LeBron James carries the US past Lithuania to avoid upset

After one of the best performance in Olympics men’s basketball history the US struggled in there game after against Lithuania. Lithuania has a history of giving the US fits. Lithuanian beat the US in the 2004 Olympics. At the end thought the US was able to pull out the 99 to 94 victory. The star of today’s game was no question LeBron James.

Lithuania had a 2 point lead with just less than 6 minutes to play but the Americans went on a 15-4 to seal the victory.

James was on the Olympic team that lost to Lithuanian and now he is the reason the Americans won today. James scored 9 of 20 points in the final 4 minutes of the game. James was 9 of 14 from the field. Can we officially stop all the talk that James in not clutch.

“You want to get tested,” James said. “The best teams want to be tested. We love the competition. We’ve got some of the greatest competitors in our league, in this world, so you want to have a game where you feel like you were tested, and we had that today.”

“It was like LeBron said, ‘I got this, I’m doing this,’ ” U.S. coach Mike Krzyzewski said.

Coming off a record performance Carmelo Anthony continued his hot play. Anthony finished the game was 20 points on 7 of 13 shooting.

Kevin Durant had 16 points including 4 three pointers. Deron Williams added 12 points, while Kevin Love had 8 rebounds and Chris Paul had 8 assists.

For the first time in this tournament the US was outrebounded by 5. The Americans also missed 12 free throws. They also only had 13 assists last game they 40 some assists. Take away Kevin Durant’s three the rest of the team was just 6 of 26 from deep.

We had to make some big plays to win,” said Krzyzewski . “So far in the tournament things have come easy to us because we’ve been hitting so many shots, and today because of the defense sometimes I think we passed up on shots because of guys hitting so many, you want to see them hit again instead of taking your shot. We can play better, but we played against a terrific team today. We had 17 steals that didn’t translate to the number of points that they should. Usually we get some momentum but today we got steals but not the points. It showed great resolve on their part that when they did make a mistake, they recovered quickly and didn’t have their head down. We beat an outstanding team today and had a lot of game pressure on us and we came through, and I am proud of them for doing that.”

Americans wraps up pool play against Argentina at 10:15 p.m. (5:15 p.m. EDT). On paper this is their toughest test to date.

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