It Took All of America’s Basketball Might to Beat Nikola Jokic and Serbia
Photo by Daniela Porcelli/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images
The United States and Serbia played what basically everyone agrees is one of the greatest basketball games ever yesterday, as the Americans erased a seventeen-point first-half deficit and a thirteen-point Serbian lead at the start of the fourth quarter to squeak out perhaps the most dramatic victory in the history of Olympic basketball and move on to the Final.
Steph Curry proved why he is the greatest shooter ever, LeBron James demonstrated why he is an all-time Swiss army knife, and Kevin Durant enshrined himself as the greatest Olympic scorer of all time. It took the best effort that America’s big guns had, all to beat a frisky Serbian team with a stifling (first-half) defense and the best player on the planet who is the official athlete of Splinter, Nikola Jokic, as named by me, Splinter’s entirely unbiased Denver-based Editor-in-Chief.
Look at how happy these guys are. All over finally vanquishing the guy so many of them can’t beat in America!

Photo by RvS.Media/Robert Hradil/Getty Images

Photo by RvS.Media/Robert Hradil/Getty Images

Photo by Christina Pahnke – sampics/Getty Images
Dropping the bit for a second, it is very cool watching this Big Three era of USA Basketball close with this kind of drama. I will return to my Denver sports shit talking in the second half of this blog, but LeBron James, Steph Curry, and Kevin Durant deserve a hero’s send-off to their international careers. They oversaw a generation that advanced basketball to heights not seen before and etched themselves among the titans of the sport. The Paris Olympics are widely expected to be their last, and all three plus Jokic’s MVP rival Joel Embiid are the biggest reasons that Team USA is moving on to the Final tomorrow against host country France and the basketball alien poised to take over the next generation, Victor Wembanyama.
I turned on yesterday’s semifinal genuinely wondering who I would be rooting for. The very first Remembering a Play in Splinter history was me guffawing over Vince Carter dunking seven-footer Frederic Weis into a different dimension in the 2000 Olympics, and have noted that I am a Dream Team baby and how that generation of stars influenced my perception of basketball while my brain was still developing. They made me fall in love with this sport, and despite all my demonstrated issues with American governance, I am a full-blown Team USA mark once every four years because of them.
Until yesterday.
I can confirm that Denver is now the Western Republic of Serbia. I began the game a neutral and mid-way through the first quarter I and everyone I knew was learning the Serbian national anthem. Some, like sports’ greatest poster of all time who I will get to in a second, charge us with being “cornballs” for rooting for our guy over America, but it’s deeper than that.
The Dream Team made me love basketball as a kid, and that fueled me up until a Taco Bell commercial in 2014 where I discovered true basketball love. For anyone who watched Nikola Jokic’s rookie season, it was obvious that the man had a special offensive talent that made the Nuggets worth watching even if they weren’t very good yet. The question was whether he could elevate his defense and conditioning to NBA levels, and if there was a position for him in a league where the four increasingly plays in space he cannot.
Nikola Jokic did all that and more. This journey watching him and Jamal Murray build the greatest Nuggets team ever from the ashes of the Carmelo Anthony era has been one of the most rewarding sports experiences of my life. It’s rare that sports suffering has a payoff, and the feeling of joy that Nikola Jokic evokes is unlike any other athlete I have watched.