US says Russia coach who thinks Soviets were right has it all wrong

Russia's coach believes the Soviets were right in 1972. The Americans say he's got it all wrong.

U.S. coach Mike Krzyzewski responded to David Blatt's opinion that the Soviet Union's victory in the controversial Olympic gold-medal game was fair by saying that Blatt should have that belief as a Russian — either forgetting or ignoring that Blatt was born and raised in the United States.

NBA executive Mike Bantom, who played for that U.S. team, said he wasn't surprised "that someone employed by the Russian Federation might have a Russian perspective right about now, but I don't think it changes anything."

"We know how wrong it was, what happened there," Bantom told The Associated Press after watching U.S. practice Wednesday. "You watch a film, or you hear reports, you can debate whether or not it was right or wrong. But if you lived it, and you were there, you know that it was wrong what happened."

The U.S. plays Russia on Thursday in the quarter-finals of the world championship on the 38th anniversary of the Soviets' 51-50 victory in Munich. The Americans appeared to have won the game twice, but the Soviets were given a third chance and made the winning basket.

Believing they were cheated, the Americans never accepted their silver medals.

"There's a wonderful film about that, and I hate to say it as an American, but it looks like the Russians were right. The American team was not cheated," Blatt said Monday. "Funny things happened, but in reality it was fair."

Blatt was likely referring to the HBO documentary about the game, ":03 from Gold," which Bantom appears in and said he saw. The film shows the confusion that created the multiple do-overs before Aleksander Belov's winning shot.

"You can arrange film to make a lot of things seem that there's some doubt," said Bantom, the NBA's senior vice-president of player development. "There was no doubt how that went down."

"He's a Russian, he coaches the Russian team, so he probably has that viewpoint," Krzyzewski said. "And his eyes are clear now because there's no tears in them."