U.S. heavily favored vs. France for Olympic men's hoops gold

With the United States men's basketball team entering the Olympics as a -550 favorite to win the gold medal, fulfilling its destiny has often felt like an inevitability. That sense of security evaporated when the squad of NBA superstars nearly lost to Serbia during Thursday's semifinal: After entering the fray as 15.5-point favorites, USA was as long as +300 on the live money line and +5.5 on the live spread near the end of the third quarter.

But after surviving the scare, the American men are back to being the big favorites for the gold medal game. Team USA opened as a -14.5 favorite over host nation France and has moved to -16.5 for Saturday's showdown, per ESPN BET odds.

Since the United States' bronze medal in 2004, the team has typically been a big favorite in Olympic gold medal games, sporting -21 and -20 spreads against Spain in 2008 and 2012, respectively, -15 against Serbia in 2016, and -12.5 against France at the delayed 2020 Games, per ESPN Stats & Information. Over that stretch, Team USA is 1-3 against the spread, covering only in 2016.

As expected, the Americans have been heavily bet before and throughout the Olympic tournament.

At ESPN BET, the U.S. has an overwhelming 74% of the tickets and 96% of the handle for gold medal futures. Things are similar for FanDuel (42% of bets, 88% of money) and BetMGM (32.1% of bets, 81.3% of money), with the elevated handle numbers largely a result of the Americans' very short odds.

France, with its own cadre of NBA stars led by Victor Wembanyama and Rudy Gobert , entered the Olympics as one of the more likely teams to take down the Americans, showing +1100 odds to win gold, tying it with Canada for second on the odds board. The French moved down from +1300 at open, likely owing to a large influx of bets: ESPN BET reported at the beginning of the tournament that Les Bleus received 24.8% of tickets, tying the United States, which had significantly more handle.

That number shrank as the tournament progressed, but the U.S. and France were heavily bet on a game-by-game basis throughout the festivities: The top five most-bet men's basketball games at the Paris Games for ESPN BET and DraftKings involved the Americans or the French.

As a whole, men's basketball has been one of the biggest handle drivers for sportsbooks, with BetMGM telling ESPN that 19 of its top 20 most-bet Olympics events have been in the sport. Saturday's gold medal showdown could end up being the most wagered for the entire Games.