Team USA Basketball Whomps France in Olympic Debut

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mostly watching (AP photo)

They may or may not be better than the '92 Dream Team—I'm a mite
skeptical, though it's probably close—but it's pretty clear that this
2012 Team USA is gonna be damn good. France might be the toughest team
that they play in the Preliminary Round—not a real Gold Medal contender,
but a team of pros at least, with an All-Star in Tony Parker and a
handful of other solid players (Boris Diaw, Nicolas Batum)—but after a
sloppy first quarter, Team USA still cruised to an easy victory, leading
by at least 20 for most of the second half and finishing with a 98-71 victory.

The game more or less reinforced the current player hierarchy in the
NBA, with LeBron James and Kevin Durant the obvious team leaders. Even
on a team with Chris Paul and Deron Williams, LeBron served as the
team's primary facilitator, hitting teammates with bullet passes for
easy looks and finishing with nine points and 8 assists, while Durant
served as the first-option scorer, tallying 22 points on 13 shots, and
pulling down 9 rebounds as well. It's hard to imagine a team with
those two guys not finding a way to win any of these games.

 
Our own Andre Iguodala didn't have a ton of impact in this one—he only
played two minutes in the first half, losing most of his minutes to a
hot Kevin Love, and didn't register any meaningful stats in his brief
stretch. He did get to play most of the fourth quarter in what was
essentially garbage time, though he didn't exactly set the court on
fire, with his most notable play being an attempted alley-oop pass that
sailed well over his teammate's head. As long as Love manages to stay
out of Coack K's doghouse, 'Dre's minutes stand to be fairly limited in
consequential action from here out, though he may be called on to be a
defensive stopper off the bench should any opposing wing players give
the team trouble.

However, there was another Sixer more notably involved with today's game
than 'Dre—Coach Doug Collins, who returned to the microphone as the
analyst for today's game on NBC. It was fun to hear Dougie's voice on
the call again, as he did for several years on TNT (and for the '08
Olympic games in Beijing as well), and cool to get his take on a couple of the
players he's had to gameplan against from the Sixers' sidelines these
last few seasons. It'll be a treat to get to hear him for the rest of
the games.

Also, if you're watching these Team USA games and a couple of them turn
into blowouts, there's another reason besides getting to see 'Dre on the
court to keep watching in garbage time—rookie big man Anthony Davis. He
didn't put up huge numbers in today's game, but he had a couple plays—a
block on one end where he just kinda swallowed the shot, an alley-oop
dunk on the other—that were fairly stunning, and showed how much fun
this guy is gonna be to watch in the NBA for the next decade or two, and
how he's already on a level where he doesn't even look out of place
playing with these All-World dudes as teammates.

Next up: The not particularly intimidating Team Tunisia, on Tuesday at 5:15 PM EST. Get ready for some SportsCenter highlights.

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