RIO DE JANEIRO -- Gold-medal favorites?
Heavy favorites, even?
Yes.
Still.
Both of those tags, at least for the moment, continue to be applicable for this incarnation of the United States men's Olympic basketball team.
Best Defensive Team that USA Basketball has ever fielded in the Coach K/Jerry Colangelo era?
Don't print those T-shirts up just yet.
The raves these 12 players were generating with all that length, athleticism and enthusiasm on D in their first seven games together gave way to some candid and uncomfortable conversation in the Team USA locker room at Carioca Arena 1 late Friday night, after Serbia immediately followed Australia's lead and made the Americans look frequently lost in trying to keep up with their worldly opponent's constant ball and player movement.
"We were talking about it in the back," Team USA swingman Paul George said after this 94-91 escape against the same country that a far-less-decorated USA roster at the 2014 FIBA World Cup in Spain routed by 37 points in the championship game.
"You don't ever sit still [in the international game]," George said. "In our [NBA] game, there are moments where you're sitting still, you can have a rest period. It might be an action that a guy runs on one side. [Here] you're constantly moving from side to side. It's like they don't get tired. That's new to us. That's very new to us."
It should be clear by now, after a second successive close shave for Mike Krzyzewski's squad, that it's coping with a lot of newness.
Over the past few weeks, Krzyzewski has been warning anyone who would listen that countries with years of polished teamwork and established continuity -- or corporate knowledge to use the term preferred by Team USA successor-in-waiting Gregg Popovich -- could hang with his uber-talented roster of NBA All-Stars because this "team" has been together for a total of only 27 days.
"I think we play as a team, too," Krzyzewski said of the relieved Americans after they gratefully watched Bogdan Bogdanovic's potential overtime-forcing triple from the left wing sail long in the waning seconds, unable to commit the foul they wanted to take before the ball got to Bogdanovic.
"We do have more talent and we have to get our talent playing even much better as a team. Our guys are playing as a team; they just haven't had the experience of playing together that long."
Yet what made the Serbia scenes so exasperating is the way Team USA started the game. The Yanks scored the first nine points, stretched the lead to as high as 18 and appeared to be assembling the perfect response to the Australia scare, with no shortage of their own ball-sharing on top of the expected defensive focus to put the Serbs in a quick 27-9 hole.
What happened from there, though, has Team USA forward Draymond Green convinced that "our offense is hurting our defense as well."
"We stopped moving the ball and we stopped defending," Green said. "Those were the two things that had us going in the first quarter. Once we stopped doing those things, anybody can beat us. If you don't play the brand of basketball that you're supposed to, it makes everything tougher.
"When we were moving the basketball early on and everything was flowing, our defense was great. Once we stopped moving the basketball, everyone stagnated and it transferred over to the defensive end."
The response, from here, will be fascinating. Krzyzewski canceled Saturday's scheduled practice with a Sunday afternoon game looming against France to finish off Group A play, but the coach has booked a team meeting, video session and walkthrough on the cruise ship USAB is using as a home base.
The film review won't be pretty. Serbian backcourt maestro Milos Teodosic set the tone with his wonderful first-half passing in the face of heavy U.S. pressure to get Serbia's comeback start, before young Nikola Jokic took over in the second half and finished with 25 points after star center Miroslav Raduljica picked up his third and fourth fouls in a potentially fatal spell of just three seconds early in the third quarter.
"Today we played our game," Teodosic said. "Extra pass.
"Any time we make one extra pass or two extra passes, we have easy baskets."
Said Serbia coach Sasha Djordjevic, surely wondering how the Serbs are mired at 1-3 in the group after a performance like that: "We looked pretty good tonight. Pretty good."
According to Team USA star Carmelo Anthony, Serbia "ran their offense fluently."
Magnificent and spectacular, meanwhile, were the words Krzyzewski used. He went to make the case that the likes of Australia and Serbia "don't get enough credit" for the talent they've brought to Rio, but Coach K is realistic, too.
He knows the drill by now.
The United States is expected to win every basketball games it plays internationally. And win them handily. Narrow victories -- two in a row decided by 10 points or fewer after only six such games in Team USA's previous 70 -- are treated like crises back home.
"We're going to get [every team's] best shot and it's kind of free money, because you play a game like this and you're going to be celebrated, win or lose," Krzyzewski said. "For us that's not the case. Ever. You just have to understand that.
"Can we play better? I hope. I think we can."
Said George: "Once again, we relied on our natural talent to get us over this one. This is why these [foreign-born] guys are special in our league. These international guys, they really know how to move. They really know how to cut. It's more so about how they're running their offense that's wearing us down.
"I think in our game there is movement, obviously, but these guys ... it's constant movement. Again, we'll figure this out. It's good that we're finding ways to win these games right now. Hopefully these will be the ones that help prepare us for later on in this tournament."
It was the losing coach, on this night, who had the privilege of exiting the building with the greater sense of sureness about what his crew will deliver next.
"Once you move the ball, they're always chasing something," Djordjevic said. "Once you stop the ball, they just go one on one and that's very tough to beat if we have to play that way against athletic players. That's what I'd like to achieve with any of my teams."
After he stepped down from the interview podium, Djordjevic was intercepted by ESPN.com at the door and asked if he really expected that game plan to work so effectively against all those big names from the States.
"Actually yes," Djordjevic told me. "Why not?"
Why not?
"You guys are better, of course, but you have to prove it on the court."
Who knew that would ever be so tough for a gang that opened these Games as a 1-to-20 favorite in Vegas to scoop up all the gold medals?