words_Brandon Richard
It hasn’t always been pretty, but Team USA has cleared the first hurdle in their quest to regain basketball supremacy at the 2010 FIBA World Championship. In the last two days, they’ve played their way to big victories over Iran and Tunisia to remain undefeated and emerge as the number one seed from Group B. Today’s results land them a match-up with Angola, who finished as the fourth seed in Group A.
Projected to be destroyed by the Americans, Iran was just happy to keep the game reasonably competitive in the first half. Poorly executed offense and an influx of turnovers let the Iranian team hang in the game after two periods of play. In the long run, the depth of the United States proved to be too much, as they outscored Iran 46-23 in the second half to win by a 37-point margin. Kevin Love, Kevin Durant, Derrick Rose and Danny Granger all posted double figure scoring totals.
Team USA looked like a team playing uninspired basketball early in Tuesday’s contest against win-less Tunisia. The Americans lead by just six points at the intermission and only held a slim four-point lead early in the third quarter. However, they were able to blow the game open in the final 15 minutes behind the hot hands of sharpshooters Eric Gordon and Stephen Curry. The big second half helped the United States coast to a 92-57 win. Gordon led the way with 21 points, while Oklahoma City Thunder teammates Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook each added 14 of their own.
At this point, it’d be nitpicking to critique the group play wins by the United States. However, there are a few red flags that the team will need to address during this three-day rest. They’ve had a hard time getting any offense going, even drawing speculation that the team is holding back for the next round of games. They’ve also turned the ball over entirely too much, tallying as many as 22 in the game against Brazil. They’ll need to sharpen up their offensive execution moving on against tougher competition.
Team USA resumes play on Monday against Angola.
images via Yahoo
They’re right on schedule, I really like how everybody steps up, when needed, that’s something previous Team USA’s missed at a lot of World Championships.
Now it’s time to focus of course, on to the knock-out stage.