PARIS — France was the official opponent; Team USA, its own worst enemy. One of the two? The Americans could overcome. But both? That’s a tough road. And against an eager, home-crowd-boosted team like France, it sure looked like the U.S. picked a bad game to have a bad game.

And then, it somehow got worse. After, arguably, the worst half of basketball the U.S. women have played on a world stage in the (now) 61-game win streak, France jumped out to an 8-0 run to start the second half and any assurance of “It’s Team USA, of course, they’ll be fine, of course, they’re going to come out different in the second half,” dissipated as fast as any of the cushions the Americans tried to build through the game.

Clinging to a one-point lead with 1:32 to go, it was Kahleah Copper’s number who was called for the play. She had to score to give Team USA a 3-point lead. The Americans had never run this play in a game, Copper had not yet been called upon as the “go-ahead” player in any crucial instance during these Games, but on a team that believes that each of its players can step up when her number is called — even after 38 minutes of frustration — every person on Team USA’s bench felt confident.

As she took to the floor, Diana Taurasi — the most decorated team…

PARIS — Van Chancellor knew he wanted Diana Taurasi on the 2004 Olympic team in Athens. She was young, skilled, confident, brash. He expected she would be a centerpiece of American basketball in the years to come, but he also knew that she would still be able to contribute on the squad of superstars that had been selected for his team — “Dream On” members who had helped re-center the world of women’s basketball by retaking the gold in 1996 in Atlanta.

On Taurasi’s first day with Team USA that year, just the morning after she had helped UConn to a national title over Tennessee, she sat down on the bus next to Chancellor and asked him a very straightforward question: What do you need out of me, Coach?

“I need for you to act like a rookie,” he told her.

“Coach Chancellor,” she said, “if that’s all you need, I’m ready to roll. I’m ready to help this team.”

That was Diana 20 years ago. It was her four days ago, too, when after 33 consecutive Olympic starts for Team USA, coach Cheryl Reeve moved her to the bench in their quarterfinal game against Nigeria in favor of 26-year-old Jackie Young, the second-youngest player on the roster. When the team broke the huddle, Taurasi bounded back to the bench as if it were where the ball would be tipped. She sat down,…

Team USA handled every aspect of its semifinal game against Australia and is now heading to a heralded game on Sunday to play for their eighth consecutive Olympic gold. They’ll face the home team, France, who beat Belgium in overtime on Friday.

The U.S. is favored over France by 15.5 points with a -1400 moneyline. The Americans were favored by a 14.5-point spread in the semifinal vs. Australia, a point spread that ballooned to 23.5 at halftime. If you bet the Americans in the first and hedged in the second, my hat’s off to you: They won by 21.

The Americans have won all five of their Olympic games by an average of 18.6 points. In fact, they haven’t lost at the Olympics since 1992. If you’re 31 or younger, you’ve never seen the American women lose an Olympic game.

“It’s gold or bust,” Breanna Stewart said in an interview after the semifinal game in which she scored a game-high 16 points, plus six rebounds and five assists.

In a neat twist of fate, both the men’s and women’s basketball gold medal games are USA vs. France.

The women’s gold medal game is the final event of the Paris Olympics, scheduled for Sunday at 9:30 a.m. ET, before the Closing Ceremony.

USA vs. France gold medal game odds

PARIS — They played poorly in the first half against Nigeria. Like, not very good at all.

They led by 19 at the half.

This is life for the U.S. women’s national basketball team, which won its 59th consecutive Olympic game Wednesday, handling Nigeria 88-74 to advance to Friday’s semifinals, when they’ll play Australia. They’re now 76-3 all-time in Olympic play, dating back to when women’s basketball was introduced in 1976. They haven’t lost an Olympic basketball game since Aug. 5, 1992 — and I know that because I covered that game that day in Badalona, Spain.

It was late in the 1992 Summer Games. The U.S. women, like everyone else competing, were overshadowed by the NBA-dominant Dream Team. But that doesn’t mean the American women were any less expected to win the gold than the men. In their three pool games in Barcelona, they’d won by an average of 45.3 points per game. Teresa Edwards, Teresa Weatherspoon, Katrina McClain and Cynthia Cooper were all future Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famers, as was their coach, Theresa Grentz.

But they lost in the semifinals to the Unified Team, an amalgam of former Soviet Union states, 79-73. And the emotion afterward wasn’t so much anger as shock. Losing seemed impossible.

And, since ’92, it basically has…

PARIS — With so little time to prepare as a team ahead of the Olympics, U.S. coach Cheryl Reeve had always said she was going to look at each game as an opportunity to learn more about her players, her team and their chemistry.

With only four practices before the team landed in Paris, this was a group that was, in many ways, always going to need to build the plane as it was taking off. And if Team USA’s 88–74 quarterfinal win over Nigeria was any indicator, then Reeve has certainly not only learned a lot about her team in the first three group stage games but also put them to good use in the knockout stage of the Olympics.

“We going to continue to tweak, tweak, tweak,” Reeve had said after Team USA’s final group stage game. “By the time we get to the end, we’ll probably think we have it figured out and we’ll probably want to play some more games.”

But against Nigeria, the tweaks (and the payoff) were evident from the jump. When the starting five took the floor, six-time Olympian Diana Taurasi — who had started each of the two Olympic tune-up games as well as the three group stage games — turned and walked toward the bench while Jackie Young took the floor in her spot. Given the consistency of Team USA’s starting five during its two Olympic tune-up…

Caitlin Clark was glowing, beaming like a student who had just finished her last exam of the semester.

“I’m on vacation,” she said as she burst into her postgame press conference minutes at the 2024 WNBA All-Star Game. “This is the last time for a month, so get your questions in now.”

A welcomed recess was upon her. For the first time since March 2023, she was receiving an extended break as the WNBA season went on a 24-day pause for the Paris Olympics. “I honestly can’t wait to not touch a basketball for a while,” Clark said.

Though Clark’s omission from the U.S. Olympic team caused a stir among fans, her absence from the roster may turn into one of the best things to happen to her as a rookie. Being left off Team USA has provided her with something more than motivation: time.

Caitlin Clark signing off from her first WNBA All-Star Weekend pic.twitter.com/VuQvAmO2KI

— Indiana Fever (@IndianaFever) July 21, 2024

Her schedule has been a slog — although a successful one — that few athletes can compare, even most contemporaries in her rookie class. As one of the sport’s brightest stars, she’s fit in cross-country trips for awards ceremonies and appearances into a schedule built around practices and games (69 in all including college and WNBA preseason…

Only five days remain in the 2024 Olympics, but there’s still plenty of gold to hand out.

Wednesday offers up 21 gold medal events, including multiple in track and field. It also includes the return of American star Noah Lyles, who will race in the 200-meter semifinals. He won gold in the 100m on Sunday and will look to build on his success against some of the same sprinters he beat in that race.

Elsewhere, the U.S. women’s basketball team will fight to keep its 58-game win streak — which dates back to 1992 — alive in the quarterfinals against Nigeria. And a 51-year-old skateboarding legend makes his Olympics debut.

There are also medal events in artistic swimming, boxing, track cycling, sailing, sport climbing, taekwondo, weightlifting and wrestling.

Events to watch

Track and field medal events

Time: Starting at 12:15 p.m. ET, 6:15 p.m. in Paris
TV: NBC and Peacock

What to watch: Four medal events dot the athletics program for Wednesday night at the Stade de France, leading off with the women’s pole vault at 12:15 p.m. ET.

Nineteen athletes from 14 different countries will compete in the pole vault final….

VILLENEUVE-D’ASCQ, France — Team USA coach Cheryl Reeve is no stranger to dynasties. From 2011 to 2017, her Minnesota Lynx won four WNBA championships. And during the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, where Reeve was an assistant, four of her players played key roles for the gold medal squad.

So, it’s probably a pretty comforting — and in a way, a familiar — feeling for Reeve to look down her bench now in France and see four starters for the Las Vegas Aces, the defending two-time WNBA champs.

Sunday night, it was a core from the most dominant WNBA team in recent memory — go figure — that propelled Team USA to an 87-68 win over Germany in the team’s final group stage game.

Through the first 15 minutes, the game was pretty even (Germany even led after the first quarter), but midway through the second quarter — just a minute after Team USA took its first lead of the game with an Alyssa Thomas layup — Reeve re-inserted A’ja Wilson onto the floor, where she joined Aces guards Kelsey Plum and Jackie Young. With the Aces core on the floor, Team USA closed out the first half on a 17-7 run.

Again, in the third quarter, midway through, a Plum-Young substitution (with Wilson already on the floor) spelled instant offensive energy for Team USA as the squad — which had allowed…

VILLENEUVE-D’ASCQ, France — Team USA center Brittney Griner had just come off the court after her team beat Belgium in group play at the Paris Games when she was asked about her reaction to the news that Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan were part of a massive prisoner swap between Russia and several Western countries.

“It’s a great day,” Griner said. “I am head over heels happy for the families right now. Any day that Americans come home, that’s a win.”

Griner, 33, didn’t disclose who first told her about the prisoner swap but said she was “definitely emotional” upon hearing the news.

“I’m just happy,” she said. “Like this is a big win, huge win.”

Griner spent most of 2022 under Russian detainment after she was found traveling with a small amount of hashish oil in her luggage as she went to join her UMMC Ekaterinburg team. The U.S. government declared her to be wrongfully detained, a classification that allowed the government to negotiate her release before a trial or conviction.

Still, that August she was found guilty of smuggling drugs with criminal intent and sentenced to nine years in a penal colony. Four months later, the United States secured a prisoner swap, bringing Griner home in exchange for…

UConn star Paige Bueckers is signing a name, image and likeness deal with Unrivaled, the new three-on-three league that promises the highest average pay in pro women’s basketball, sources briefed on the deal said. The deal will make Bueckers the first NCAA athlete to receive ownership equity in a league.

Bueckers, who is entering her fifth season at UConn, is expected to join an Unrivaled team after her first WNBA season, the sources said. The current deal does not include playing services because of NIL restrictions.

With a 10-15 percent ownership pool for players, Unrivaled, which was announced by WNBA stars Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier in July 2023, has been aggressive with its pursuit of WNBA stars. The league will include six franchises with 30 players total. The league cap for the 30 players will be at least $7.5 million, an average of $250,000, the sources said — just above the WNBA supermax of $241,000.

The league will officially launch in January.

“Women’s sports is on such a rise, and it feels like everyone is benefiting from that except the women in the sport, and obviously that’s something we’re trying to change and then also create generational wealth for these women,” Collier told The Athletic in May. “From the beginning, (Stewart) and I…