2000 Olympic Basketball

Result

Lithuania nearly upset the USA in the semifinal (USA won 85-83) before beating Australia 89-71 in the bronze-medal game.

Games

Tournament context

Sydney's Olympic basketball tournament saw the United States claim its fourth straight "professional era" gold, but with far less margin for error than in 1992 or 1996, reflecting the continued narrowing of the gap between American NBA talent and the rest of the world's increasingly sophisticated international programs. The Americans needed a narrow 85-83 win over Lithuania in the semifinal — the closest the US had come to an Olympic loss since NBA professionals became eligible in 1992 — before facing France in the gold-medal game. The final, on October 1, 2000 [CORRECTION 4 Sep 2026: previously dated "September 30, 2000" here; this site's individual-game-depth build for 2000 found the correct date via a full late-tournament schedule cross-check to be October 1 — the same day as the bronze medal game, both played same-day as was standard for the era, in a sequence of Quarterfinals Sep 28, Semifinals Sep 29, Classification 5-8 games Sep 30, and Bronze/Gold medal games Oct 1], saw the US beat France 85-75, a competitive scoreline by the standards of the Dream Team era, though still a comfortable American win in practice. Lithuania recovered from its heartbreaking semifinal loss to beat Australia 89-71 in the bronze-medal game. This entry required a specific documented correction during earlier stages of this database's research: an initial AI-summarized fetch of Wikipedia's 2000 tournament article had misreported the bronze medalist as Australia rather than Lithuania. That was corrected via FIBA's "Olympic Legends" retrospective coverage of Lithuania's near-upset of the Americans, together with contemporaneous ESPN reporting headlined "Lithuania beats Aussies for bronze" and citing the 89-71 scoreline — independent, converging sources that confirm Lithuania, not Australia, actually won the bronze medal, with Australia the losing bronze-game finalist. The near-loss to Lithuania is generally regarded by basketball historians as an important inflection point in the sport's competitive history: it was the first time since the Dream Team's 1992 debut that a Lithuanian (or indeed any) international team had come within two points of eliminating a full-strength NBA-stocked US roster in Olympic competition, foreshadowing the far more serious upset that would follow four years later in Athens, when Argentina actually beat the Americans outright. Sydney's tournament thus occupies a transitional place in this dataset's broader arc: still an American gold, and still a competent US roster (that included stars like Vince Carter, whose highlight-reel dunk over 7-foot-2 French center Frédéric Weis during pool play became one of the most replayed individual moments in Olympic basketball history, colloquially nicknamed "le dunk de la mort" — "the dunk of death" — in French media), but one whose margins were visibly thinner than the prior two Olympiads, a signal that the rest of the world's basketball programs, aided by growing numbers of international players entering the NBA itself, had begun closing the gap that the Dream Team had opened so dramatically just eight years earlier.

Sources

• landofbasketball.com — France vs. USA, 2000 Olympic final box score
• FIBA.basketball — Olympic Legends: Lithuania's near upset