In the end, after weeks and months and years of work, the difference between overtime and Olympic gold was a matter of inches. It looked like France's Gabby Williams may have tied things up with a ridiculous running bank shot at the buzzer. But replays showed her foot on the line, and the U.S. women's basketball team escaped with a 67-66 win and an eighth straight gold medal by the slimmest of margins.
A'ja Wilson willed herself to 21 points and 13 rebounds for the U.S., which found itself down by as many as 10 points in the third quarter on a day when nothing, at either end, came easy. But Team USA, tested for the first time after running roughshod in Paris, buckled down when it mattered, eking ahead late to preserve its golden streak and earn a 61st consecutive Olympic win.
"Man, I wish I could put it into words," Wilson said. "I don't think I'll remember that second half for the next couple of weeks. It's all a blur right now."
Williams led Les Bleus with 19 points, the only French player in double figures, but her would-be heroics were relegated to a footnote in the cruelest possible fashion.
Read on for a full recap and takeaways from a second straight classic Olympic final at Bercy Arena.
USA 67, France 66: Full recap, highlights and takeaways
An ugly start
We knew going in that France would try and muck this game up; this was a team that won its semifinal game against Belgium despite shooting just 30% from the field and 7-of-31 from 3, after all. Les Bleus want to raise hell on both ends, forcing turnovers, crashing the glass and muscling their way enough points to get by.
And early on, that was exactly how this Olympic final played out: The U.S. turned the ball over seven times in the first quarter and 13 times in the first half, letting France's three-quarter-court pressure bait it into speeding things up and trying to do too much with the ball in its hands. That defensive aggression had its downside — Team USA built a 15-0 free-throw advantage in the first half — but it also created the sort of game in which France thrives; you needed two hands to count all the times an American player forced a drive to the basket, or a hit-ahead pass wound up out of bounds or in the wrong hands.
"France played with their identity," U.S. head coach Cheryl Reeve said. "We couldn't get to our identity because of what France were doing, so hats off to them."
France was having a miserable time scoring on anything that wasn't a transition chance or the occasional Williams iso, but it didn't matter. Despite Les Bleus missing 17 of their first 19 attempts and shooting 27.5% overall in the first half, the two teams went into the halftime break tied at 25, France building a 40-26 edge in shot attempts.
France pulls ahead
The diagnosis was clear: Settle down, settle in and don't let France take the U.S. out of its game.
“Taking care of the ball," Napheesa Collier said of the message at halftime. "They’re so aggressive. Their defense was great, so making sure they were not doing us up too much.”
But if the hope was that the U.S. would find an adjustment in the locker room, it didn't happen.
Instead it was France who threw the first punch in the second half, Valeriane Vukosavljevic hitting a couple of 3s as part of a 10-0 run to put the U.S. on the ropes as the home crowd started to roar with belief. This was the moment we'd wondered about with this U.S. team: After breezing through its first five games in Paris more or less unchallenged, what would happen when and if things got tight? Most often when Team USA takes the court, the outcome is more or less assured; how would this group respond to everything suddenly hanging in the balance, to the pressure of those seven gold medals and 60 straight wins and the expectations of all the American legends who came before them?
The answer, it turns out, is like champions, and it was a couple of backup guards who helped set the tone and turn the tide.
Kelsey Plum, Kahleah Copper play big
Of course, it helps when your backups happen to be WNBA All-Stars; just about every other team in this tournament would kill to slot Plum and Copper into its starting lineup. And for the U.S. on Sunday, the duo may have swung the game, providing exactly the sort of scoring juice and cool, calm ballhandling the situation called for.
Plum almost singlehandedly got the U.S. up off the mat, sandwiching two big 3s around a slick assist in transition to Wilson to slice the lead back down to just two in the matter of about 90 seconds. That set up a nip-and-tuck final quarter, with the defense physical, the officiating lenient to say the least and points at a premium. Wilson was the star down the stretch, on both ends; the Las Vegas Aces star uncharacteristically struggled to finish around the rim, but she channeled her frustrations into her play, blocking four shots on one end and continuing to rampage to the rim on the other. Team USA's high scorer in the final quarter, though, was Copper: The Philly native scored 10 of her 12 in the fourth, slicing to the rim for layups and getting to the line over and over again. On a day when it seemed like the U.S. couldn't consistently generate clean looks, it was Wilson and Copper who muscled this game across the finish line.
A frantic finish
Not without a whole lot of agita first, though. Less than 24 hours after these countries' men's teams delivered a fourth quarter for the ages, the women did the same, with six ties and six lead changes over the final 10 minutes of play. France had an answer every time the U.S. looked primed to make a run, taking a two-point lead with just 5:03 to go. But Copper poured in four straight points to put Team USA back ahead, and Wilson hit a circus jumper to stretch the lead to three.
It seemed like the U.S. had finally put things away when Plum cashed two free throws to go up 65-61 with just 11 seconds left. But then Williams almost pulled off a final flurry for the ages, hitting one quick 3 to keep France alive and then, after two more free throws, getting a heave to go that very nearly forced overtime.