2008 Olympic Basketball

Result

The USA's roster, dubbed the "Redeem Team" after 2004's bronze-medal finish, went 8-0 to reclaim gold. [CORRECTION 4 Sep 2026: bronze was previously listed here as Australia. This was incorrect. Argentina actually won bronze, beating Lithuania 87-75 in the bronze medal game after losing the semifinal to the USA; Australia did not reach the bronze medal game at all, having been eliminated in the quarterfinals (a 116-85 loss to the USA). Confirmed via four independent sources (GMA News, FIBA.basketball's own retrospective, landofbasketball.com, and thebasketballworld.com's box-score archive) during this site's individual-game-depth build for 2008 — the first outright wrong-medal correction this build has made to an existing entry, as opposed to a score, date, or prose-wording fix.]

Games

Tournament context

Beijing's Olympic basketball tournament was explicitly built, from the American side, around redemption for 2004's bronze-medal humiliation. The roster — quickly dubbed the "Redeem Team" and featuring Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul, Carmelo Anthony and Dwight Howard under new head coach Mike Krzyzewski, assembled as part of the multi-year organizational rebuild that followed Athens — went 8-0 through the tournament, restoring the program's sense of Olympic dominance after the Athens debacle. The gold-medal game, on August 24, 2008, was a rematch of the same opponent the US had beaten in the 2004 final's absence and 2000's final directly: Spain, led by Pau Gasol and a deep, talented roster including a young Rudy Fernández. The Americans won 118-107, a final margin that, while decisive, masked a genuinely competitive contest for long stretches — Spain kept the game within reach deep into the fourth quarter behind Gasol's interior scoring and Fernández's perimeter shooting. Dwyane Wade, who averaged a tournament-leading 16 points per game across the Games and anchored the American offense in the gold-medal game's first half after early foul trouble limited both Bryant and James, was widely credited as the tournament's most consistent performer; Bryant, averaging 15 points per game while taking the most shots on the team (13 per game), scored crucial points down the stretch to help seal the win, while James averaged 15.5 points on 60 percent shooting across the Games. Pau Gasol later reflected that Spain had "pushed [the Americans] to have to play their best game," a assessment widely echoed by American players and media covering the final. The "Redeem Team" name and narrative became one of the most enduring storylines in modern USA Basketball history, explicitly framed by the players themselves — Wade among them — as restoring "USA Basketball ... to global prominence" after the Athens low point four years earlier. The roster's collective star power (an unusually deep collection of former and future NBA MVPs playing complementary, defense-first roles under Krzyzewski) set the institutional and cultural template that USA Basketball would follow for the next several Olympic cycles: continuity of coaching staff, multi-year player buy-in, and a deliberate emphasis on defense and team cohesion over pure individual talent accumulation, philosophies that directly carried into the gold-medal-winning rosters of 2012 and 2016. In 2025, the "Redeem Team" was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a unit, a rare institutional honor that reflects both the roster's talent and the broader cultural significance of its redemption narrative within American basketball history.

Sources

• Wikipedia — Basketball at the 2008 Summer Olympics
• Olympedia — 2008 basketball
• NBA.com — Comeback story by Team USA's 2008 'Redeem Team' immortalized in Hall of Fame