Team USA’s first game at the 2024 Olympics was against Serbia, a team that figured to be some of their toughest competition in the tournament. That proved to be true eventually, as Serbia pushed them to the brink in the semifinals before Stephen Curry led a furious comeback to punch their ticket to the gold medal game.
However, in the opener, the Americans torched the Serbian side led by Nikola Jokic and Bogdan Bogdanovic, with Kevin Durant making quite the statement in his first game playing with Team USA. Durant scored 21 points in the first half and didn’t miss a single shot, as Serbia simply had no answers for the future Hall of Famer.
On Netflix’s “Court of Gold” documentary, we got a behind-the-scenes look at the Serbia locker room at halftime, where Jokic and the Serbian coach were absolutely ripping into their team about how they were covering Durant.
KD had Serbia’s locker room falling apart pic.twitter.com/3fcam05ltO
— Vévo (@vevosuave) February 18, 2025
It’s a pretty incredible look at the team dynamics in the Serbian locker room, with Jokic pleading with his guys to ignore Bam Adebayo if he’s out on the perimeter if it’s a choice between defending Bam or KD. Once the coach steps in, he didn’t mince words at all when getting after his guys, eventually saying “it was my bad, I should’ve assigned a different player to guard Durant,” which had to cut deep for the poor guy that was getting torched.
While they didn’t make a real charge in the second half in what became a blowout for the Americans, they did seem to learn something from the opener in group stage and nearly pulled off the upset in their semifinal rematch. Unfortunately for the Serbians in that game it was Curry, not Durant, that they couldn’t figure out how to contain.