It’s been a little over a week since Tom Cruise rode off into a cargo jet to perform the first Olympic overture to the 2028 Los Angeles Games, yet I still find myself basking in the afterglow of the basketball played in Paris. Things feel different now, like the basketball-adoring public has tapped into a heightened consciousness. The 2024 Olympics delivered a two-week tournament that opened a portal into a new basketball epoch. It featured a men’s semifinal game between the U.S. and Serbia that will go down as one of the greatest games ever played; a women’s gold medal game decided by a single point after Team USA had won its previous nine gold medal games by an average of 22.3 points; and a thrilling men’s gold medal clash that was put to bed by an iconic shooting display from Steph Curry, one of the game’s most significant revolutionaries.
What a gift it was to witness a historically dominant Team USA program pushed to the brink. To watch legends Curry, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant collectively channel their competitive fervor on a stage where pride—the most primal, elemental motivating factor—was at stake. And what a sense of progress for the state of basketball that the level of competition didn’t come as some sort of existential shock the way it did 20 years ago, when Argentina’s golden generation dismantled an ill-prepared American men’s roster en route to the only non-U.S. gold since professional athletes were even allowed to play in the Olympics. To advance for a shot at the 2024 gold, Team USA had to overcome Serbia’s Nikola Jokic, the monolith of basketball’s present; to win it all, it had to overcome the blinding light of France’s Victor Wembanyama, the monolith of basketball’s future. So it is, so it shall be.
