Team USA’s win over Serbia was both an instant classic and promising sign of where Olympic basketball is going

The most important basketball games in Olympic history tend to have two things in common: they are Team USA losses, and the fallout surrounding those games boils down to what Team USA lacked. When Team USA lost to the Soviet Union in the semifinals in 1988, the rules were changed to allow NBA players to participate in 1992. That gave us the Dream Team. When the Americans lost to Argentina in the semifinals in 2004, it forced a roster-construction reckoning. USA Basketball overhauled its leadership, completely reconsidered what type of players it brought to the Olympics, and hasn’t lost a gold medal since. It’s become a bit of a cycle. Every 20 years or so, Team USA catches a glimpse of its basketball mortality and decides to straighten up and fly right. That buys a bit of time against a world that we so frequently hear is catching up.

It’s also what made Thursday’s semifinal against Serbia such an instant classic. There are no more levers for Team USA to pull here. This is the A-Team, and Team USA’s A-Team is the pinnacle of international basketball. From that perspective, this was really a first in Olympic history. Team USA has played close games before. It has even lost before. But its place atop the world’s basketball hierarchy has never been threatened in such a manner.

That raised the stakes for both sides in ways that haven’t really been possible before now. When we talk about legacies as they relate to the Olympics, it tends to be as simple as a medal count. Perhaps for someone like Kevin Durant, the records are mentioned as well. But the games themselves tend to fade into the background because, frankly, they often aren’t that competitive, and when they are, there’s usually some excuse tied to the American roster that explains why. Thursday was so special because those excuses were gone. We got to see the absolute best players in the world play in such a competitive and meaningful game that it ultimately should and likely will color the way we think about them. This was a legacy game for everyone involved.

Imagine for a moment that Serbia had won. What would that say about Nikola Jokic, already widely considered the best player in the world today? He’d be only the second star to lead a non-American team to Olympic gold in a tournament featuring NBA players, and as impressive as Manu Ginobili’s 2004 gold was, it didn’t come against Team USA’s A-Team. How many players in the history of basketball could have led Serbia this close to an upset over a closing lineup featuring four NBA MVPs? Whatever number you have in your head probably isn’t small enough. It’s certainly in the single digits. Jokic rarely pops up in the single-digit portion of most all-time player rankings. When his career is done and it’s time to have those conversations, this game should come up. If he’d won it, it would immediately become the single most impressive victory of his basketball career. Maybe any basketball career. You don’t have to beat teams with 12 stars to win an NBA championship.

Joel Embiid actually did win this game. It’s unquestionably the biggest win of his career even if he was on the 12-star side. By the time most MVPs reach their 30s, they have a few late-stage playoff wins under their belt. Embiid has never reached the conference finals. He has a reputation for ducking Jokic, at least on the road. Team USA would not have a chance to win gold without his 19-point performance. That it came against Jokic, specifically, was a happy bonus. If there were any doubts, we now at least know that Embiid is capable of meeting such a moment.

We already knew that Stephen Curry was, but for a variety of reasons, he doesn’t have too many of them on his resume. That’s not exactly his fault. Two of his four championship teams had four All-Stars and a third played in the Finals against an opponent missing its second- and third-best players. Yes, Game 4 of the 2022 Finals was probably the signature game of his career, but did his signature moment even come in the playoffs? The most memorable shot he’s ever made was probably a regular-season overtime winner against the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2016. Perhaps no single 3-pointer out of the nine he made in this game will stand out as much as that one did, but the totality of the performance will never be forgotten. He added a big-game performance to a career that probably had room for one.

LeBron James has more of them than any of us can count. He’s 39 years old and has been doing this for two decades. He can no longer even hide the grey in his beard. But when it was tight, he was still the player the best players in the world trusted to carry them home. He ran the show late in the game. He’s run the show for pretty much the entire tournament, and when Team USA needed him most, he delivered with a 16-point, 12-rebound, 10-assist triple-double. It’s such a startling contrast to his first Olympic go-round. When Team USA won bronze in 2004, a teenaged James largely sat on the bench because Larry Brown thought he was too young. You’d think his Olympic career would be bookended with him being too old to keep dominating in this matter. But just as he has in the NBA, he’s defied Father Time yet again on the FIBA stage. James currently plays for a Lakers team that has no real chance of contending for a championship next season. This might have been the last truly great game he gets to play in. Saturday’s gold medal game will probably be the final championship game of any sort he’s a part of, and it almost certainly won’t be as exciting as this one was.

We could keep doing this forever if we really wanted to. Kevin Durant is perhaps the NBA’s most famous nomad, but he is also by far the most reliable American Olympian ever. He has literally never declined an opportunity to play for Team USA at the Olympics: he was cut from the 2008 Redeem Team after his rookie season and has never sat out since. What does it say about Devin Booker, among the least-accomplished players on this incredible team, that Steve Kerr trusted him to play during crunch time? What does it say about Jayson Tatum, the best player on the reigning NBA champion, that Kerr didn’t trust him to play at all? Have we been criminally underrating Bogdan Bogdanovic for his entire career? When has any Olympic game ever inspired these sorts of big-picture questions?

It’s just really rare for an Olympic game to be worthy of this sort of historical dissection. The Spain teams led by the Gasol brothers are probably the only international opponent that was ever consistently capable of drawing this sort of performance out of Team USA. Now, games like this are probably going to become a bit more common.

The notion that the world has “caught up” is a bit overplayed. No nation is ever going to produce the sheer volume of high-end basketball players that the United States does. There just isn’t any other country with the combination of population, financial incentives, fan passion and developmental infrastructure to do so. Team USA will probably be the favorite to win every Olympic tournament for the foreseeable future. But there’s a difference between being the favorite and being the automatic winner, as has so often been the case.

The rest of the world has proven more than capable of producing MVP-caliber players. Jokic was the best player on the floor on Thursday. He’s the best player in the world, a title that probably hasn’t been held by an American since whenever James gave it up. The last six NBA MVPs are foreign-born (though Embiid is playing for Team USA). Luka Doncic, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and gold medal opponent Victor Wembanyama may deny the United States that trophy for years to come.

Those players with a lesser supporting cast could never compete with Team USA over a seven-game series. But with years of continuity on their rosters and a bit of the positive shooting variance Serbia got in the semifinal, they can at least play Team USA competitively and potentially beat them in a single-elimination setting. The days of Team USA beating Angola 116-48 are over.

That’s the best possible outcome for the sport on the global stage, because it’s the one that gave us what might have been single greatest game in Olympic history. Never has an Olympic game been so competitive, so entertaining, and featured so many legacy-altering performances by all-time great players. And the hope is that this is going to be more common. Whether or not Team USA continues winning gold every four years, it’s hard to imagine it skating through each tournament without being tested like this moving forward. It was Jokic this summer. It might be Gilgeous-Alexander in 2028 and Wembanyama in 2032. It will be someone. And it will mean a whole lot more to the rest of the world when Team USA finally does have another loss on its ledger that isn’t primarily attributed to the players that didn’t show up.