Olympic basketball tiebreak rules, explained: How groups are decided and qualification for knockouts works

Men's and women's basketball in the 2024 Olympics is starting to heat up.

As each country plays its second game, we're starting to see teams with 2-0 records clinch berths to the quarterfinals. Fans of countries that are on the bubble with one win are probably beginning to wonder if their team still has a chance to compete for a medal.

For more information on the Olympic basketball tournament tiebreakers, The Sporting News has you covered below.

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Olympic basketball tiebreak rules, explained

In both the men's and women's tournaments, countries were broken up into three groups of four teams.

Eight of the 12 countries advance to the single-elimination Knockout Stage — the top two teams from each group and two wild cards, which will be determined by tiebreaker.

First Olympic basketball tiebreaker

The first tiebreaker is head-to-head results . If two countries are tied and played each other during the Group Stage, the winning team will advance to the Knockout Stage.

Second Olympic basketball tiebreaker

In the event that the tied countries did not play each other in the Group Stage — or there are more than two teams tied for the wild card spots — the secondary tiebreaker will be point differential .

The point differential tiebreaker almost always comes into play, which is why you will see teams playing as hard as possible until the final buzzer, no matter the score.

This is quite different from the NBA, where teams often pull their best players when the game is all but over.

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Explaining Olympic basketball Knockout Stage seeding

Once ties are broken and the field is trimmed to eight teams, the single-elimination Knockout Stage bracket is built.

Each team is given a seed, Nos. 1 through 8, based on the tiebreakers above. Just like most playoff systems, the bracket will look as follows:

• No. 1 vs. No. 8
• No. 4 vs. No. 5
• No. 3 vs. No. 6
• No. 2 vs. No. 7

The only catch is that teams from the same group cannot play each other in the first round of the Knockout Stage.

So, for example, if the United States is the No. 1 seed and South Sudan was to sneak in as the No. 8 seed, those two teams could not face off in the quarterfinals because they were both in Group C.

Once the bracket is set, it is a standard, single-elimination tournament with no re-seeding.

The teams that win the in semifinals will advance to the gold medal game. The teams that lose in the semifinals will face off in the bronze medal game.