If you’re a basketball fan and you didn’t stay up last night to watch the Men’s Basketball Gold Medal Game between USA and Spain, you missed something amazing. It was an incredible game that contained highlight-reel plays literally in every minute, from both teams. The guys on USA were determined not to see another game go up in smoke like the previous losses of in the Worlds and the Olympics for the last 8 years; the guys on Spain were determined to show that they could win even after a 30+ point loss the previous time the two teams met.
You can watch the highlights from the USA side, and you can pretty much see every amazing play (albeit without context) that Team USA had, but it’s a joke that this video doesn’t include anything from Spain. Not only was their determination inspiring, but they had 
some plays that took me out off my couch, including a monsterous dunk by Rudy Fernandez over Dwight Howard, and some amazing clutch plays by the Gasol brothers. When you watch the NBC highlight reel you think the game was a blowout, but keep an eye on the score and you’ll see that Spain was within two during the 4th quarter, and within 4 at 2 minutes left- this was a game down to the wire.
One quick note – it’s great that NBC broadcast all of the Olympics streaming free online, but their tight control over the content is a joke. I couldn’t embed the highlights here (they could have included advertising in the embed); I couldn’t even embed a photo from them. Also, Yahoo! Sports and ESPN essentially have no visual content available, which I presume is do to lockout. The best you can get in terms of pictures is the great photo journals over at Newsweek (where all these pictures are from).
