Barcelona, Spain (SportsNetwork.com) – Klay Thompson had 20 points — one of six American scorers in double digits — and the United States pulled away in the second half on Tuesday to beat Slovenia 119-76 in the quarterfinals of the FIBA World Cup.<\/p>\n
The Americans shook off a slow start to post their highest point total so far and will face Lithuania in the semifinals on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Kenneth Faried and James Harden added 14 points apiece, Anthony Davis scored 13 and Derrick Rose and Kyrie Irving each had 12 in the win, which moved the Americans to 7-0 in the tournament.<\/p>\n
Although they are winning games by an average score of 102-69, they’ve had to overcome slow starts several times.<\/p>\n
Tuesday, they missed their first six shots from the field and led just 49-42 at halftime to a team they beat by 30 two weeks ago in their final exhibition game before the World Cup.<\/p>\n
Harden scored 12 of his 14 points in the third quarter as the U.S. pulled away.<\/p>\n
The Dragic brothers — Goran and Zoran — combined to score 24 points in the loss for Slovenia, which has lost to the U.S. in three straight World Cups by an average of 28 points.<\/p>\n
Lithuania beat Turkey 73-61 earlier on Tuesday behind 19 points from Renaldas Seibutis and 12 points and 13 rebounds from Jonas Valanciunas.<\/p>\n
France will play Spain and Serbia will face Brazil in the other quarterfinal games on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The U.S. beat Turkey in 2010 and is trying to win back-to-back World Cup titles for the first time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Barcelona, Spain (SportsNetwork.com) – Klay Thompson had 20 points — one of six American scorers in double digits — and the United States pulled away in the second half on Tuesday to beat Slovenia 119-76 in the quarterfinals of the FIBA World Cup. The Americans shook off a slow start to post their highest point […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23280"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23294,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23280\/revisions\/23294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}