Mike DeCourcy Recaps Team USA's Thrilling Win vs. Serbia
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00:00Mike DiCorsi of the Sporting News joins us, and he just said to me in a break, literally,
00:05when I mentioned putting in a gig into his house, he said, you're not worth a gig to
00:10me, actually.
00:11Who's paying for that?
00:13And I feel like there was a potential that we had to send a bill to SportsGrid, and we
00:19were going to go to a gig.
00:21I said, what do you think about a gig, Mike?
00:23He goes, don't talk gigs with me, young man.
00:27So I knew something was up.
00:29Here's my guy, Mike DiCorsi, I can't have Mike not coming in crystal clear, especially
00:34after that magnificent basketball game today.
00:39I cannot believe, to be honest with you, that Serbia unraveled.
00:44They had him.
00:45They had him right where they wanted him.
00:46They were playing off screen, getting wide open looks, ball movement, wide open threes.
00:52They had hit 15 out of 30 at one point, 50% from downtown, and then they missed seven
00:56in a row late in the game.
00:59And then they had the turnover on the backcourt violation.
01:02They unraveled.
01:03They had the game won, and they literally blew it.
01:07Scott, how many times in all of your years of watching Kevin Durant, which goes back
01:14at least to 2007 when he was the National Player of the Year at Texas, how many times
01:20did you ever think of him coming in for defense?
01:23Because that's what happened.
01:25That was the best or first great coaching move in this series, in the Olympic Games,
01:32that Steve Curry made, which was to put KD in, have him guard the ball a lot.
01:37He guarded Misic a lot at the start of the quarter.
01:41Then he switched over to Bogdanovic and really shut him down.
01:45And it was KD's defense that was the biggest difference in that game.
01:49I know Steph Curry was the biggest hero, not only for scoring 36 points, but also
01:54for scoring some of the biggest baskets in that huge steal and coast-to-coast layup that
01:59he made late in the game.
02:01But KD's defense, putting him in the game and saying, we're not doing this anymore.
02:06We are not getting beaten from the perimeter like we were.
02:09I think what we saw today, and I don't know how much it'll matter.
02:12I imagine France is going to give the United States a heck of a go.
02:17I think you've got to consider taking Drew Holiday out of the starting lineup and put
02:21Kevin Durant in there, because right now he's as good a two-way player as they have.
02:26Yeah, I thought Holiday, despite that corner pocket three he hit, which was big, and then
02:34Booker hit the big three off of the inbounds, off at a joker foul, off at a KD three on
02:42the wing.
02:43That three was huge.
02:44The foul was huge.
02:45Possession, inbounds, Booker, top of the key three.
02:49But I did not think, and I'm being frank, I did not think that Booker or Holiday played
02:55well in the game.
02:56I thought Holiday was aggressive defensively.
02:59I thought he tried to play aggressive defense.
03:03I just didn't think either one of them were really effective in the game.
03:07I agree with you about Durant.
03:09The thing that I noticed about them was that, you know, LeBron obviously had a triple-double.
03:16They needed that.
03:17They needed him attacking the rim and late in the game because they were missing too
03:21many shots and making too many mistakes.
03:24But I thought that all of their star players, frankly, did nothing in the game.
03:29I thought, I mean, at one point they were all sitting over there, Durant, AD, Ann Edwards,
03:35Halliburton, and none of them were going in the game at all.
03:39Well, you can't blame Halliburton for this because he's not putting them in the game.
03:44I said early in this process that they made the decision that they valued defense over
03:51ball movement.
03:52And I think in a circumstance like this, when you have so many gifted scorers and you need
03:58someone to bring definition to the offense, because there's nobody you can say, oh, you
04:02shouldn't take that shot.
04:04You can't say that to anybody almost.
04:07It may be Bam Adebayo taking the second half three, yeah, I'll say, don't take that shot.
04:12You're not that guy in this game.
04:14But for the most part, you have to understand that KD taking a shot off the dribble, okay,
04:19he's KD.
04:20And same for so many others.
04:22And that's why Halliburton made such a defense early in this process.
04:26And then he abandoned him after the difficulty in the South Sudan game in the showcase series.
04:35And since then, he's gotten almost no run, and they've gone with Derek White.
04:38Derek White was an absolute disaster today.
04:41He was embarrassingly bad in a game where they needed good defense.
04:46He was up, I believe I checked, he was a minus 16 in six minutes.
04:51And offensively, he was poor, defensively, he was disastrous.
04:56I didn't think there was any excuse for putting him back in.
04:59And thank goodness that Steve Kerr got that message and rode with KD in those minutes.
05:05For the first time in the whole tournament, I thought Embiid played well.
05:10Not only did he do well, he was very physical, almost violently physical in the game.
05:18I thought, Mike, literally, they were calling nothing away from the ball.
05:23The FIBA refs were calling nothing.
05:24It was literally tackle football out there.
05:26They were mauling each other, and no calls were being made at all.
05:31I thought Embiid said, all right, if we're going to play this way, I invite it.
05:35So let's go.
05:36You want to play dirty?
05:37Let's go.
05:37You want to foul and tackle and step on people?
05:40I'll run over somebody, see how you like it.
05:42But I thought he played well, and it's the first time I thought he played well.
05:46I think he had 19 hit, 8 of 11 shots, hit two threes, had a block shot.
05:51And I saw actual enthusiasm out of him, like he was having fun and he was into it.
05:58And it's the first emotion I've seen because he's been booed the whole time he's been in Paris, and everyone hates him.
06:05Well, I think that what you saw finally was him taking the responsibility for playing the game in the first half.
06:14You're right.
06:15He was fantastic in the second half, and he was for the entirety of the game up to the physical challenge that Nikola Jokic presented.
06:23So give him credit for that.
06:24But he didn't want to do anything else defensively.
06:27On any switch, any opportunity, when Drew Holliday got picked off or Steph Curry got picked off, and you had to step in the pocket and at least offer some challenge,
06:36Embiid just hung back and said, if he's going to make it, he's going to make it.
06:39Well, in this game, the answer was always, he's going to make it.
06:42Whoever it was, Bogdanovich, whoever, Misic, whoever it was, they were making that shot.
06:48And Embiid in the first half had no interest in making it a challenge.
06:51He showed in the second half that when those things happen, he can step out.
06:56He could step out and cause some traffic and make it difficult to shoot.
07:01He finally did it.
07:03In this game, once they started making threes, you needed to step forward and make it difficult.
07:09And until the second half happened, really the fourth quarter, that didn't happen.
07:13So I'll give Embiid a lot of credit for that fourth quarter and enough credit that he had a huge part in winning the game.
07:21But he also had a huge part in them being in a big deficit.
07:26I would agree with that. I'll say this.
07:27At one point, it was 15 out of 30.
07:29They were at 50 percent and then they missed nine straight threes.
07:34They ended up 15 of 39.
07:36And in actuality, the U.S., which had been missing left and right, ended up 16 of 32 for 50 percent.
07:45So it was the U.S. that actually ended up shooting 50 percent in the game and not Serbia.
07:50And the whole game we were watching, we thought Serbia was like hitting every three they took.
07:54And they were just like, there's no way they're losing this game.
07:56But then when it mattered most, they missed nine straight threes as the U.S. was knocking them down.
08:04Absolutely. Again, I have to give credit for making that move because I didn't see that coming.
08:10Putting Kevin out there and basically saying, use all that great length and that great quickness and shut down what they're doing.
08:18And he did it. LeBron played a great role in the fourth quarter.
08:22Steph was magnificent.
08:23I did think Booker did some good things defensively in the fourth quarter.
08:27When everything else was happening, I thought he was he was he played his role, which was guard your guy.
08:34Don't let him get open. Don't let him get threes.
08:37Don't get picked off by Jokic. And then if we need you, make a three.
08:41And he did that. So I'll give him credit for that comeback, too.
08:45It was intense. It was magnificent.
08:47I've seen some of my colleagues say that it was the best basketball game ever by the pros in the Olympics.
08:56I disagree. I think the 2008 gold medal game versus Spain was better because Spain was better.
09:01The U.S. had to play poorly for a lot of this game for it to be as exciting as it was.