Barcelona, Spain (SportsNetwork.com) – James Harden scored all 16 of his points during a dominant third quarter that carried the United States to a 96-68 victory over Lithuania in the semifinals of the FIBA World Cup on Thursday.<\/p>\n
After a tightly contested — and, at times, sloppy — first 20 minutes, the Americans opened the second half on an 18-2 run to seize control.<\/p>\n
They outscored Lithuania 33-14 in the decisive frame.<\/p>\n
Kyrie Irving had 18 points for the United States, which will play the winner of Friday’s semifinal between France and Serbia in Sunday’s title game.<\/p>\n
Klay Thompson powered the Americans in the first half with 14 points. He finished with 16 on 7-of-12 shooting.<\/p>\n
Jonas Valanciunas and Mindaugas Kuzminskas scored 15 points apiece for the Lithuanians, who hung around with the Americans in the first half.<\/p>\n
The U.S. led 21-16 after closing out the first quarter on an 11-3 surge and went into halftime with a 43-35 advantage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Barcelona, Spain (SportsNetwork.com) – James Harden scored all 16 of his points during a dominant third quarter that carried the United States to a 96-68 victory over Lithuania in the semifinals of the FIBA World Cup on Thursday. After a tightly contested — and, at times, sloppy — first 20 minutes, the Americans opened the […]<\/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-23380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23380","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=23380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}