Is Team USA Men’s Basketball Good or Bad? Kevin Durant Weighed In at 5 a.m.

A squadron of some of the greatest athletes to ever touch a basketball narrowly defeated the Serbian national team in a thriller of a game for a chance at the gold on Thursday evening. By 5 a.m. Friday, KD—my personal GOAT—was already tweeting.

By Kylie Cheung  |  August 9, 2024 | 5:38pm
Photo: Getty Images Art: Kylie Cheung LatestOlympics Paris Olympics
Is Team USA Men’s Basketball Good or Bad? Kevin Durant Weighed In at 5 a.m.

On Thursday afternoon, I giddily perched on my couch to watch the USA men’s basketball team cruise to yet another Olympic victory—this time against Serbia, helmed by the Denver Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic—for a chance to play France for the gold. I was expecting to relax and partake in some light-hearted jokes on Twitter dot com while watching the game over my lunch. Instead, I nearly went into cardiac arrest as a team with LeBron James, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, and Joel Embiid trailed for most of the game, narrowly clinching a win in the final minutes thanks to the heroics of Curry and Embiid, in particular. Interspersed with a collective sigh of relief and a strong showing of almost Republican levels of patriotism on social media, the game sparked a semi-avalanche of online debate: Is Team USA Men’s Basketball good or bad at basketball??

“Serbia just took the most talented team in the history of the planet to the wire with a medal on the line. Team USA was a 16 point favorite. The whole country [Serbia] should be proud,” one NBA analyst and Nuggets fan tweeted after the game. At 5 a.m. Paris time, Durant replied to the noted American, “Where u from??”

Denver, you’ll recall, is based in the United States of America. But nonetheless, the city’s famously rabid base of Jokic super-fans set to work, pushing the narrative that the closeness and intensity of the game demonstrated Jokic’s superiority and the Team USA superstars’ consequent inferiority. Twitter users were quick to call Durant “petty” and small for picking fights—at 5 in the morning his time, no less. He quote-tweeted one such tweet from a user named Will and said, “Will’s upset.” He called others “clowns” with “corny agendas,” and he was right! To Durant’s point, the NBA players on Team USA are indisputably incredible, and fans deploying what he calls “idol worship” of Jokic to discredit their own national team is… weird.

“This a brotherhood fam, u not apart of. It’s a problem now cuz social media got u clowns walkin around wit your chest out like u mean something. YOU DONT!!! YOUR TAKES DONT MATTER,” Durant wrote. In a separate tweet he wrote, “Lets talk about the fan culture that’s been created recently. … ALOT of idol worship, a lot of hate and division based off wins and losses, a lot of disrespect of the work being put in by these incredible athletes, mostly by people who don’t know what it takes to be good at anything besides talking…go do something and get out the way..”

As I wrote last week, I’m simply obsessed with Durant’s commitment to fighting absolutely anyone on Twitter, an activity he described as “better than goin to da club” in 2010. I can only imagine that he was up tweeting while his teammates like Anthony Edwards or Devin Booker were either out partying or fast asleep, and it’s precisely for that reason that Durant is my GOAT. As the adage goes, “i be waking up REAL EARLY to have extra time to be a hater.”

Circling back to the matter of USA and Serbia’s very, very close game: The only thing one should possibly take away from it is that with their backs against the wall, Team USA impressively managed to lock in and win when it mattered most, which isn’t an easy feat—as a long-time Philadelphia 76ers fan, often enough I find myself watching my team just completely fall apart in the final stretch of a close game. And the fact that Team USA is so stacked works against them, IMHO—it’s a little thing called suffering from success. It’s not easy to combine such a staggering amount of talent and come together to operate as a cohesive, effective unit—that’s what role players and a bench are for. As for team chemistry, this handsome bunch had only a few weeks to go from semi-hating each other’s guts to becoming the best of friends, and I think it’s very sweet that they’ve managed to do so. Here’s to gold on Saturday against France!!!

 
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