US Fries French Team for Olympic Basketball Gold
By Teodoro Medina Reynoso
PhilBoxing.com
Mon, 12 Aug 2024
The US All Stars team kept a pesky France national squad at bay for more than three quarters before Stephen Curry singed them with a searing display of three points shooting in the dying minutes to put them away on the way to a 97-86 US win for the Paris Olympics basketball gold.
It was the US team's fifth straight gold medal finish since a stars starved NBA led squad settled for bronze behind Argentina in the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece.
As in most of their previous wins, it was an entire team effort for the Americans as coach Steve Kerr shuffled his bench after using his usual starting five of Curry, Lebron James, Joel Embiid, Devin Booker and Anthony Davis. That enabled stars as Jason Tatum, Bam Adebayo and Anthony Edwards to see action together with the likes of Derrick White and Jrue Holiday in not only holding the crowd-inspired French at bay but also staking the US to sizable leads.
But the French just would not go down without a stout fight as Victor Wenbenyama and Guerschon Yabusele kept the game close and the hope of the raucous crowd alive with timely hits from both under and outside the basket.
The 6-9 Yabusele, a power forward playing for Real Madrid even had his highlight reel dunk over Lebron which had the crowd in delirious joy.
Together with Wenbenyama's twin tower partner Rudy Gobert, fellow NBA veterans Nicholas Batum and Evan Fornier and the promising pair of Nando de Colo and Isaia Cordiner, the French kept on nipping at the Americans heels, limiting their leads to single digits.
Then came Curry's hot shooting from the three points land, including one over Wenbenyana's outstretched arm and over the pair of Batum and Fornier which had been christened as Golden Daggers that fried the fight from the French.
Curry may have been the toast of the US team but Lebron James was adjudged as the tournament's Most Valuable Player. The two together with Kevin Durant were selected in the Mythical Five that also includes Nikola Jokic
The author Teodoro Medina Reynoso is a veteran boxing radio talk show host living in the Philippines. He can be reached at teddyreynoso@yahoo.com and by phone 09215309477.
Click here to view a list of other articles written by Teodoro Medina Reynoso.
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