Shaq on the free throw line today!!! My bad USA. Good win for us. Needed a game like that. On to the next.
— Kevin Love (@kevinlove) August 4, 2012
Kevin Love shot just 3-for-8 from the foul line in Saturday’s nail-biter of a victory over Lithuania, and the Americans missed 12 shots in all from the charity stripe before being bailed out by LeBron James down the stretch.
What can we take from this game?
I go into it in a little more detail in this column from a Lithuanian-American tavern in Queens, New York, but the bottom line is this: On any given day, there are a half-dozen teams that can stick with the Americans through three-plus quarters. And if the Americans aren’t scoring points off their forced turnovers, and aren’t hitting outside shots as they did against Nigeria (when they made 29 3s), interesting things can happen.
As Love said, they needed a game like that.