Sheridan: Serbia coach on Team USA: Prove you are better

MADRID – “Until they show us for 40 minutes that they are the better team, I am not going to say they are the better team.”

Consider the gauntlet thrown down. The thrower was Serbia coach Sasha Djordjevic.

You may never have heard of Djordjevic, but he was a pretty good point guard back in the day. And way back in 1996 at the Atlanta Olympics, he played on a Yugoslavia team that was the first squad to play a competitive game against Team USA in the Dream Team era.

In that game, all the pressure was on the United States. And that version of Team USA was a monster, with Shaquille O’Neal, John Stockton, Karl Malone, Hakeem Olajuwon and Charles Barkley among the guys wearing red, white and blue.

It was 18 years ago, and expectations for Team USA were about the same as they are now as we head into the gold medal game of the 2014 FIBA World Cup. Nobody expected the Americans to lose, much less have a competitive game. It was simply out of the question — except in the minds of the Yugoslavians.

“I already had a conversation with my team about this,” Djordjevic told me after Serbia defeated France, 90-85, in the semifinals of the World Cup to set up the first official US-Serbia game in FIBA history. But before their country was broken up, the Serbs were part of Yugoslavia. And it was Yugoslavia that produced some of the best European players from an earlier era, guys like Vlade Divac and Peja Stojakovic who became household names among NBA fans.

And Yugoslavia was no pushover.

In 2002, they were one of three teams (along with Argentina and Spain) that defeated the Americans on U.S. soil during the debacle known as the 2002 World Championship in Indianapolis. Yugoslavia went on to win that tournament on a Sunday afternoon when every Serbian within 500 miles of Indianapolis made the drive to Hoosierville for the gold medal match.

Here is a video of the non-call (it comes at the 5:20 mark, but I highly recommend watching all of the first 5 1/2 minutes. You will see things — aside from a short-haired Luis Scola — that you will not believe):

The game went to overtime after one of the most egregious non-calls in the history of basketball at the end of regulation, and Yugoslavia defeated Argentina in what ended up being one last moment of glory for a nation that broke apart, becoming (among others) the indepedent nations of Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia.

This little history lesson is necessary heading into Sunday’s gold medal match, because there is a whole generation of basketball fans that has no recollection of what transpired 12 long years ago.

Nenad Krstic was 19 at the time, playing for Partizan Belgrade, and was returning home on the team bus from a road game when the bus pulled over at a roadside gas station and the Partizan team gathered around a small TV set to watch the game.

“I remember it well” Krstic said. “We stopped at a gas station to watch because there was no other way to watch it. The game was an 8 p.m. start, we did not have Internet, so we found a way.”

Serbian basketball went downhill fast after that game. They lost their final game at the Athens Olympics to Yao Ming and China, failing to make it to the knockout round. They failed to qualify for the Olympics and the World Championship in 2006 and 2008, though they defeated Spain in 2010 before losing their final two games to finish fourth. They did not qualify for the London Olympics, and they needed a victory over Italy in the 7th-8th place game at last summer’s Eurobasket to make it into the field for this tournament.

But here they are now, playing for the gold medal after defeating the team that defeated Spain.

They are much older than the Americans. They have a player who once played for the Nets in East Rutherford, N.J. (Krstic). They have a point guard, Milos Teodosic, who is a lock for First Team All-Tournament (he scored 24 points on 9-for-12 shooting against France).

Most importantly, they have nothing to lose.

And when all the pressure is on the other team, as it will be for the United States on Sunday, it can be an enormous equalizer. Just ask Spain.

“We’re not going to be scared, for sure,” Krstic said. “Some players never get this chance — the chance to do something great in our lives.”

A previous generation of Serbians got that chance and capitalized on it in 2002, even if one of them — Divac — got a gold medal after one of the worst games of his life.

Another generation, Djordjevic’s generation, put a scare into the Americans in 1996 when everyone thought it would be another 20 years before anyone would even come close to defeating Team USA.

The Serbians played a huge role in making the basketball universe change less than two decades ago, which allows us to remind everyone of this famous quote: Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

Just a few words of caution heading into Sunday’s game.

Do yourself a favor and turn off the football for two hours and see what happens. When the Serbs are involved in a gold medal game, you really never know what you are going to get.

“If they beat us, when it is over I will shake their hands,” Djordjevic told me. “But we are going to play our game.”

 Chris Sheridan is publisher and editor-in-chief of SheridanHoops.com. He has covered every senior U.S. men’s national team since the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Follow him on Twitter.