Joel Embiid and Team USA are on a mission to bring home the gold from the upcoming 2024 Paris Olympics. The Americans have won the gold in the men's basketball tournament in the Summer Olympics since 2008 and they are unsurprisingly the favorite to win their fifth gold in a row.
All that being said, winning the Olympics isn't the lock that it used to be for Team USA. The rest of the world has significantly diminished the gap between themselves and the Americans, who will be sending a loaded roster filled with future Hall of Famers to Europe to try and prove to the world once again that when it comes to the sport of basketball, there is not a nation out there better than the United States.
Team USA will be put to an acid test early in the Paris tournament, with Nikola Jokic and Serbia meeting them for both teams' first games in the 2024 Olympics. Asked about his looming matchup against NBA rival, the Philadelphia 76ers star big man said that it's never his focus.
“I don't care about Jokić. I'm playing for my national team,” Joel Embiid said (h/t Justin Russo).
“It's all about focusing on ourselves and trying to make sure everybody's on the same page. When we get there, we've got to know what we got to focus on. Right now it's just about finding ways to get better every single day,” added Embiid, who holds French and American citizenship.
Jokic and Serbia are among the countries expected to be the biggest obstacles for Embiid and Team USA.
It can be recalled that during the group phase of the 2016 Rio Olympics, Jokic scored 25 points on 11/15 shooting from the floor with six rebounds and three assists in a close 96-93 loss to the United States. The two teams met again in the gold medal match where the Americans flexed their muscles and crushed Serbia to the tune of a 96-66 score. Jokic scored just six points on 3/5 shooting in that contest.
In that edition of the Olympics, Team USA had a frontcourt featuring DeMarcus Cousins and DeAndre Jordan. This time around, it's going to be Embiid, Anthony Davis of the Los Angeles Lakers, and Bam Adebayo of the Miami Heat.
Joel Embiid debuts for Team USA
Embiid will be getting his first taste of Olympic basketball and he'll be doing it with the No. 1 ranked team in the world. Since he also has a French passport, many initially believed that he'd choose to represent France in the Olympics. A frontcourt that parades Rudy Gobert, Victor Wembanyama, and Embiid would have posed a huge threat to the rest of the competition in Paris. However, Embiid elected to play for the United States.
After an early first-round exit from the 2024 NBA Playoffs with the 76ers, Embiid could brighten up his summer with a gold in Paris.
In the 2023-24 NBA season, Embiid averaged 34.7 points, 11.0 rebounds, and 5.6 assists while shooting 52.9 percent from the field.
Team USA 2024 Paris Olympics schedule
The Americans will open their Paris campaign against Serbia on July 28. Then they will go up against South Sudan on July 31 before finishing up their group play schedule with a showdown versus Puerto Rico on August 3. The quarterfinals are scheduled on August 6, the semifinals on August 8, and the gold medal game on August 10.
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