For all the amazing things we’ve seen in the sport of basketball, whether it be Bird vs. Magic or MJ pushing Byron Russell to score the game-winning goal against the Jazz or Christian Laettner playing the perfect game against Kentucky in the 1992 Elite Eight, we may never have witnessed anything quite like what happened with 90 seconds left in Saturday’s men’s gold medal game between the United States and France.
American guard Steph Curry had drawn a double team in the backcourt and threw a pass to the opposite wing to superstar teammate Kevin Durant. Given the shot clock situation, Durant almost had to consider drawing a shot to help protect his team’s painful six-point lead.
Yes, but that wasn’t happening.
As soon as Durant caught the ball and saw defender Evan Fournier running toward him, he passed the ball back to Curry. KD, who has made 50 percent of his shots in the NBA and 39 percent of his 3-pointers in the NBA and has been even more accurate in international play, passed up a big shot. Because he had seen what all of us had seen.
This was Steph’s moment. Her golden moment.
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What Curry did in the final three minutes — after committing a careless turnover and then missing a short jumper and being complicit in shrinking the U.S. lead to a single possession — was the kind of thing we see in Marvel movies, a feat that only seemed plausible through the use of CGI.
In the remainder of the game, he made four three-pointers, each more ridiculous than the last, all of them mandatory if the United States wanted to stay ahead. The last of them came with 35 seconds left, with several defenders challenging him. The ball was launched toward the ceiling of the Bercy Arena, but went straight into the net. The United States survived 98-87, with a golden dagger that we will probably never forget.
“THE GOLDEN DAGGER!”
Steph Curry, that’s completely ridiculous. ?#ParisOlympics | NBC and Peacock image.twitter.com/8hIN8tgmfK
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 10, 2024
Throughout this team’s adventure, ever since they gathered in Las Vegas just after the Fourth of July holiday, it always seemed like LeBron James was the player who wouldn’t let them lose. Not that day. It was Curry who took advantage of those final minutes against an inspired group of Frenchmen and declared, “Je ne nous permettrai pas de perdre.”
Okay, he didn’t say it in French. He didn’t say “I won’t let us lose” in English either. He said it in the language of the game.
“Obviously, those were big shots,” Curry told NBC Sports. “We were up by 3, to get up by 6, that kind of settled everything, and then the tempo came, the rush, and luckily the other three went in. But that was an unbelievable moment. Obviously, I’ve been fortunate enough to play basketball at a high level for a long time. I don’t know … this ranks very high in terms of excitement and sense of relief, getting to the finish line.”
Curry’s final score of 24 points (eight 3-pointers), five assists and two steals gave him 60 points in the two-game medal round.
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Maybe it shouldn’t have come to this. The U.S. again looked uncoordinated on offense at times, committing 17 turnovers in a 40-minute game, four more than the average for any Atlantic 10 Conference team last season. Coach Steve Kerr’s decision not to build the team around a pass-first point guard began to look problematic even on a day when the U.S. got assists on 29 of 36 field goals.
In previous games, James had seized the moment and secured victory. He scored the game-winner against South Sudan and the final 11 points to escape Germany in friendlies, and was again the hero in the narrow semi-final win over Serbia with four assists in the fourth quarter and physical defense against Nikola Jokic.
And while James contributed a lot in this game, with 14 points and 10 assists and one of the many hands involved in trying to defend Wembanyama, it was best for him to step aside when Curry took over.
“Despite all the noise, all the pressure, I think we might be the only team in the world whose fans are embarrassed for them if they get a silver medal,” Kerr told NBC. “And that’s the pressure we’re under. Our players – and you saw Steph – they love the pressure. They appreciate this atmosphere. They were fantastic.”
“The execution of the shots was just incredible, but given the circumstances (away, in Paris, against France, for a gold medal), this is something out of a fairy tale. That’s what Steph does. She likes to be in storybooks.”
This was one of those things that almost didn’t get written about. Though he’s been an NBA All-Star for a decade, won an MVP award and four league titles, this is Curry’s first Olympic gold medal.
In 2008, Curry was still a college student at Davidson. In 2012, he was just starting to find his game with the Golden State Warriors. In 2016, he wasn’t healthy. And when the Tokyo Games rolled around — and USA Basketball certainly could have used him — he turned down an offer because he wanted to preserve his health ahead of the Golden State Warriors’ 2021-22 season. (And they ended up winning it all that year.)
He nearly missed his Olympic window by passing up that opportunity, but when USA Basketball’s Grant Hill approached this time, Curry rose to the challenge.
And when his teammates needed him most, with France getting too close and Wembanyama showing off his incredible skill and the silver medal starting to look like a very real possibility for the Americans for the first time in 50 years, Curry seized the moment. He made it his own. For that, he was awarded a gold medal, along with his 12 U.S. basketball teammates. It’s expected, honestly, after five in a row and 17 total in 88 years of Olympic basketball.
But we never expected it like this.
