SAITAMA, Japan -- The Japanese women's basketball team put together a smart and efficient game plan, ran it to such perfection that instructional videos could be made from the edits and showed off a roster where everyone could shoot, dribble and pass.
It was a brilliant display of basketball. But it was no match for Team USA.
This is the state of play and has been for decades now as the Americans claimed their seventh consecutive gold medal in a 90-75 victory Sunday.
Two of the women who built and grew that dynasty, Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi, put their hands on their fifth gold medals, the first international basketball players to ever have achieved that feat.