Veteran sportswriter and Euroleague.net collaborator Vladimir Stankovic has been following the best basketball on the continent longer than almost anyone journalist, writing for decades about the sport in major publications in both Serbia and Spain. Now, he is in London covering his seventh Summer Olympics and blogging about the men's basketball tournament for Euroleague.net.

Expectations were met, and as the British might say, they were met splendidly. The gold-medal game of the 2012 London Olympics was played by the United States and Spain, the best two teams in the tournament, and was a testament to how well basketball is played on both sides of the Atlantic. Spain was a more-than-worthy rival that forced the American stars to their limit. The final score of 107-100 proved to be the smallest difference in the 14 finals on which the USA has won the gold. All of the USA's previous opponents had fallen by between 11 and 32 points. Spain had to settle for its third silver medal, after 1984 and 2008, but each of them has shined a little brighter for demonstrating that this sport is consistently more global and more exciting.

The final in London was pretty similar to the one between the same opponents in Beijing 2008. Four years ago the score at the break was 69-61, an... more

Veteran sportswriter and Euroleague.net collaborator Vladimir Stankovic has been following the best basketball on the continent longer than almost anyone journalist, writing for decades about the sport in major publications in both Serbia and Spain. Now, he is in London covering his seventh Summer Olympics and blogging about the men's basketball tournament for Euroleague.net.

Well, here we are, in the semis, and without major surprises, I would say. The last four teams left in the Olympic Games men's basketball competition are, in fact, the best four teams. Some, like Spain, have barely made it to this stage, but in the moment of truth showed real character and are now just one step away from the podium. These four semifinalists already have 30 Olympic medals between them: the USA have 15 (13 golds, 1 silver - which they never accepted in Munich 1972 - and 2 bronzes). Russia, as the heir of the old USSR, has 2 golds, 6 silvers and 2 bronzes, but under its current name, is fighting for its medal. Argentina has one gold and one bronze, both won by this very generation of players, while Spain has two silvers (1984 and 2008).

All four teams have things in common, but also their differences and particularities. The United States, the main favorite, has a great core of... more

Veteran sportswriter and Euroleague.net collaborator Vladimir Stankovic has been following the best basketball on the continent longer than almost anyone journalist, writing for decades about the sport in major publications in both Serbia and Spain. Now, he is in London covering his seventh Summer Olympics and blogging about the men's basketball tournament for Euroleague.net.

At the moment in this Olympic tournament, the United States is dominating, but the two types of basketball in the world these days - the NBA and the rest of the world - are getting closer, one to the other, every day. The days are over when pioneers like Aleksandr Volkov, Vlade Divac, Drazen Petrovic, Sarunas Marciulionis and others, at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, had to break an NBA barrier often put up by American coaches who didn't believe that Europeans could play. Nowadays, almost no NBA team gets by without any non-American players. Just look at the list of the top scorers and assist-makers so far in this Olympic tournament in London. There you find Manu Ginobili (23.7 points per game), Andrei Kirilenko (23.3) and Luis Scola (22.7) and Alexey Shved (8.3 assists per game), Marcelinho Huertas (7) and Pablo Prigioni (7). All played or learned during their formative years of basketball in the Euroleague. It's more and... more

Veteran sportswriter and Euroleague.net collaborator Vladimir Stankovic has been following the best basketball on the continent longer than almost anyone journalist, writing for decades about the sport in major publications in both Serbia and Spain. Now, he is in London covering his seventh Summer Olympics and blogging about the men's basketball tournament for Euroleague.net.

Hello from London, where I am privileged to be attending my seventh edition of the Summer Olympics. Once again, we all expect that basketball is going to take center stage at this event. If I go down memory lane - and my Olympics recall stretches as far back as Rome in 1960, when I was a kid watching them - I can say that I have seen a half-century of this men's basketball. That includes the best and the worst from the perennial favorites for the men's basketball gold medal, the United States. I watched all five of the U.S. team's defeats in Olympic tournaments: two on television, the 1972 final in Munich and the 1988 semifinal in Seoul; and in person, all three of their losses during the 2004 games in Athens - to Puerto Rico, Lithuania and eventual champion Argentina, in the semifinals. At the same time, I saw the U.S. in person at its very best, that unforgettable summer of 1992 in Barcelona, with the... more