There’s a difference between being a part of history and making it. The latter takes some magic, a legend, a moment. It takes, as it turns out, someone like Steph Curry. Gold medals are given out every few years, but the ones we remember are the medals with a story to tell: like that of a legendary team on the brink, rescued by a string of increasingly preposterous jumpers from the greatest shooter to ever live.
Team USA won gold at the Paris Olympics—as was expected from the moment the Americans put together one of the most decorated rosters ever assembled. LeBron James, who first played for the national team two decades ago, organized a team of former MVPs and All-NBA standouts. Kevin Durant became the first man to win four Olympic golds in basketball—and along the way, surpassed Lisa Leslie as USA Basketball’s all-time leading scorer. The U.S.’s 98-87 victory over France on Saturday marked Curry’s first medal in his first Olympic games, and at 36 years old, it’s likely to be his last. Yet in his one Olympic run, he provided Team USA with one of its most indelible images: a dramatic, wrongfooted shot from deep to seal the game and the gold, hoisted over the top of two closing French defenders:
USA Basketball, historically, has almost been too dominant for plays that last in the public memory. There’s Kobe Bryant’s silencing jumper in the gold medal game against Spain in 2008. There’s Vince Carter’s hurdling dunk over Frederic Weis from the Sydney games in 2000. Otherwise, there’s a blur of breakaway finishes from Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley and Dwyane Wade, utterly nonspecific in the way points in a blowout tend to be. Curry’s impossible 3-pointer with 35 seconds left was different—not only in the sensational way his shots often are, but because of the stakes that surrounded it.
Global basketball has never been stronger. It took a massive comeback against Serbia, a team led by the best basketball player in the world, for the Americans to even make it out of the semifinals in the first place. The leading scorer for Saturday’s gold medal game wasn’t Curry, but 20-year-old Frenchman Victor Wembanyama—the future of the sport, dominant in a way unlike anything we’ve ever seen. A team headlined by three all-timers needed all three just to hold off France, and a signature shot from Curry to put the game away for good. The way Team USA floundered to a bronze medal finish in 2004 was largely an indicator of American hubris. The fact that this year’s gold medal game was up for grabs with three minutes remaining speaks to how far the game has grown internationally in the last 20 years, and what’s now required to win gold.
Come 2028, the Americans will have to find that level through dramatically different means. “I can’t see myself playing in L.A.,” James told reporters after winning the gold. Durant was slightly more ambiguous on the matter, but he’ll be 39 years old by the next summer games and Curry will be 40. None of the three will be in a position to lead Team USA, should they even defy the odds to participate. All of which means that USA Basketball isn’t just celebrating a gold, but the end of an era. The torch is passing, even if no one within the program knows which up-and-coming star will be ready to receive it. Anthony Edwards has a compelling claim, and now real Olympic experience to support it. There’s a gulf, however, between the Edwards of today and the icons he could replace four years from now. Jayson Tatum could be up to the task, but just endured an Olympic run where he was barely a factor on the floor and failed to make a single jump shot. Tyrese Haliburton will surely be more of a factor for the games in L.A., and Devin Booker and Bam Adebayo should still be in the mix if they elect to go for a third gold. But will any of those three have the game and presence of USA Basketball’s sunsetting statesmen?
Picturing Team USA’s next gold requires some imagination—if only because of how much this year’s team leaned on its old guard. Curry struggled through much of the Olympics, but put up a ridiculous 60 points over the last two games while going 17-for-27 from beyond the arc. Only two other players (Bogdan Bogdanovic and Dennis Schroder) hit 17 3s in the entire tournament. And when France narrowed the deficit to a single possession with just under three minutes left, Curry drilled four 3s in a little over two minutes to fend off the rally and clinch the game.
When the deciding moments came, Curry dialed up pick-and-roll after pick-and-roll with James—the culmination of a decade of competition between the two rivals. LeBron’s teams have often targeted Curry on defense by using his man as a screener for James, dragging the smaller guard into a physical matchup he could never win. On Saturday, it was Curry setting that very same screen, terrorizing France’s overmatched guards. Those sequences threw the French defense into a desperate scramble, at times doubling off Durant in an effort to contain the uncontainable.
For all the questions over the past few weeks regarding how and who Team USA should play, the three generational titans in the lineup showed an immediate understanding of how to play off of one another. Curry and Durant fell right into old patterns from the three seasons together in Golden State, to the point that KD directed his less experienced teammates to wait for Steph to spring open. Putting the ball in LeBron’s hands allowed him to leverage Steph’s cuts at every opportunity, paying off long before Curry’s own shooting did. The feel for the game that made LeBron and Steph such perfect foils turned them, finally, into perfect teammates. And whenever their joint project failed or faltered, they could swing the ball to Durant, the ultimate shortcut to world-beating offense.
Curry may have had the last word (it was nuit nuit), but Durant had a response to most every previous French run—as was the case against so many of Team USA’s previous opponents. It was his pull-up that sealed the game against Serbia. His flurry of scoring and playmaking that kept France at bay in the second quarter. His jumpers that answered scores from Mathias Lessort and Nando De Colo, snuffing out momentum buckets before they had a chance to take hold. The most accomplished scorer in the history of the program joined the starting lineup on Saturday for the first time in the tournament and delivered, over and over, without once commandeering the game for himself. That’s what it takes to play with legends, even for a legend himself.
Behind Curry’s immortal moment, after all, was Durant—the deadliest scorer in international basketball—dutifully turning himself into a screener. Arguably the greatest player in the history of the sport spaced the floor from the weak side. Anthony Davis waited in the dunker spot. Devin Booker parked himself in the corner. A team of All-Stars and champions watched from the bench as Curry made his fourth-straight insane shot, and with it made history. Then, together, Team USA borrowed from Steph to put France—and a home-friendly crowd of 20,000—to bed.
