Serbia sets up potential U.S. rematch with OT win over Australia (2024)

PARIS — Josh Giddey was close to tears. Even though he’s just 21, he knows how fleeting time can be. And that it may be running out for his Australian national basketball teammate Patty Mills.

“I mean, he deserved better,” Giddey said after his Boomers gave up a 24-point first-half lead, much of it fueled by the 35-year-old Mills’ turning-back-the-clock stretch to end the first quarter and start the second, and fell in overtime to Serbia, 95-90. That sends the Serbs to Thursday’s Olympic semifinal against the United Statessends Australia home.

After one of the most celebrated careers of any hooper in international competition over the last decade-plus, maybe it sends Mills home for good, after the Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal legend’s five Olympic appearances in the green and gold.

Serbia survived 26 points each from Mills and Giddey, including an incredible last-second shot by Mills over Nikola Jokić to force the overtime at 82-82. And Jokić survived what was, for him, a subpar offensive night. He missed many shots in the paint that are usually cash for the three-time NBA Most Valuable Player.

PATTY MILLS HAS ICE IN HIS VEINS. 🥶

Australia sends it to OT against Serbia! #ParisOlympics | 📺 USA Network and Peaco*ck pic.twitter.com/b2DiZ5fHKI

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 6, 2024

But the Joker (21 points) made the two shots that mattered most — a floater in the paint with 1:07 left in OT to put Serbia up one, then a baseline fadeaway with 25 seconds left to put the Serbs up three. Giddey threw the ball away on the next possession, and Serbia was free to prepare for a rematch with the U.S. men on Thursday in the semis, a little more than a week after the Americans smoked the Serbs in Group C play.

“It was up to us to get him that ultimate goal of a gold medal,” Giddey said of Mills. “Whether it’s his last or not, he’s poured so much into this program. His legacy will never, ever be forgotten within this country and this tournament. You talk about FIBA Patty — one of the greatest to ever do it in these types of tournaments. We’re very, very lucky to play with him. I am, as well.”

But, make no mistake: There was no backup in Australia. Serbia took this from the Aussies. Which probably will hurt them even more in the coming days. They wasted a heater by Mills, who made 7 of his first 9 shots in the first half. They wasted a 20-0 run that left Serbia frazzled, pushing the Boomers to a 46-22 lead three minutes into the second quarter, forcing a timeout — during which legendary Serbian coach Svetislav Pešić laid into his team.

“I mean, we knew we were down, and we had to find some momentum and rhythm,” said Bogdan Bogdanović, Serbia’s captain, the national program’s all-time leading scorer, and the Atlanta Hawks guard. (Jokić hasn’t spoken to the media during most of the tournament so far, and didn’t again after the game Tuesday. As Bogdanović noted with a chuckle, the Joker doesn’t get fined by FIBA if he blows off reporters here.)

“We know that our offense wasn’t going, but also our defense,” Bogdanović continued. “That’s why it was (a) huge gap. We wasn’t aggressively, and defensively, we didn’t talk — easy backdoors, easy (shots). No momentum. They had the whole momentum of the game. But this is the biggest pressure of the tournament, quarterfinals. You lose, you’re out of competition, out of the next two games. It’s the biggest challenge of the tournament. Pressure plays for both teams.”

Indeed. Pressure bursts pipes, and the Eagles’ defense and physicality broke Australia’s dreams of getting another Olympic medal, to go with the breakthrough bronze medal it won in 2021 in Tokyo, its first in Olympic competition. Whether Mills returns four years from now, at 39, for one last run at the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles, was a hard question to answer.

“I thought we threw everything at them in the first half,” Mills said. “You’re playing against world-class individuals, world-class teams, world-class coaches. And this is why you play international basketball. It’s a different sport than any other league around the world. It brings the best out of everyone. I think for us, we just threw everything we could at them, and maybe nothing left in the tank at the end of the day. Full credit to what Serbia was able to do — get us out of our comfort zone. And in international basketball, once you lose that momentum, it’s hard to get it back.”

From the midway part of the second quarter, Serbia’s guards, led by point guard Aleksa Avramović — “he’s our energy,” Bogdanović said — started to get up into Giddey and Australia’s ballhandlers on the perimeter, exposing the team’s Achilles heel.

Australia had been uneven throughout this tournament, getting into the quarterfinals despite a pedestrian 1-2 mark in group play by virtue of a better point differential in its Group A. And the team’s potential liability was its looseness with the ball. That trait was emblematic of the fine line the national team has tried to walk in this cycle. The remnants of the old guard that raised the program to international prominence, most notably, Mills, have had to mix with the program’s next generation, led by Giddey, now with the Bulls in the NBA, Dyson Daniels (Hawks) and Josh Green (though Green, the Mavericks’ wing, hasn’t played much at all in the last three games).

But Australia has turned the ball over when it’s been pressed. The team committed 50 turnovers in its first three games coming into play Tuesday; only Brazil had more in group play. And Australia added another 20(!) miscues Tuesday, after 45 minutes of being hounded by Avramović and company.

In the first half, “we didn’t make any good decisions on defense,” Pešić said. “To play one game, quarterfinals game, like today, or one elimination game, it’s very difficult. Not only technical, tactical, but also mental. For our players, they were a little bit, I think, we started to analyze, too much, tactical things. Por suerte,basketball has two times 20 minutes. And we understood that we should start to play the defense.”

Serbia got its deficit down to a manageable 54-42 by halftime. In the third, it applied the clamps to Australia, wrecking the Boomers’ flow and reducing their offense to contested one-on-one shots. Meanwhile, Avramović, Vasilije Micić (14 points) and Bogdanović (17 points) started putting their heads down and getting to the rim. The Serbs erased the rest of the deficit midway through the third, and had a 67-65 lead after three.

Seven fourth-quarter points from Australia’s Jack McVeigh kept the Boomers alive down the stretch, and Mills gave them five extra minutes with his fading shot over the 6-11 Jokićoff a switch with 1.4 seconds left in regulation. And Australia took a 90-87 lead on Giddey’s 3 with 2:43 to go in OT. But the Boomers didn’t score another point.

The Serbs will have fresh cutups of the U.S. men to watch. The Americans spanked them in Lille nine days ago, 110-84, taking control late in the third quarter. But this group, led by Jokić, wants desperately to continue the “Silver Generation” that has earned multiple international medals for the re-emerged, independent Serbia over the last decade, including the 2016 silver medal in Rio. Unfortunately, the last time they met was when this U.S. team woke up.

“Honestly, I think we saw a flip, a switch, we saw that against Serbia,” U.S. coach Steve Kerr said after his team’s practice Monday. “We’d played five friendlies, a couple of close games (in group play). We were like, ‘I think we can be better.’ And they turned it up, quite a bit. I think they know what’s at stake now. It’s about being locked in every possession, multiple efforts. They’re going to make some mistakes, but if they keep playing, they can challenge a shot, get a deflection, make a play. And if we’re all flying around for 40 minutes, then we feel good about it.”

Required reading

• Paris Olympics 2024 live updates: Day 11
• United States vs. Brazil live updates: Paris Olympics 2024 men’s basketball group C game latest
• Team USA secures No. 1 overall seed for Olympic quarterfinals with win over Puerto Rico

(Photo: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)

David Aldridge is a senior columnist for The Athletic. He has worked for nearly 30 years covering the NBA and other sports for Turner, ESPN, and the Washington Post. In 2016, he received the Curt Gowdy Media Award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the Legacy Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. He lives in Washington, D.C. Follow David on Twitter @davidaldridgedc