Paris Olympics: Curry for president! Steph steps up to save Team USA’s gold medal hopes

PARIS — The headlines and hot takes were gathering like storm clouds on the horizon. The United States men’s basketball team was down 17 to Serbia — Serbia? — and you could hear the knives getting sharpened.

Entitled. Selfish. Greedy. Maybe even a Woke or Un-American thrown in there, too. When you suit up for Team USA men’s basketball team, there are expectations, and one of those expectations is that you don’t lose in the semifinal round to freaking Serbia.

There’s also this: when you hail from a league that’s taken some definitive political stances in the last few years, there are a whole lot of people who will delight in your failure no matter what letters are on your chest.

Fortunately for the United States, and unfortunately for the sports-talk radio hosts and Twitter agitators of the world, America has Steph Curry. And Steph solves a whole lot of problems.

Curry, playing in his first Olympics, finally found his stroke on Thursday night, pouring in 36 of the United States’ 95 points in its four-point win over Serbia. He started hot, draining 14 of the USA’s first 15 points. Then he got a little cocky, missing a three-pointer from just inside the half-court line … and it turned out that miss was all Serbia needed to start a monster first-half assault.

“They came out and made a lot of tough shots in the first half,” Curry acknowledged.

Devin Booker put it more succinctly: “They punched us in the face to start.”

Curry stayed hot, but the rest of the United States couldn’t get on his level, and the result was a game that ranged from annoying to maddening to desperate. Team USA fell 17 points behind, and only the fact that several of the world’s greatest basketball players remembered who they were, and played accordingly, allowed the Americans to escape what surely would have been the Most Humiliating Loss In Olympic History. (Another provocative headline, vanished.)

Anthony Edwards, the first of the Americans to speak after the game, projected the confidence that comes when you know you’ve avoided utter devastation. “We was never like, ‘Oh no, it’s over,’” he smiled….

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/paris-olympics-curry-for-president-steph-steps-up-to-save-team-usas-gold-medal-hopes-222343795.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-08-08 22:23:43

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