USA vs Lithuania what just happened here? Lithuania has played terrible during this Olympics and yesterday they stood in front of the "gods" of basketball but what was supposed to be an easy game for the US did not end up so easy.
The game was never a blow out and so wasn’t the final score, US was shooting and attacking the basket and so were the Lithuania team. In case you did not know this, Lithuania is ranked as one of the best countries in the world. FIBA (The International Basketball Federation (French: Fédération Internationale de Basketball) decides the ranking system in different ways and I have listed how countries will get ranked.
1. Event selection and weight
FIBA World Championships Olympic Basketball Tournaments FIBA Africa Championships FIBA Americas Championships FIBA Asia Championships Eurobasket Championships FIBA Oceania Championships | 5 5 0.2 0.8 0.3 1 0.1 |
2. Competition Ranking Scoring System
Gold Silver Bronze 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 etc... | 50 40 30 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 |
So back to the US game, even though Lithuania played really good and stayed in the whole game with US, they still came out only 5 points short, loosing with 99-94. Unfortunate for Lithuania, they do not have a strong bench like US, matter fact no one has a bench like US. It feels unfair in some way that US have such a good team but hey what can you do, if they are American than they can play for the stars and strips.
