The real road to redemption begins...

Final day of the Beijing Olympics Basketball Preliminaries. Dwyane Wade has been by far the best player for the US Squad. And the US Squad has been by far the most dominant team in the tournament. (i still can't call them Dream Team because they aren't)

Here are few things to expect going into the knockout stages:

Lithuania being the number one team in Group A will take on China (#4 in group B, assuming they lose to Greece later tonight which will probably be the case) and US will probably take on Australia (Or Croatia, in the rare case that they lose today against Iran)

Quarterfinals (The eight teams to advance from round-robin play match up as follows)

Game 1: Lithuania vs. Greece/China
Game 2: USA vs. Croatia/Australia
Game 3: Argentina vs. Greece/China
Game 4: Spain vs. Croatia/Australia

Which brings us to:

Semifinals (The four quarterfinal winners advance to the semifinals, where the match-ups are as follows), Again assuming there are no upsets later today...

Winner of Game 1 (Lithuania) vs. winner of Game 4 (Spain)
Winner of Game 2 (USA) vs. winner of Game 3 (Argentina)

Just to summarize, the likely opponents for each top 2 teams after the prelims. In bold is USA's sched and their road to redemption...

Team - Quarters - Semis - Gold
US - Australia - Argentina - Spain
Spain - Croatia - Lithuania - US
Lithuania - China - Spain - USA
Argentina - Greece - USA - Spain

i say, yikes for Argentina, that Lithuania loss in their first game really stings them now as they have to take on Greece to advance to the medal rounds...
US will probably cruise through Australia and will have to do it again against Argentina (or even Greece again) then Spain again to win it all... (i am loving the fact that US have to go through Argentina and Spain, which i feel are the squads that have a chance of pulling an upset) On the other hand, Spain will take on the unknown entity in Croatia and an early date with the number one team on the other side.

So all in all, the pre-tourney rankings are pretty much on the button. Group A was a wild one with the surprise Croatian team even as Argentina buckled a slow start, Lithuania played like contenders...

We will see.