Time to move on from the glory days of the 1992 Dream Team.
"This is not 1992 anymore."
Coach Steve Kerr was very frank during the postgame press conference on Friday, as 11th-ranked Germany eliminated world number 2 and Tokyo 2020 gold medalist USA in the FIBA World Cup semifinals.
"Players are better all over the world. Teams are better, and it's not easy to win a World Cup or an Olympic game," he pointed out.
Add to it the fact that Deutschland had plenty of confidence going into the semifinals that it could beat Team USA.
The result means Serbia and Germany will face each other for the FIBA World Cup championship in only the second all-European finals in the quadrennial tourney in the 21st century, after Spain and Greece in 2006.
For FIBA World Cup Global Ambassador Carmelo Anthony, who helped USA reach third place in that edition of the tournament, the upset is a good thing... for the rest of the world, at least.
"It's good for the sport, to let everybody know that the rest of the world is here to play," Anthony said on Saturday during a talk show with the other FIBA World Cup global ambassadors. "Everybody has to think differently on their approach in trying to win the gold medal."
Kerr has been lambasted mercilessly on social media after the loss.
To be fair, a battle for bronze is a marked improvement from Team USA's seventh place finish in the 2019 FIBA World Cup in China. But many of the NBA's top players have opted to skip the world championships for the Olympics, where the Americans are the defending gold medalists. And, of course, many still remember the "Dream Team" of 1992, the first US Olympic team to feature active NBA players.
Meanwhile, the current group of players, with barely any experience in senior FIBA competitions, officially got together for practice only a few weeks before the FIBA World Cup tipped off.
"I think we have to respect the game a lot more," Anthony admitted. "We have to respect what the 1992 team has done and created, and even teams before that."
However, one of FIBA's finest scorers acknowledged that American players' view of international basketball has shifted with the NBA embracing more foreign athletes. In this FIBA World Cup, a record 55 NBA players from 20 countries have participated.
In the final, Bogdan Bogdanovic, Nikola Jovic, and Filip Petrusev are bannering Serbia, while Dennis Schroder, Franz Wagner, Moritz Wagner, and Daniel Theis are representing Germany.
"I will say the respect level for the game of basketball around the world from American players is a lot different than what it was 15, 20, 30 years ago. Now, guys know we have to go to compete," Anthony noted.
"We're playing against these guys every single day. We know these guys. We scout these guys every day for eight months," he said of NBA players playing in FIBA tournaments. "When you come here, these guys are back on their respective teams, their respective countries. They play for something different."
And so the question is: Will USA bounce back in the 2024 Paris Olympics with NBA All-Stars? Anthony said he hopes it happens, but USA Basketball has to let more players grow.
"We have to keep encouraging the guys here. We can't overlook these guys right now. They committed," Anthony said. "As much as we want to talk about '92, we have to stay in the moment and encourage these guys to win the bronze medal."
USA will take on Canada for the bronze medal match on Sunday, September 10, at 4:45 p.m.
(MDB)