Germany outlasted Serbia on Sunday to win its first-ever FIBA World Cup championship, a fitting finish for Deutschland that emerged as the only unbeaten team in the tournament.
Dennis Schroder, a veteran of the National Basketball Association who will play for the Toronto Raptors in the coming season, led Germany in the final game as he did all tournament long. Schroder led all scorers with 28 points, including the two points he scored on a lay up with 21 seconds left in the game, giving Germany a four-point lead, 81-77.
The final tally: Germany, 83, and Serbia, 77.
Fittingly, Schroder accepted for Germany the Naismith Trophy, the prize of the FIBA World Cup that was named after basketball inventor James Naismith.
Germany won third place in the 2002 FIBA World Cup.
The championship game, played in the Mall of Asia, was nip-and-tuck early, with Serbia and Germany ending the first half tied 47-47.
The game turned in favor of Germany in the third quarter, when it outgunned Serbia, 22-10.
Serbia made its own run in fourth quarter, outscoring Germany, 20-14, on the heroics of Aleksa Avramovic. The 28-year-old Serbian basketball player scored 21 points, including a couple of three-point shots that trimmed Germany’s 12-point third quarter lead to 2 points with less than one minute in the game.
Serbia won the silver for a second time. It lost to the US in the championship game in 2014.
In its championship run, Germany also beat the US in the semifinals, Latvia in the quarterfinals, Georgia and Slovenia in the second round, and Australia, Japan and Finland in the group stages.
Earlier Sunday, Canada won its first-ever medal in the FIBA World Cup after it beat the US, 127-118, in overtime. This is the second time the US didn’t win medal after winning back-to-back titles in 2010 and 2014.
Germany, Serbia, Canada, the U.S., Latvia, South Sudan, Japan, and Australia all qualified to the 2024 Paris Olympics because of their performance in the FIBA World Cup. France qualified as host of the Olympics.
