USA Basketball Gold Medal Game

The USA Men's Basketball Olympic Team - nicknamed the Redeem Team (I agree with Kobe, that's a silly name), brought the Olympic gold medal back to the US on August 24th, 2008. The reason the US needed redemption was that Argentina won Olympic gold in 2004 and USA was stuck with bronze. You'd think that would "piss" them off enough to return to dominance in international play, but in 2006 Spain won the FIBA world championship. (The NBA needs to stop calling the NBA champion the "world champion" when there is a tournament that more legitimately awards that title).

Team USA swept through the first 8 games of the tournament with nearly a 30 average margin of victory. This includes a 37 point victory over Spain, who turned out to be the last team left standing and the opponent in the Gold Medal game. That doesn't mean that the international competition is fierce. All the top international teams have 2-3 (sometimes more) NBA players/prospects, and when watching the teams play, one doesn't necessarily spot the NBA players as significantly better than the rest of the team.

The Gold Medal game came on at 11:30pm. My biggest complaint with NBC's Olympic coverage, even though all TV coverage was in HD, and they got special purpose olympic channels, and they posted even more hours online, was that they just didn't focus at all on giving people the tools to find the content that they wanted to see. The schedules were all screwy, the searching online was pathetic. Just a lack of attention to what in my mind is the most important element of Olympic coverage.

Until about 11:50pm, I thought the game would be on at 2:30am... Until finally someone (I think it was Bob Costas) mentioned the 2:30 time was Eastern time zone...
doh! Not even the website, which had many times in Pacific (I'd hope though my time zone preference) had the right time. Luckily I'd inadvertently recorded the first 20 mins, and I did feel happy to watch what turned out to be an awesome Gold Medal game live.

Bill Simmons takes it to next level by claiming that practically no one besides him saw it live. He does capture the game fairly well, so if you missed it, check it out:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?section=magazine&id=3575385
ESPN is ridiculous for not automatically including dates on their articles, but I believe the article was posted today - 9/12/08 - at least that's the first time it's shown up as a highlighted article.

I disagree with him though about not wanting the game to be aired again... and that brings me back to my biggest complaint about the Olympic coverage. Google takes you here, which has an article and highlights, but no link to the actual game: http://www.nbcolympics.com/basketball/news/newsid=254238.html#silencing+critics

The whole game was difficult to find (in that it took me longer than 5 minutes to find and there were indications along the way that it wouldn't be available)... So, although it's not as nice as watching on a big screen TV with a nice sound system, if you potentially might watch any basketball game online, it should be this one:
First link worked for me:
http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/player.html?assetid=0824_hd_bkm_en191&channelcode=sportbk
Second link is the one NBC gives for sharing:
http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/share.html?videoid=0824_HD_BKM_EN191

James got me a Dwyane Wade jersey for my birthday, so I'll have a memento of the game for some time to come =)

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And what was up with Bob Costas during this Olympics? Was I the only one who thought he was about 100x more irreverent than I've ever seen him while covering a sporting event?