Team USA Men’s Basketball, in Spite of Itself, Remains an Olympics Goliath

The rout capped a brilliant tenure as Team USA head coach for Krzyzewski, who signs off after guiding the US to three consecutive Olympic gold medals and an astounding 88-1 record in worldwide competition. Though they finished undefeated, there were multiple instances when the team showed signs of discordant struggle.

Through Samsung VR, Samsung’s virtual reality app, you can see USA Basketball Men’s National team train for the Games as you never have before, from the team’s pregame preparations through their postgame celebrations.

The Americans just secured their fifteenth Olympic gold medal.

One can only wonder what the future holds for virtual reality through Samsung’s technology and their partnerships with various sports teams and federations. That was written right after this year’s draft, when there was a record number of worldwide players taken in the first round and the same exhausted stuff about the world “catching up” and “AAU players lack fundamentals” came up again.

Bryant also won gold with Coach K in 2012, and he’s one of many current and former Olympians to praise Krzyzewski for his work with USA Basketball over the last eight years. What remained iffy was its capacity to translate individual prowess to team advancement, and, for a while there, it appeared that hero ball would spoil the party.

Krzyzewski said he has coached his last usa national team, which he said Monday would take some getting used to after settling in as head coach the past 10 years.

“It’s kind of like in college when you go from being a team to having an outstanding program”, he said.

“They played better than us”, said Serbian center Vladimir Simac. This was just the latest American team to carry its torch, the 2016 team that had been spooked by Australia (98-88), Serbia (94-91) and France (100-97) in the Rio Games and was in desperate need of something to raise the intensity level heading into a game against Argentina. For the first time since 2004, many top American players opted to skip the Olympics, forcing them to bring some here who wouldn’t have been considered otherwise.

In 2008 Krzyzewski got National Basketball Association heavyweights like LeBron James and Kobe Bryant to commit to playing for Team USA, and those relationships have continued with both superstars speaking highly of Coach K.

“I’m all for raising the bar for global basketball”, he told USA Today. In that time, the US have won three Olympic Gold Medals, two FIBA World Championships and one FIBA America’s Championship. “I think somewhere along here, we’ll look back at the time”. In these Olympics, three planned practices on non-game days – including Saturday’s – were downgraded to more informal session (optional workouts with video sessions and/or a team meeting). In the preliminary rounds, the USA had to eke out three-point wins against Serbia and France. “So they’ll be very, very hard for us”. I didn’t want to miss that opportunity.