Olympic basketball scores 2016: Quarterfinals play brought an upset, a buzzer-beater and a slight scare for Team USA

Team USA and Australia were supposed to play a tough gold medal game and the Americans were to win. That’s how it was all going to go down and that writing had been on the wall from the time rosters were announced all the way through pool play when both teams stayed undefeated.

That script will need some rewriting as Liz Cambage and the Opals walked away in tears after a crushing 73-71 upset loss to Serbia on Tuesday in Rio.

Australia was lucky to have even been fighting in the final minutes as it committed 26 turnovers in the game, including 16 Serbian steals that led to 27 points.

Nonetheless, a close game stayed that way until the final ticks. With just over three minutes remaining Serbia held a one-point lead. Cambage, Australia’s 6’8 All-Star and the leading scorer in Rio, had just returned to the game after picking up her fourth foul and sitting on the bench for 30 seconds. Foul trouble also caused her to sit early in the third.

With Cambage back in she became the focus of the offense yet again and bullied her way in to score a bucket with two minutes remaining to put her team up one. Serbia responded on the other end with a Jelena Milovanovic layup to put her team on top again. On the next possession Cambage was forced into a tough jumper, which she missed, and Sonja Petrovic, who suffered a first-half shoulder injury, took the ball to the cup on the other end to give the Serbians a three-point advantage with just over a minute to go.

In a 30-second span, the ball went back to Cambage, who scored another easy bucket, which was answered by Serbia’s Ana Dabovic’s jumper and reciprocated with another Cambage layup that kept Serbia up one with the ball.

A foul sent Dabovic to the line for two and she front-ended the first before nailing the second. Serbia up two.

On the final possession Australia couldn’t find a well-guarded Cambage and Marianna Tolo was forced to chuck up a mid-range attempt that wouldn’t drop. The upset was complete.

This game had all the elements of a true upset as well because Serbia, quite frankly, wasn’t good in pool play. They finished 2-3 with losses to Spain, the United States and Canada, and their wins were both close against a winless Senegal team and China. Their minus-21 point differential was fourth-worst of six teams in Group B. They shot the sixth-best field goal percentage of all 12 teams and seventh-best three-point percentage. Serbia is a very middle of the road team that did a lot of things right when its opponent did a lot of things wrong.

This game changes the rest of the playing field now as Serbia and Spain are suddenly battling in the semifinals for the right to lose to the U.S. and bring home a silver medal.

The former Minnesota Lynx point guard nailed a runner at the buzzer to put Spain over Turkey, 64-62, and send her team to its first Olympic semifinal ever. Spain is now one win away from its first medal.

Down two points with the clock ticking down from 20 seconds, Turkey opted to trap the ball rather than put the Spaniards on the line. A successful stop from Lara Sanders saw her trap a panicked Alba Torrens into passing out of the corner. Sanders deflected the pass into the hands of her teammate. Cutting down the center of the paint, Turkey’s Birsel Vardarli Demirmen found Sanders for a layup that appeared to send the game into overtime with four seconds remaining.

Cruz wanted none of that and sprinted down the floor for a perfectly placed runner from just inside the top of the key.

Just as no one predicted, either buzzer-beating Spain or upset winner Serbia will take a silver medal back home.

The Japanese gave probably the best American team of all-time a real scare in the first half of their quarterfinal game on Tuesday. That was after nearly giving Australia its only loss in pool play.

Japan is young and small, but talented as hell with speed and toughness to more than overcome its flaws.

Their fast pace forced the United States to switch its gameplan, substitution patterns and limit ball movement to revert a great passing team back into an isolation-driven offense. It only lasted for 20 minutes, sure, but those were the toughest 20 minutes Team USA has had to fight through in its past eight games.

Japan hit 7-of-11 threes and 50 percent of its shots in the first half, which forced coach Geno Auriemma to sit Brittney Griner, who was trying to fit into a quick tempo that didn’t fit her strengths.

That effort was all wiped away as the Americans outscored them by 36 points in the second half, including a 29-5 fourth quarter, but the team that doesn’t carry a player past 29 years old impressed the veteran team of the world’s best players.

The Japanese should be a favorite to reach the podium in four years.

Serbia 73, Australia 71

Spain 64, Turkey 62

USA 110, Japan 64
France 68, Canada 63