Steph Curry Kept The U.S. On Top | Defector (2024)

No matter how imperfectly the U.S. basketball stars harmonized at times, the vision of four Steph Curry threes—insolent, obscene, comic in their timing—wiped all Paris memories clean. I'd spent the last two rounds of the men's tournament wondering if the top European foes could close the gap in the coming years, and if head coach Steve Kerr had gotten too cute with his lineups, but then that volley of daggers cut right through my idle musing. Oh, right, they still have the guys who do that sh*t, and the rest can be ad-libbed.

France had trailed Saturday's gold medal game since early in the second quarter. They managed to creep back within a three-point margin with just three minutes to go in regulation, and just as soon, they were buried by Curry, who ensured that his first and last Olympic run would end in gold, seasoned by the tears of one Victor Wembanyama. There's no torch to be passed. While Wemby's 26-point game strengthened the case that he could rule the NBA, the U.S. won 98-87, courtesy of the old heads who have defined the last dozen-odd years of the league. There was something sweet about that, a haze of nostalgia for a basketball era that hasn't even passed.

The game started out chippy and highlight-dense, and even when the U.S. lead swelled to 14 in the second half, it never quite lost that edge. The U.S. team is too larded with too much varied talent to summarize, but it is still broadly built in the image of LeBron James, in his fourth Olympics at age 39—the big beard now frosted with gray. His inside-out playmaking and inevitability in transition give any team a recognizable shape. Surrounding him with shooting like Curry, Kevin Durant, and Devin Booker is the ultimate decadence. James was aggressive from the opening minutes, and while this particular behind-the-back dime to Booker had me howling, his persistence on the fast break was the most important thing he brought to a team that often looked like less than the sum of its parts in the half-court.

The French team, meanwhile, was known for its strong frontcourt. You can't ask for much more than the tentacular two-way stylings of Wemby, backed up by Rudy Gobert, shutting down the airspace around the rim. But the team struggles to find much juice on the perimeter. For the most concise possible illustration of this point, observe that Frank Ntilikina started this very important game at point guard. (I did enjoy how he got chesty with KD after an early foul; real Ntilikina heads know that he has never backed down from the big dogs, at least while the ball is dead.) In the absence of decisive guard play, France possessions often started out murky, but they brightened once the ball made its way into the paint, by rebound or entry pass or some stroke of fortune. Early scoring was all handled by Guerschon Yabusele. Fans who know the power forward only by his unremarkable two-year stint with the Celtics would have been baffled by the prospect of him receiving "MVP" chants in an Olympic gold medal game, but he has indeed heard those throughout the tournament, and deservingly so. This iteration of Yabusele was slimmer, springier, and sweeter-shooting than his Celtics self, and irrepressible in the post. Should he want to return to the NBA after three years at Real Madrid, he could submit this 15-point first half as his full resumé. Within it, the obvious standout was the hellacious and-one dunk he threw down on a late-scrambling LeBron.

The second half was a heady mix of offensive anxiety and defensive zeal; traps were sprung, passes were picked, and both teams burped up the ball almost unprompted. The U.S. finished with 17 turnovers and France had 13. Where they diverged, to a staggering degree, was their ability to cash out on the other end of the floor. The U.S. had the edge in transition points, 31-9, thanks to their own strong transition defense and the absence of a French slasher who could consistently find its gaps. (Optimistically, the raw but punchy 20-year-old Bilal Coulibaly, who just finished his rookie year for the Wizards, could be that player for France someday.) Add in the discrepancy in three-point shooting—9-of-30 for France, 18-of-36 for the U.S.—and Wemby's squad was doomed. It's remarkable how close they kept the game until Curry's conclusive freakout. And that, too, was remarkable in its way, considering that the world's greatest shooter spent his Olympics 5-of-20 from the arc until his last two games. In the semifinal and final, he hit 17-of-28, accounting for almost all of the team-high 60 points he scored across that span.

It's those last 12 points, of course, that will endure in his personal mythology. In retrospect, the U.S. probably could have carved France up with a whole game's worth of incessant LeBron-Steph actions, because it is unanswerable, but at least they got to it eventually. First three: Meet LeBron for a pick-and-pop, find just enough space for a pull-up. Next trip down the floor, LeBron is the screener: a little space, a step-back, a pump-fake, cash. Third trip: Preemptive panic about Curry sends the whole defense into rotation, and Curry himself winds up the beneficiary, allowing a closeout to skitter by him before draining it. The fourth one was a perverse joke: Curry dances blithely through a double team, then chucks one up while fading hard to the right and scissoring his legs for balance. Hard to begrudge anyone the "night-night" gesture after hitting all that.

These last two games were also fitting sendoffs for James and Durant, whose late shot-making helped the team edge Serbia in the semifinal, and who are now the two most accomplished players the U.S. has ever dispatched for international play. That said, it's also striking how much the U.S. leaned on players aged 35, 36, and 39, while strapping young world-champion Jayson Tatum picked up two DNPs in the tournament and Tyrese Haliburton chipped in with moral support. Some of their absence could be chalked up to Kerr's finicky rotations, but some of it must be an honest assessment of the talent on hand. The next Team USA may be radically different in its roster construction. Do Anthony Edwards and Devin Booker age gracefully into those elder roles? How will the matchup with France look in Los Angeles 2028? By that time, a 24-year-old Wemby may well be the best basketball player in the world. He might finally have a point guard by his side—Nolan Traore, full of burst and passing craft, is lottery-bound in 2025. And while Wemby can't get much taller, he could still get much madder. "Nobody's going to take [this experience] from me," he said, after a loss that left him sobbing. "I'm learning and I'm worried for the opponents in a couple years."