he made that many 3-pointers on 14 or fewer attempts? Nine, in keeping with Stathead.comand that features a total of 1,103 games between the regular season and the playoffs (0.8 percent of the time). As a reminder, these games are 40 minutes long, not the 48-minute affairs we see within the NBA. The proven fact that it happened in a game where Team USA so desperately needed a basketball hero made it all of the more epic.
“There have been moments over the last few weeks where I thought (Curry) was working too hard,” said Kerr, the Warriors coach who has witnessed Curry's success up close for a decade. “He's just so dedicated, constantly working so hard on his game. We all know who he is, what he does, and I almost wanted to tell him, 'Hey, take a day off,' but that's just not him. He works so hard, and with the work he's put in over the last few weeks, he's pushed himself into this game tonight.”
Curry, the 36-year-old who was in a position to fully enjoy this Olympic experience even off the bottom, stressed that the partitions weren’t getting any closer.
“I didn't feel any pressure at all because we were winning every game by … 15, 20 points,” he said. “I know I affect the game in a different way. But tonight, about two minutes in, we realized I was being eyed, that they were playing a different type of defense against us. Obviously, they were scoring an insane amount of goals on the other end, so you just keep going and get lost in the moment.
“It will depend on what the sport requires. I shot 3 times last game (in a win over Brazil) and I didn't wish to force it because that wasn't what the sport required. That's the fantastic thing about Team USA and FIBA and this whole experience. Every game was for another person.”
When you hear Curry's side of the story, you realize that this role represents a huge adjustment for him. While he was shooting just 35.7 percent of his shots from the field and 25 percent of his threes (5 of 20) before the Serbia game, he was also averaging just seven shots per game. That context, the fact that this team makes it so difficult for so many great players to find a way, like they do with their NBA teams, is often forgotten in the discussion.
“I haven't had many opportunities,” Curry said candidly. “I haven't shot well all tournament, but that doesn't diminish my confidence to seize the moment.”
And he did.
When one of the greatest basketball games of all time was over, James – who was part of the 2004 team that the USA Basketball program would rather forget – threw the ball in the air and looked down to see Curry waiting to embrace him with unbridled joy. It was a surreal scene in every way, the sight of these two NBA rivals sharing a kind of memory that no one could have imagined when their Cavs and Warriors teams battled each other in the Finals all those years ago.
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So I asked James, “How does this game rank in terms of pure emotion?”
“I mean, it's right up there,” said James, the four-time champion and Los Angeles Lakers star whose triple-double (16 points, 12 rebounds and 10 assists) played a big part in the win. “I mean, I'm 39 years old and I'm going into my twenty second season. I don't know the way many more opportunities or moments like this I'm going to get to compete for something big and play in big games.”
This game was beyond great. It was downright magical, with all this history woven between key players who fell on the track for their national pride. Just listen to Kevin Durant, the Phoenix Suns star who won two championships with Curry in Golden State, sound like he'd never experienced anything like it.
“Steph, man, that was a godlike performance,” said Durant, who forced Bogdanović into a crucial backcourt violation with 1:34 left and hit a nasty jump shot with 34 seconds left that put Team USA ahead 93-89. “Damn, (Curry) was tough. It felt like he'd been struggling all tournament, and we at all times said every night (every game) it could possibly be anyone else. And tonight he presented himself in a way that, man…”
Durant was almost speechless.
“One shot after one other, stealing a ball after which ending with a layup,” he said. “He was in every single place tonight. It was probably the greatest games I've ever seen from him.”
Required reading
image credit : www.nytimes.com