SCHEME TEAM? A CRAZY FRENCH SCENE SMELLS AN ALL-TIME UPSET OF TEAM USA

LeBron James and Steve Kerr know how a loss would hurt their legacies, and though Steph Curry saved a rally over Serbia, the insane noise — national pride, in wild bloom — is a massive Paris overload

     PARIS — They shouted with deep concern, if not mad and desperate relief, inside a French arena that seemed forbidding and very foreign. When a grayer-than-ever LeBron James hugged Stephen Curry with his mean-as-Akron glare, just know the bare truth about their team. Imagine if the Americans lose the gold medal Saturday night.

     Will they be remembered as a flawed, drained, oblong Dream Team that couldn’t justify their collective deca-billionaire salaries? Or their lofty places in our country’s lives? Would Steve Kerr be butchered for outthinking himself with weird rotations, for not rallying superstars who’ve been puzzled by his decisions? Will James again lose an Olympics competition that he is supposed to win with transitionary ease?

     Scheme Team, should we say?

     Put it this way, as another mob scene screams “Les Bleus!” and does The Wave and shakes the building during the Dance Cam and rides purple scoreboard horses to the finish: If the Americans perform as they did in overcoming a 17-point deficit to Serbia, which says it should have prevailed in a 95-91 defeat, they will blow the championship. And everything that I mentioned will disintegrate in shock about the very best NBA players, in a league that brought in $76 billion in new media deals, and why they can’t beat Victor Wembanyama and his teammates in a Parisian nightmare.

     They cannot blow a game to France amid mayhem that will overwhelm every road game they’ve played in their lives. Boston, New York, colleges, anywhere. The French are smelling blood, as Wembanyama wore it on his jersey in a 73-69 win over Germany, and if their team beats down Team USA, I’m worried about leaving this nation on time. The players should return home in the air, one by one, so no one trashes the jet.

     “They're on their own turf. Everybody's playing extremely well,” Curry said Thursday night after scoring 36 points. “They’re going to feed off the home energy. We have to get off to a better start than we did tonight.  There was a point at the end of the third quarter where you're starting to feel a little like, not is it their night, but are they going to slow down at all?”

     After he helped seal a victory with more drives through paint, James spoke about what the comeback means. He said: “It's up there. I'm 39 years old, going into my 22nd season. I don't know how many opportunities and moments I'm going to get like this to be able to compete for something, compete for something big and play in big games, and tonight was a big game.” But the next one is much bigger, meaning the difference between winning for his country or adding a shattering loss to Wembanyama, the NBA’s destiny, just as he has lost six league Finals and a Summer Games in 2004.

     Leave it to Wemby, after one NBA season, to pinpoint the drama of two nations: one from the dominant land, the other ready to slay authority in a place previously bent on soccer and rugby. “We can be part of a goal that we set for ourselves months back,” he said. “We can write history, even more. A once-in-a-lifetime dream.”

     Not buying it? Such as oddsmakers who’ve made the U.S. a 16.5-point favorite? All you must know is that Guerschon Yabusele has spoken. He has a big head of hair and wears a headband and led his team’s scorers with 17 points, and when he goes to the free-throw line, the crowd chants “MVP! MVP! MVP!” Wembanyama is god’s future. Rudy Gobert is on the bench. There are others, such as Isaia Cordinier and NBA veterans Nic Batum and Evan Fournier and former New York lost cause Frank Ntilikina, but the fans adore Yabusele. And he took a shot at the Americans, knowing James spoke publicly about France’s absence of physicality.

     “No disrespect to anybody else, but we might be the only team that can compete against them just in terms of physicality,” he said.

     He’s referring to the players in uniform, not the loons at Bercy Arena. Every time a DJ plays “One More Time” by Daft Punk, the place goes wacko, using whistles as boos for the enemy and waiting for the ODB meter. It’s for decibels, which raised to 130.

     This is something else Kerr will scold his players about. Are they ready? He spent the post-game period raving about Nikola Jokic and his teammates while praising a wonderful night, as his friend and Wembanyama’s coach, Gregg Popovich, sat in the stands. “Serbia was brilliant today. I'm really humbled to have been a part of this game. It's one of the greatest basketball games I've ever been a part of,” he said. “They were perfect. They forced us to reach the highest level of competition we could find and our guys were incredible in that fourth quarter, and they got it done. I'm so proud of the team and, as I said, humbled just by being part of it. Just incredible.”

     You almost lost, coach. Another NBA veteran, Serbia’s Bogdan Bogdanovic, blamed the officials. “We tried to talk to them and they did not try to talk to us. (The U.S.) did not need that type of help against us,” he said. “We did not have that type of help when they were grabbing us with two hands. I still believe that we could have won this game — a couple of possessions, a call goes our way, a couple of shots.”

     Nah, it was brilliance, said the coach. “We knew coming into this tournament that there's always going to be a game like this,” Kerr said. “It's the Olympics. FIBA. Forty minutes. One game and you're out. Over 40 minutes, our talent wore them down. They were brilliant. They made everything. But we always feel like we have the deepest team. The other countries, they all have great players now. But we have the most great players. And we feel confident over 40 minutes that will play itself out.”

     The loons chanted Wembanyama’s name in the final seconds, after he excelled in spurts and faded in odd moments on a 4-for-17 shooting night when he missed seven of eight three-pointers. Afterward, a 7-5 prodigy reminded his new NBA workmates that he is immensely proud to play in France, that he’s only 20 years old. A cut on his neck prompted lyrics in the national songbook, which includes, “The bloody flag is raised!”

     “In our national anthem, we talk about blood," Wembanyama said. "We're willing to spill blood on the court. So, it's no big deal. If it allows us to win gold, I'm offering. Take all of it.”

     He almost received Jokic. Instead, he’ll deal with LeBron and Curry. How did the Americans control their poise? “Some are more vocal than others, but we're all kind of very connected. The buy-in is there, and it's the only way you can do it to win,” Curry said. “Hopefully we have another win on Saturday and you can look back at this game as the one that challenged us and tested us and the one you'll remember just because of the circumstances, being down the entire game and having to come back.”

     The gold-medal game won’t be just “another win.” They are the gods of the sport and they could fall for the first time since Argentina beat the U.S. in 2004. I didn’t know an arena with 20,300 seats could rumble like Travis Scott, sitting in the front row. Wait until Joel Embiid, who made big shots, faces the people in Paris who think he picked the Americans over the French.

     “It was insane tonight,” Batum said. “I can’t imagine what it’s going to be Saturday. I can’t wait.”

     Will someone bloody up Wembanyama again? Police have been warned, not that 45,000 of them don’t already know.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.