In the final episode of Court of Gold, Netflix's docuseries about men's basketball at the 2024 Olympics, France assistant coach Kenny Atkinson is seen leading a video breakdown of Team USA's offense. In stilted French, he diagnoses the challenges of defending a set, insisting his team makes la rotation to ensure pas de layup before he asks how to say, "Pray they miss," in French. You can clearly see that Atkinson is discussing a play in which Jrue Holiday springs Joel Embiid into the corner with a back screen. Minutes later, Atkinson instructs the full team on how to defend Kevin Durant, says not to be afraid to "push him out of bounds," and preaches the merits of exaggerated ball pressure. The next shot is of Durant alone on a bus, correctly predicting the gameplan. He relishes the competitive setup of a team trying to beat him, and expresses his preemptive nostalgia for getting to play with LeBron James and Steph Curry.
This is far from the most exciting moment in Court of Gold, but it most cleanly shows the series' degree of access and how it was used effectively. We observe proprietary strategic information, then get a glimpse of how a coach disseminates it to his team, and how the opponent anticipates that gameplan. Within that scene, the casual viewer learns that France has to bring a new level of intensity to overcome a superior foe, while the hardcore basketball fan can detect hints of how France tried to solve this problem. It's also a preview of the style of play that would define the forthcoming NBA season.
The willingness to embrace specificity is part of what distinguishes Court of Gold from the swelling canon of Netflix original sports programming, a roster that includes the NBA-focused Starting 5, cycling's Tour de France: Unchained, the tennis docuseries Break Point, and, most famously, Formula 1: Drive to Survive. That last example, a pandemic hit, was so successful in getting casual fans invested in that it ignited a Formula 1 boom in the United States, creating a playbook for other sports and leagues to eagerly follow.
If the primary goal of a docuseries is to sell fans on a sport or league, its value will inherently be constrained by the degree to which it must serve as marketing. There's a good deal of overlap between what is most interesting about Formula 1 and what the producers of Drive to Survive want to show you, but that Venn diagram is not a circle. Watch enough episodes, and it becomes clear that the operative competitive substance of the sport is engine design, something so highly classified that it's only talked around in the show. By contrast, Court of Gold shows plenty of inside information, including Nikola Jokic drawing up a full play during halftime of the semifinal against Team USA. Drive to Survive leans on selectively edited reality-show personality drama that can be interesting, but is so heavily edited that many of its subjects have come to resent it. I liked the series enough that I watched most of an entire F1 season, before I realized that I didn't really like F1 racing—I liked the highly stylized and dramatized version of the sport as presented by Netflix. The hook of Drive to Survive is competition, but between narratives rather than drivers.
The success of a sports docuseries is dependent on whether that palatable marketing produced by the access is actually drawing in new fans, and I'd argue that this formula explains why the genre is somewhat stagnant. Break Point lasted two seasons before it was canceled, largely because the best players in the world had no incentive to give them access. Tour de France: Unchained will not return after this summer's season, as it was unsuccessful in its primary aim of magnetizing hordes of new fans. Starting 5 is returning for a second season, though the first was remarkably lifeless, essentially a long commercial for people who had never heard of LeBron James. On-ramps can only extend for so long.
Court of Gold avoids those pitfalls because director Jake Rogal used his access wisely: The purpose was not to propagandize its subject, but to show the psychodrama of competition. There was something to learn for those who either did or didn't watch last year's Olympics. The program follows Canada, France, Serbia, and Team USA throughout the tournament, with interviews, shots from the court, and tons of practice footage. They frame the 2024 U.S. iteration against the Dream Team, making the case that the Dream Team was so influential that they set the stage for their successor's eventual destruction decades later.
In Court of Gold, this fascinating competitive dynamic is pursued from all sides. Team USA players try not to look nervous as Barack Obama says publicly that winning a silver medal would be "terrible and embarrassing." Shai Gilgeous-Alexander watches the men's 100-meter final and expresses something like envy at the level of intense pressure those athletes feel. Nicolas Batum convinces himself of the delusion that France's superior chemistry will overcome Team USA's superior talent, to which Durant cockily responds in a separate interview, "That chemistry gonna help you when you gotta guard Steph?"
If there's any proselytization, it is for the Olympics as a vanguard of sporting competition; Court of Gold was produced in part by Olympic Channel. The only time the series loses focus is during a brief stretch in the second episode, when USA players gawk wide-eyed at the scale of the spectacle. But if Court of Gold doesn't hold a heavily critical perspective on the corruption or greed that propel the Olympics, neither does it exert itself in service of the greater project. The audience is shown why the Games matter through the intensity of their participants, and that's the extent of the show's argument.
What also makes Court of Gold shine is its choice of protagonists. LeBron James, Victor Wembanyama, and Nikola Jokic get plenty of airtime, but those stars are not the stars of this series. The series spends more time with Kevin Durant, Bogdan Bogdanovic, and, most compellingly, Nicolas Batum. The Frenchman is presented as a grizzled veteran who has done his fair share of losing, someone who knows that this is his last and best shot at Olympic gold, in his home country. He talks about his first impression of Wembanyama—a stunned awe, similar to most civilians—and berates his team at halftime. As Durant foretold, Batum feels the fear of having to guard Steph Curry, a challenge he knows is extremely difficult, if not impossible. You see the lies Batum has to tell himself in order to believe his team can win.
The camera takes great pleasure in showing France as a team of cloistered ascetics, staying by themselves in an isolated compound in order to stay as focused as possible. Witness the team's head chef laboring, clearly treating his duty as a solemn matter of national importance. While James waves a flag on Team USA's boat during the opening ceremony, Team France watches from INSEP, the country's national training center. Batum gets a massage and tries not to look intimidated, but his massage therapist pauses her work to gawk. Court of Gold generally tries to rely on little moments like that, rather than exposition from talking heads. But the latter category is where Durant excels.
The best moment in the series is at the end of the second episode, when Durant breaks down while talking about how much basketball means to him. The moment isn't affecting just because he cries in front of the camera, but because he does so while making a moving case for basketball as a transcendent force. "You see what [someone is] really about when you out on the floor," he said, when asked why he loves the sport. "Being able to get the true essence of a person." The interview is mixed with footage of him taking over the game against Serbia, footage that includes Dwyane Wade calling him a "purist" and head coach Steve Kerr giggling with his staff and marveling, "He's so fucking good." Durant's relationship to basketball is akin to worship, and what eventually moves him to tears is the prospect of connection, represented by an arena full of people around the world coming together for basketball. "I come from neighborhoods where people don’t even talk to each other," he says.
The emotional ballast is that Durant's playing career is almost over. He's found the perfect team, and he only gets one chance to win with them. It's that whiff of tragedy that makes Court of Gold special. The Curry-James-Durant triumvirate, which only existed once, toward the end of all three of their careers, is properly handled. Durant's basketball mortality is also a reminder that this team represents the densest agglomeration of basketball talent in decades. Court of Gold makes the case that each player brings some unique energy to the team and, by extension, basketball.
Naturally, the conclusion had to be Curry's gold-medal winning barrage against France, one of the coolest things I've ever seen on a basketball court. Court of Gold establishes the context for Curry's heater by showing how Team USA was on the verge of blowing the game because the players had gotten tight. Except for Curry, who faces the pressure with equanimity. He explains that he can only make the most difficult shots in those big moments because he's already made his peace with potentially missing those shots. It's this sense of freedom that lets Team USA win, but just as importantly awes both Kerr, who as Warriors head coach has seen this as often as any person alive, and Batum, who lost to it. They can't do anything but laugh, proving Durant right about basketball and connection.
Winning is shown largely as a relief, a point personified by Jokic stalking the arena, trying to scare up as many beers as he can, and dancing after Serbia wins bronze. Losing is shown in all its misery, with Moritz Wagner weeping into his Germany jersey while the arena shakes around him. The psychic heft of defeat is felt most brutally by Wembanyama, who metabolizes that heartbreak into fuel in real time. There, Court of Gold makes its final argument: Even the best players are only part of the story of basketball for a short while.
