Remembering a Play: Manu Ginobili and Argentina Take Control of the Olympics from USA Basketball

Splinter’s first-ever Remembering a Play was Vince Carter’s Olympic Dunk of Death in 2000, as it is the perfect example of the celebration of sports we aim to accomplish with these periodic features. The goal is to highlight the wide range of emotions evoked by sports, and no play gets me out of my seat as consistently as Vince Carter dunking a seven-footer into the Earth’s core does. I was raised on the Dream Team and am the picture of the kind of person who spends all their days decrying America’s faults before going all in as America’s biggest fanboy during Olympic Basketball, which starts again this weekend.

Which brings me to 2004, a year that sends chills down the spine of USA Olympic Basketball enthusiasts. It was the first year since professional players played at the Olympics that American basketball supremacy was upended by a group of hard-nosed grinders, led by one of the most awkwardly effective basketball players of all time.

Argentina defeated the United States in the semifinals, shocking the world as they went on to take the gold medal over Italy in the title game while the U.S. settled for bronze. While there is no singular play from that 89-81 Team USA defeat that really stands out to the degree this format requires, at the beginning of the tournament, Manu Ginobili hit one of the greatest shots in Olympic history that doubled as a declaration that Argentina’s golden generation had arrived.

Argentina actually narrowly made it out of the group stage. They finished just two points ahead of New Zealand and Serbia and Montenegro who missed out on the quarterfinals, and had Manu Ginobili not shoved this dagger into Serbia and Montenegro’s hearts at the buzzer, maybe USA Basketball’s mid-aughts reality check never happens.

That shot is bonkers. To adjust on a dead sprint as you’re falling away from the basket and deliberately bank it in requires an annoyingly high level of skill that Ginobili quickly became famous for as one of the key cogs in the San Antonio Spurs’ dynasty. Watching him and the Spurs repeatedly beat my beloved Denver Nuggets in the first-round over the entire decade really fossilized my basketball hatred for Ginobili. His herky-jerky game helped advance basketball in an international direction, and plays like the Eurostep which seemed so foreign a couple decades ago became the favored move of American basketball greats like James Harden, who also annoys the crap out of people with it today.

In so many ways, this Argentina team helped drag basketball into the 21st century. It was filled with NBA players, which helped legitimize them in the face of American media, and when they beat the United States, it served as a beacon of international basketball’s progress. The effort that began with the Dream Team in Barcelona to make it a truly global sport was realized twelve years later in Athens, and two decades after Argentina proved this was more than just an American game, the NBA is awash in international talent. One cannot help but wonder how different today may be had Ginobili not hit this shot that set Argentina up to prove to the world that Team USA was far from unbeatable.