Australia wins its first Olympic basketball medal in history – Marca Claro

The ‘Boomers’ came to Tokyo with a low profile but with a very strong team and with a very clear mission: to make history for your country. In the friendlies prior to Olympic Games defeated the United States and Argentina with authority, and that was just the beginning. In the group stage, they comfortably beat Italy, Germany and Nigeria, qualifying for the final phase without major problems. In the quarterfinals they crushed the Argentine team by more than 35 points and they were installed in a new Olympic semifinal. However, they ran into the United States, the great favorite and power that has been winning almost uninterruptedly (in Athens 2004 Argentina won) the Olympic gold for more than 20 years.

At the match for the bronze medal, he had to face Luka Doncic’s Slovenia, the great revelation of the tournament that in its first Olympic Games, I was already fighting for a medal. At halftime, Patty Mills (who from the following season will play for the Brooklyn Nets) led Australia with 26 points, while Luka Doncic had just six units for Slovenia. The third quarter ended Australia up by 11 points.

The key to the match was in the performance of the two stars of each country. On the one hand, Mills was virtually error-free and finished with 42 points, 9 assists and only two losses to his name, while Doncic had eight losses and 19 points in the game.

In the end, Australia and his figures like Mills and Ingles they got revenge of the matches lost for third place in 2019 where they lost to France in the World Cup, and that match for third place in Rio 2016 where Spain It beat them by just one point.