Last summer, it took a heroic fourth quarter effort from Stephen Curry for Team USA to beat Victor Wembanyama and France in the gold medal game, winning their fifth gold medal in a row.
Wembanyama had to settle for second in his first Olympics, tearfully wearing a silver medal in front of his home fans in Paris.
The look on his face said everything we need to know: he's not going to settle for second ever again.
As the NBA becomes increasingly international, the Americans seem to be losing their stranglehold on FIBA and Olympic basketball. In 2028, Los Angeles will host the games, and Wembanyama would likely love nothing more than to beat Team USA on their own turf, and he should have the support to do it.
“If you look at a more developed Wemby, you look at the Risacher, you look at some of these young players coming up from France over the next three to four years, I think France, in my opinion, not that they have the best basketball players in the world, but they can field a team of 12 players, France, in three to four years that will be on par with the US," said Richard Jefferson on the *Road Trippin'*podcast.
Jefferson predicts that Team USA will not win in 2028, and with Wembanyama, Risacher, Alexandre Sarr, Bilal Coulibaly, Joan Beringer, Noa Essengue, Nolan Traore, and Guerschon Yabusele, the French will be even better than last year, and it took the Americans everything they had to beat the less-experienced French.
On top of that, America is losing its internal dominance. With the exception of Anthony Davis and Joel Embiid, the best big men in the NBA are all foreign, and even Embiid originally hailed from Cameroon.
By 2028, it's safe to be that all of the best centers will be playing for other national teams, and the Americans will simply have no answer for a frontcourt lineup of Wemby and Sarr.
“You've always had dominant bigs," Jefferson pointed out. "The dominant bigs have faded from the US. And then you look at it. It's Joel Embiid. It's Giannis. It's Jokic. Most of the dominant bigs are coming over from Europe."
Losing the Olympic basketball tournament on their own turf would be the ultimate embarrassment for Team USA, but without certain weapons, it's hard to imagine them being able to rival the French in a single-elimination format.
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