PARIS – The ball bounced off the ring five times.
Five!
Stephen Curry broke free of Joel Embiid’s brick-house block late in the fourth quarter, Serbian guard Ognjen Dobrić ran into the wall like he was Wile E. Coyote and fell to the floor, and the greatest shooter of all time fired a shot from above that might as well have landed on a craps table.
With just 144 seconds left in this FIBA-style game where the clock is no one’s friend, the ball dropped through the net, giving Team USA its first lead since midway through the first quarter. Eventually, Team USA pulled off one of the most impressive comebacks of all time, somehow 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 – came to a level of infamy that would have surpassed the 2004 team that took bronze in Athens and, as a result, sparked a reckoning within the national program.
STEPHEN. CURRY. TEAM USA LEADS.#ParisOlympics | 📺 NBC, USA Network and Peacock pic.twitter.com/C4MUUl1v78
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) 8 August 2024
Phew.
I honestly don’t know what else to say.
When covering international tournaments like the Olympics, one of the things that is off-putting is the support some non-American media outlets show for their respective teams, which is, to be honest, quite off-putting. Some reporters cheer on the press, which is considered taboo in the United States, and others even shout derogatory things about American players like Joel Embiid (true story).
But when you watch these Americans push themselves to the limit, and anticipate the kind of criticism they’ll get from people like me when they miss, you have to secretly hope that shots like Curry’s late three-pointer fall. That dynamic just doesn’t exist in the NBA; it comes from knowing one group of people so much better than the rest. 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 seemed like a player who applied pressure from the start. He scored in single digits in three of the US team’s four Olympic Games and averaged 7.3 points in the first four games. The only highlight of his first Olympic experience was the friendly against Serbia on July 17, in which he scored 24 points.
That was child’s play compared to 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 you know how many times he’s shot that many threes on 14 or fewer attempts in his entire career? Nine times, according to Stathead.com, and that includes a total of 1,103 games between the regular season and the playoffs (0.008 percent of the time). As a reminder, those games are 40 minutes long, not the 48-minute affairs we see in the NBA. The fact that this happened in a game where Team USA so desperately needed a basketball hero made it all 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 able to fully enjoy this Olympic experience even off the ground, stressed that the walls were not 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 depends on what the game requires. I shot three times last game (in a win over Brazil) and I didn’t want to force it because that wasn’t what the game required. That’s the beauty of Team USA and FIBA and this whole experience. Every game was for someone else.”
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 22nd season. I don’t know how 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 always said every night (every game) it could be somebody else. And tonight he presented himself in a way that, man…”
Durant was almost speechless.
“One shot after another, stealing a ball and then finishing with a layup,” he said. “He was everywhere tonight. It was one of the best games I’ve ever seen from him.”
Required reading
(Top photo of Stephen Curry and Aleksa Avramović: Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)
