Here’s a quick preview of tonight’s game:
Tip-off: 12:40 AM eastern
Watch: NBC (but given NBC’s habit of interrupting live sports to show last week’s gymnastics, you might want to have the live stream on the NBC app or NBCOlympics.com handy as a backup)
Serbia isn’t known as a women’s basketball power, but they upset powerful China in the quarterfinals, so as Dawn Staley said, that’s all she needs to know. “They did a tremendous job of doing that. They played inspired basketball. And that's a scary thing, because you want to play your best basketball during this time.”
Multiple players described Serbia is “tough.” Sue Bird said when she played overseas “You always had a baller on your team, and it was a Serbian player.”
USA and Serbia played last year in the Olympic qualifying tournament. USA won 88-69, led by 16 points and 7 rebounds from A’ja Wilson.
Wilson was relatively quiet in the blowout win over Australia in the quarterfinals with only 10 points and 4 rebounds. But she barely played in the second have as her heroics weren’t needed.
The mother semifinal is between Japan and France. The Americans beat both in the group stage, although they got a big scare from Japan.