DONGGUAN, China — When they huddled on the floor before tipoff Thursday night, Coach Gregg Popovich of the United States slipped some colorful language into his greeting for his Serbian counterpart Sasha Djordjevic.

This was not an angry reaction to the headline-grabbing comments Djordjevic made before the FIBA World Cup, when he said of a potential Serbia-United States showdown, “Let’s let them play their basketball and we will play ours and, if we meet, God help them.”

This, rather, was Popovich, in his first face-to-face encounter with Djordjevic since, using humor to mask sadness.

Djordjevic did not want to use curse words at his postgame news conference, but he revealed later that Popovich, the five-time N.B.A. championship-winning coach, broke the pregame ice by jokingly calling them “a couple of losers” — with a profanity thrown in.