Last week, I wrote about Nikola Jokic’s experience at the Olympics mirroring much of his NBA career: he’s been an apex strategist working with a diminished set of tools, compiling some of the most impressive near-losses that you’re likely to ever see. He has done more than that, of course: he did recently win an NBA championship. But if his Denver Nuggets’ teammate Jamal Murray’s Olympic performance for Canada is any indication, he’s not likely to win another soon. As an off-ball player behind MVP runner-up Shai Gilgeous-Alexander on the point guard depth chart, Murray struggled to do much of anything on the world’s stage, and his performance is an ominous sign for the 2024-25 Nuggets campaign.
Unless, of course, this stuff doesn’t actually translate that well. NBA and FIBA games are both particular things, quite distinct from each other. Going from 40-minute international games to 48-minute American games might seem like “just a few more minutes,” but the difference is actually closer to what you’d observe when switching from 25-minute sitcoms to 110-minute movies. Murray is especially adept at the basketball equivalent of the latter. He’s one of the great longform climax men of this era, a clutch wunderkind. But FIBA contests are not quite the multi-phased, feel-things-out affairs that NBA games are; by the time you’ve gotten a chance to really study the rhythms of it, the game is either out of reach or fully over.
Steph Curry, who struggled through much of the Olympics, figured that out quite emphatically by its crucial endpoint. There was no time, he learned, to pick his spots. Every spot should be his. He became the relentless gunner his most fervid stans are always asking him to be, eschewing anything remotely methodical to give us what was, instead, one of the quintessential American sporting moments. Dance and shoot, dance and shoot. The lankiest defender alive is running at you, as you dance? Pull up, shoot. Newspapers are saying he “painted his masterpiece”; I’d argue that the NBA playoffs are too important for such strokes to be framed anywhere else, and that Curry gave us his greatest work in 2022. But it’s also not worth arguing over much. We’re all grateful to see him explode under a huge, high-stakes spotlight, at least one more time, and he was so compellingly great in Paris that he may have transcended the usual statutes of basketball posterity.
It’s because of the presence of the old wizards—Curry, LeBron James, Kevin Durant—that younger Team USA stars sat and watched perhaps more than they planned to. None more conspicuous than Jayson Tatum, who barely saw the floor as the tourney went on and the consequences grew. Fresh off a championship with his Boston Celtics, he joined the American roster for the second time, alongside two Celtic teammates, Jrue Holiday and Derrick White. Many expected it to be The Summer Of Jayson, but Holiday and White both played significantly more important roles than he did.
The idea that Tatum was destined for global coronation was a confusing one, in the first place. Jaylen Brown, as he’s happy to tell you, was the Finals MVP and most important Celtic in the team’s championship, with Tatum having the worst shooting stretch of his career during the postseason—a trend that continued in France. He still mattered a great deal in the Celtics’ run as a huge, gritty defender and rebounder, plus as a heady passer, but his career has been on a decidedly different track than the one media’s paved for him, and we’re still waiting for consensus to catch up to the fact that he’s now a more rugged and offensively strained wing soldier than the dynamic, hyper-efficient primary playmaker he’s been sold as.
Brown, again, would be the first to tell you, if he was speaking from his heart. Instead, he watched the gold medal run from afar and communicated his dissatisfaction about being excluded through passive-aggressive social media gestures. First he insinuated his snub was due to Nike machinations, and then, at the height of the U.S. team’s run, he unfollowed their accounts. It’s hard to imagine things will be completely normal between him, Tatum, Holiday, and White after all that—possible locker room friction looms, as it always does for defending champions. (Even if it doesn’t usually explode into Draymond Green vs. Jordan Poole level drama).
More explicit, frank, and unambiguous in his digital Olympics declarations was Kevin Durant. Perpetually straddling the internet fence between messily real and really messy, Durant’s latest invective against fans with tiny platforms was aimed more specifically at Americans who rooted for Serbia; mostly, as you’d expect, Nuggets fans deep in their Jokic love. Calling them “lames,” “cornballs,” and “clowns,” he evoked his exclusive status as a senior member of the NBA fraternity to broadly invalidate fan opinions expressed online. It was a less inspired version of the riff, which he’s performed before, but he scored plenty of points with jingoists seething with American pride, which—as it turns out—is mostly who makes up NBA Twitter. Team USA’s victory is supposed proof of the truth that the America-First contingent of NBA fandom has been chasing since 2018, which is the last time a U.S.-born player won the MVP. And Durant, for one angry internet morning, was their oracle.
More importantly, Durant was excellent on the court, and so was his Phoenix Suns teammate, Devin Booker. Often derided as a score-first jamoke who’s not a serious winner—whatever that means—he’s actually a pro’s pro, and has been for a while. He’s still shaking off that time he scored 70 points in a meaningless game for a bad team (who lost the game), all the way back in 2017. The noise of that supposed hot-doggery still chases him, but his clinical and grounded performance in France is helping to reverse a reputation that should’ve been fixed long ago. And despite how dismally the Suns’ 2023-24 season ended, they won 49 games with inconsistent health, and the Durant-Booker Olympics burst should be fuel for their excellence in their second full NBA season together.
Durant (probably!) won’t be back on Team USA again, and neither will James or Curry. Again: probably—keep in mind that on the women’s side, Diana Taurasi just won her sixth gold medal at age 42. What happens next on the American stage will be decided by guys who have not, like these stage-right legends, been around for well over a decade. Tatum, Anthony Edwards, or even Brown—who Team USA has shown signs of wanting to do diplomacy with—could be up next. They will face an increasingly difficult foreign field. Victor Wembanyama will be really, really good by then, and looking for more than silver. Perhaps that’s why this round of Olympics basketball felt different (weightier, more grand) than usual. It might be the last time that America is the clear favorite.
