U.S. mens basketball to play pre-Olympic tuneup games vs. South Sudan, Germany in July

Team USA’s final stop before the Paris 2024 Games will be London for exhibition contests against the defending FIBA World Cup champion and also a country making its first appearance in any Olympic sport.

The Americans will play South Sudan on July 20 and then Germany on July 22 at London’s O2 Arena, USA Basketball announced Tuesday. Both tuneup games are part of the “USA Basketball Showcase,” the same term used for most of the program’s exhibition contests before the World Cup. The games will be played at 3 p.m. Eastern Time and will be televised by Fox.

Advertisement

Germany, led by Dennis Schröder, Franz Wagner, Mo Wagner and Daniel Theis, defeated the U.S. 113-111 in the World Cup semifinals in the Philippines before capturing the championship over Serbia. The Germans also played the U.S. in an exhibition game last summer and lost.

South Sudan, meanwhile, used its first World Cup berth to qualify for the Olympics as the top-finishing African team. The South Sudanese are managed by former NBA All-Star Luol Deng and coached by Royal Ivey, a former NBA player and current assistant coach with the Houston Rockets.

Wenyen Gabriel, an NBA veteran currently playing for the Wisconsin Herd of the G League, played for South Sudan last summer, as did Khaman Maluach, a 7-foot-2 16-year-old who is already regarded as a prospect for the 2025 NBA Draft. The 2023 G League Player of the Year, Carlik Jones, was also on the team that earned Africa’s automatic bid to the Olympics by going 3-2 at the World Cup.

With the Olympic opening ceremony in Paris scheduled for July 26, and the Americans likely to play their first Olympic game the following day in Lille, France, the London contests will conclude Team USA’s exhibition season that starts with a Las Vegas training camp at the beginning of July. Other dates, locations and opponents for tuneup games are still being finalized.

The Americans, coached by the Golden State Warriors’ Steve Kerr and managed by Grant Hill, are four-time defending Olympic gold medalists but are coming off a fourth-place finish at the World Cup. They are expected to send to Paris a team of established NBA stars led by Kevin Durant, LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Joel Embiid.

Required reading

(Photo: Dante Dennis Diosina Jr II / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57lGppcmhna3xzfJFsZmpqX2Z%2FcMDEmqRmraOWeqOt0qScrZqRobluuM6nm6imXZrFqbXBoquip55itKK5xKxm