Noah Lyles’ Blunt Response To Team USA Being World Champions In Basketball

The basketball world witnessed an absolute masterclass showing on Saturday from Team USA as they took down France in the gold medal game.

The 98-87 win in front of what was an extremely hostile crowd at the Bercy Arena in Paris, France will go down in the archives as one of the best ever. Team USA's roster, as we all know, was littered with legends of the game as LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and Steph Curry all led the charge to help clinch what ended up being the fifth gold medal in a row for the United States.

Each of them had tremendous moments as Durant hit a dagger against Serbia, James initiated the team's offense at an elite level the entire tournament, and even notched a triple-double and double-double in the semifinal and gold medal games respectively. As for Curry, he had 17 threes in the final two games of the tournament and hit a couple of shots that only he could make.

While the team, fans, and country as a whole were all thrilled with the victory, there was clearly one person on the minds of most for what he had said about NBA players last year. Despite being a fellow Team USA athlete, track athlete, and 100m gold medal winner Noah Lyles may have been public enemy No. 1 in the eyes of most basketball fans after he called out NBA players for claiming to be world champions last year.

“You know what hurts me the most is that I have to watch the NBA Finals, and they have ‘world champion’ on their heads," Lyles said of NBA champions claiming to be world champions last August. "World champion of what? The United States? Don’t get me wrong. I love the U.S.—at times—but that ain’t the world. That is not the world. We are the world. We have almost every country out here fighting, thriving, putting on their flag to show that they are represented. There ain’t no flags in the NBA. We gotta do more. We gotta be presented to the world.”

Following the win, tweets trolling Lyles were fired off by thousands of fans, and even the Team USA basketball social media account who posted a photo of the team with their medals and the caption "Are we the world champs now?"

A question that Lyles finally addressed while interviewing with the Associated Press, giving fans what they have been longing for over the past year.

Lyles explained exactly why the 12 NBA players who now are sporting a gold medal around their necks are in fact the world champs as opposed to the NBA champions.

"It's not a thing of if I consider or not," Lyles said when asked about whether or not Team USA players could claim the world champion title. "It's...they are. They're Olympic champions and in the Olympic champions you face the whole world."

"And they saw how difficult it is," Lyles continued. "And of course they came out on top and of course I knew they would. Because we have some of the greatest athletes but they saw you can't just slap everybody together and say "This is a great team." You know there was a ton of countries out there who said "Hey we're not lying down just because we don't play in the NBA. You know we have cohesion. We have our own way of playing the game". And there was a lot of close calls. But again, like myself, I have confidence in the U.S. basketball team that they were going to make it all the way."

At the end of the day, both Team USA and Lyles can call themselves world champs following the Paris Olympics, but clearly they won't be best friends anytime soon.

Related: Doc Rivers Names The 'Unsung Hero' For Team USA During Gold Medal Run