Team USA Continues To Be An Embarrassment, Now Loses To Serbia To Make This One Of Their Worst FIBA Showing Ever

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Heading into this stage of FIBA, I think everyone wanted to see Team USA vs Serbia. They were the two teams that had the best odds to win the whole thing, and are loaded with NBA talent. What I don’t think many people expected was that these two teams would meet in the losers bracket, but here we are. Serbia was upset by Argentina and the US by France. Sort of a tough draw for the US to play back to back and it certainly showed given how this game started. Serbia jumped out to an 11-2 lead which turned into a 32-7 lead after the first quarter and the US look cooked. I mean if you thought losing to France was embarrassing it’s a new level to not even score double figures in a quarter when you’re trotting out a roster of NBA players. Serbia was pretty much exactly what you may have expected, they shot lights out, set their personal record with 15 3PM and guys like Bogdan Bogdanovic showed why Kings fans should be really excited about their future. He was awesome and pretty damn automatic from deep. To think they pulled this off while only getting 9 points from Jokic is pretty crazy, but as we know basketball is a make or miss game and if there’s one thing this Team USA showed us it’s that they love scoring droughts. Can’t get enough of them. The good news was at least this game became watchable after Team USA responded in the second quarter and we had a 4 point game at halftime and then a 3 point game heading into the fourth quarter.

But like they have a few times in this tournament, Team USA choked. They started the first 4 minutes of the fourth without a basket, Serbia did their thing and the next thing you knew the lead was back to double digits and that was it. A team that relies on their defense allowed Serbia to shoot 52/48% from the floor, and while there were nice bounce back performances from guys like Kemba (18/4/8) and Harrison Barnes (22/5/4) it was once again not enough. The biggest issue for this team was basically their inability to get that big momentum defensive stop. They would cut it to 3 or 4 and then immediately give up points. Some possessions it was a three, others it was a foul to break up any sort of run. You combine that with tough shooting nights for Donovan Mitchell (4-12), Jaylen Brown (1-6) and Joe Harris (1-6) then Boban coming in and absolutely destroying any Team USA big and that’s how you lose back to back games. That’s something that almost seemed impossible to comprehend when this tournament started, but this is now officially one of the worst FIBA performance of all time for Team USA. They can’t finish any higher than 7th and every single one of them should be ashamed, Pop included. The last time they finished this low in a FIBA World Cup was 2002 when they finished 6th, so there’s a chance there are some stoolies reading this blog that weren’t even alive the last time the US embarrassed themselves like this.

Sadly, we’re not done yet. One more game to go and quite honestly I’m not totally convinced this team won’t lose 3 in a row. We have seen nothing as of late to give you any sort of hope they won’t leave China on any sort of positive note. At this point we’re rooting for health, I know I want every Celtic shut the fuck down for this final game, it’s already happened with Tatum and Smart. This has been brutal enough, the last thing anyone needs is someone who plays on their favorite team to get hurt with training camp right around the corner.

Team USA, your basketball team. WOOF.