Rudy Gobert of France had an open shot on Sunday in his team’s 3-point loss to the United States in a group-play game at the Rio Olympics.Pool photo by Jim Young
RIO DE JANEIRO — The United States men’s basketball team began its summer schedule on a roll, hammering Argentina by 37 points in Las Vegas on July 22. Through four more exhibition games, its winning margins were just as garish: 49, 50, 35, 44.
At the Rio Games, the Americans kept firing, notching a 57-point win over China and a 44-point win over Venezuela to burnish their veneer of invincibility. Blowouts felt like a formality.
But then the mood changed. The United States players received a scare from Australia and had to come from behind to win by 10. They merely scraped past Serbia and France, by 3 points each time.
The knockout stage of the Olympic men’s basketball tournament begins Wednesday, and players from other nations have taken notice of these slight missteps.
“I still think they are the favorites, for sure,” said Manu Ginobili of Argentina, which plays the United States on Wednesday in the quarterfinals. “But after what happened in the last two, three games, I think there are some doubts.”
Make no mistake, Ginobili clarified, the United States remains the most talented team, the overwhelming favorite to win, the squad most likely to get hot and humiliate its opponent in a span of minutes.
Yet the feeling around Carioca Arena 1, the basketball venue at these Games, has been that some team could topple the favorite, Ginobili and other players said.
“The tournament is closer than I thought, and it looks like it’s not going to be easy for anybody,” Ginobili said. “I was kind of surprised that in at least two of the games, they were a shot away from going to overtime or losing — very surprised, especially after playing them in Vegas and looking at their roster.”
Since 1992, the first Olympics to feature active N.B.A. players, the American men have failed to win gold at the Games only once, in 2004. That debacle, in Athens, led the program to re-evaluate its approach and spurred a renaissance in the win column. The United States now has a 50-game winning streak.
Yet at the same time, the rest of the world has kept improving. Many countries at the Games have a core of players who have played together for years. The American team, on the other hand, has looked somewhat thrown together, with only a couple of weeks to practice as a unit.
The team’s vulnerability in the past week has heartened the rest of the field.
“I think it’s good for everybody,” said Jose Calderon of Spain, whose team looked sharp Monday. “Actually, it’s good for them, too, so they know what’s coming. But it’s good for us as well.”
Calderon added: “They are a really good team, but they are maybe not used to playing together, like other teams. But they are the best team by far.”
On defense, the Americans have looked susceptible to cascading ball movement, which has often left them tangled and misshapen. Their overall inability to get stops, in turn, has seemed to limit their chances to run and assert their athleticism.
Australia shot 50 percent against the United States. Serbia shot 51.7 percent. France shot 56.2 percent.
On offense, they have too often succumbed to solipsistic habits. Their movement has had a clunky, arrhythmic feel.
In truth, it has been enough to win games. But the question is whether that will last.
The rhetoric around the team, as a result, has subtly changed. After the game against France, Kevin Durant employed notably humble language, saying: “Everyone wants us to win by a lot of points, but that’s not going to happen this time. So we’ve got to be prepared for a grind-out game, and I think we showed the last few games we can grind it out.”
After the team’s narrow win over Serbia, Paul George said the players had been attempting “one-on-five shots.” George added, “We are too good for that.”
Will Voigt, the coach of Nigeria, which lost to Brazil on Monday and did not make the knockout stage, pointed out that the N.B.A. game — in rules and in theory — can feel considerably different from international play.
“Offensively, there’s just a lot more ball movement and player movement, which makes it a lot harder to defend,” Voigt, who has coached teams on four continents, said of international play. “Teams here are really well equipped for that style of play, moving and creating for each other. I think the U.S. is much more about spacing and highlighting star players.”
Asked to identify the keys to defeating the Americans, Voigt pointed to two of their recent games.
On offense, he said, he would attack them the way the Serbs did, moving the ball with patience, riding out the early stress. “As long as you’re not disrupted by their pressure and their switching, you’re going to eventually find mismatches on the floor,” he said.
Voigt praised Australia’s self-confident approach on defense.
“Sometimes people, rightly so, are intimidated, but if you give them too much respect, you’re going to struggle,” he said. “I think you’ve got to take it to them on the defensive end, not be afraid to pressure them, not be afraid to trap here and there.”
On Monday afternoon, when Brazil still had a chance to make it to the knockout stage, its players spoke similarly about the powerful, but flawed, American team.
Leandro Barbosa said he and others were surprised to see how close the United States’ games had been. Marcelo Huertas said the Americans had “suffered” through their last three games, adding, “Nobody is unbeatable.”
Raulzinho Neto, a teammate, agreed. “I think France, Australia and Serbia, they showed that everybody — not everybody, but somebody — can beat them,” he said.
And that is all it would take — just one loss, somewhere down the line — to make this summer a failure for the United States team.
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