1st place
Germany 83-77 Serbia
Germany was a cohesive team all the way through this tourney, never overwhelming but consistently solid. Denis Schroeder was their lodestar, Daniel Theis was the veteran dirty work guy (and even in int'l play, he still doesn't get calls!), the Wagner brothers were the offensive anchors of the team (I thought Mo was the better of the two, he seemed to be everywhere), and Isaac Bonga and Johannes Voigtmann gave reliable dirty work minutes off the bench. They weren't deep but in a tourney like this depth is just for injuries, not for rotation. I was impressed with the German game plan and their consistency, again, they weren't overwhelming but they never went away, they were never out of any game.
Serbia was arguably the best team of the tourney with wins over Canada, Lithuania and Dominican Republic. And, for good measure, I thought Bogdan Bogdanovic was the MVP of the whole thing, with Aleksa Avramovic being a 1st team possibility. Until the 4th quarter of the Final, Bogdanovic was one of the most reliable filler-uppers in the tourney. (And that 4th quarter shows one of the main differences in the int'l game: with no in-game time-outs, its harder to get rest time for the stars because getting them back into the game is incredibly unpredictable; so in the Final, Bogdan was worn out but ended up spending too much time on the bench) In the Final, they hung with Germany until the 3rd quarter when the Germans went on a run and the Serbs just never could quite make it up. Good run, though, hell of a showing for the Serbs.
3rd place
USA 118-127 (OT) Canada
Canada pretty well dominated the game for the first 3 quarters. Early in the 4th Canada had a 10-point lead and the Americans went on an out-of-nowhere 10-0 run to tie it up. Then Canada outplayed them for the rest of the quarter, until Mikal Bridges with under 5 seconds left had the most improbable 4-point play I've ever seen it to tie it up. Then in OT the Americans rode the high of the shocking comeback to....oh, wait, no the Canadians pummeled the Americans in the OT period, just making the extra 5-minute session an unnecessary waste of time.
Canada was really good all the way through with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander being an MVP candidate and Dillon Brooks deserving of a 1st team nod (did they even do that stuff in this tourney?). The rest of the team was good, they played well together and they reminded the world that Canada has plenty of talent (and maybe should've gone further). I didn't see the semifinal where they lost to Serbia, they would've been fairly evenly matched.
USA had the expectations problem: they just expected to win though they didn't have the best team or the best plan. Also, I hate to be that guy but....over the last year I have soured quite a bit on Steve Kerr and as I never understood what he was doing with the lineups (re: the overall team strategy), I got to put most of this flame out on Coach Kerr. He was trying to force Brandom Ingram early on (did he even play in the 3rd place game?), starting Jalen Brunson didn't make sense to me, Josh Hart got too much playing time (with too little understanding of his role), he got the least out of Jaren Jackson and he made Walker Kessler completely disappear. What did Coach Kerr do that was good in the entire tournament? Oh well, it don't matter since I assume he won't be back anyway, just thought I'd get in some shots at the coach that I think is overrated (rather than the players).
As for USA, I thought Halliburton, Bridges and Reaves were consistently good, Anthony Edwards was good but perhaps not quite the bust out star we thought he might be, Paolo Banchero was pretty good (but with the occasional disappearing act), Jaren Jackson was okay but maybe not the ideal fit for this squad, Brandon Ingram sulked like a movie star, Cam Johnson and Kessler and Bobby Portis kinda disappeared and while I like Brunson in a Knick uni, I never thought he was the right fit for int'l competition. 4th place is nothing to sneeze at and yet it feels disappointing--we ended up with 3 L's.
Semifinal matches
Serbia 95-86 Canada
USA 111-113 Germany
Germany was just better than USA. Neither team ever had a major lead but Germany was the pace-setter pretty much throughout and USA could never catch up.
5th place
Latvia 98-63 Lithuania
7th place
Italy 85-89 Slovenia
5-8 Placement
Italy 82-87 Latvia
Lithuania 100-84 Slovenia
Suggestion: If this was a 16-team final, rather than 32, the two group rounds could rank all teams 1-16, which could be followed by a one-and-done style tournament that would be even more exciting. Also, by limiting it to the top 16, the best teams would get more tough games, more exposure and the one-and-done tourney would feature even more talented (and desperate!) squads. Just a thought, I know the int'l crowd loves ranking each team out and in this format that is the way to do it and generally I want to include more teams but for FIBA, the final tourney would be a lot more exciting with fewer teams playing a more furious style of tournament. Just a thought.
Also, as always the problem with USA basketball is we worship the Olympics and don't give a shit about the World Cup. I think the Olympics should be a youth competition--or at least have a series of age-bracketed divisions--and the World Cup should be the real competition. But Americans watch the Olympics, so the big stars want to play for that audience (a bland, nationalistic, every-four-years kinda audience) rather than the real fanatics (the live and breathe basketball crowd). So we prefer spectacle and audience dynamic rather than actually trying to put the best team in the best competition. Oh well, we're America, we keep getting away with our dumb mistakes, so what good is learning?
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