Dream Team Dreams: How Great Can This US Men’s Basketball Team Still Be?
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PARIS — Five words changed basketball forever, not just in the United States but around the world.
“If they participate, I participate too.”
That was Michael Jordan’s answer when he was asked to join the U.S. team for the 1992 Olympic Games.
Rod Thorn and Russ Granik, the two deputies to NBA commissioner David Stern, had compiled a considerable list of stars interested in playing, including household names like Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Thorn called Jordan to ask — a smart strategy, considering Thorn was the Chicago Bulls general manager who selected Jordan in the 1984 NBA Draft — and Jordan’s response became an early memorable moment in one of the most storied runs in U.S. Olympic history.
That Barcelona team would have crushed its competitors even without Jordan. With him was born a global cultural revolution in sports, with a coolness, marketing reach and a display of raw power that inspired generations of youngsters in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and South America to pick up a round orange ball and dream that they could be just like Mike.
It was the Dream Team, and Jordan was its face. It easily earned a place in the pinnacle of American Olympic history, achieved by only a select few individual athletes like Simone Biles, Michael Phelps, Jesse Owens and Carl Lewis and teams like the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” hockey team.
“There’s no question the Dream Team had such an impact,” Granik said. “You hear from so many current players that they never thought about anything other than football until they saw the Dream Team.”
The U.S. men’s basketball program has enjoyed continued success, as have women’s basketball, which is attempting to become the first team sport to win eight consecutive Olympic gold medals, and women’s soccer, which revolutionized the sport in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
And the 1992 team set what quickly became the standard for the United States men’s basketball team on the world stage, a benchmark that has been unattainable for some time.
Still, as the U.S. men’s national team begins the Olympics on Sunday, it will begin with a roster that has drawn countless comparisons to the Dream Team. The connection existed even before the formal selections were made, with a spot at the Paris Games an attractive draw for top NBA talent thanks to commitments from megastars like LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant.
But with two narrow wins in last week’s friendlies against South Sudan and Germany, this team has yet to live up to the impossibly high standards of 1992.
“We’re not invincible,” Curry said, a statement no member of the Dream Team could have made with a straight face.
On paper, the U.S. men’s team may be the best team assembled since 1992. But it lacks the magic of novelty, a lesson Americans quickly learned in 1996 when the men’s team swept the competition at the Atlanta Olympics with little fanfare.
LeBron James and Co. know what’s at stake. Their run for a gold medal and a place in USA Basketball history begins Sunday against Serbia. (Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)
When Jordan and Barkley and Bird and Magic teamed up to dominate the world, it became an expectation that future stars would do the same.
“I think that goes for any American team because we’re considered the best in the world, the best players in the world combined into one team,” said Anthony Davis, who played in the 2012 London Olympics before playing in the NBA.
You say MJ is the greatest who ever played? James was his true NBA heir and has probably equaled or even surpassed him in the game. James, not Jordan, is the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, and it was James who stood at the front of a boat with hundreds of American Olympians on the Seine River on Friday night, as the first male basketball player to carry the American flag for an opening ceremony.
Curry is arguably the greatest shooter of all time. His relentless 3-pointers changed the game. Durant is the most prolific scorer in U.S. men’s history and, if the Americans win gold in Paris, could become the most decorated men’s basketball Olympic player.
“I don’t know if Magic, Michael and Larry came up with that (nickname) themselves and called themselves the Dream Team, or if that was the nickname that the fans and the media gave them, (but) I feel like we’re going to have that same vibe,” Curry said earlier this summer.
That was until reality hit. The first American selection featured Joel Embiid, a Cameroonian-born 7-footer who is a year removed from being the NBA’s MVP. It included current champions Jrue Holiday and Jayson Tatum. And Kawhi Leonard, a two-time champion and NBA Finals MVP.
Leonard, however, did not make it past training camp; the U.S. management sent him home due to concerns about a chronically swollen knee. Embiid did not show up to training camp in shape, and the offense looked clumsy in the first few practice games when he was on the court. Durant could not play or even practice because of a calf injury.
In two consecutive practice matches in London in the week before the kick-off, the South Sudanese led the Americans by as many as 16 points, with Germany even taking a lead over the team in the fourth quarter.
The U.S. recovered to win both games, thanks in part to heroics from James that NBA fans have seen countless times before. But the performances were still shocking to anyone drawn to the Dream Team comparison.
After all, close games were not possible in 1992.
“It’s a good reminder that we’re talented, we’re experienced, we’re a new group together, but there’s a lot of good teams fighting for that podium,” Curry said. “So you can’t just show up and expect to win.”
The competitiveness Curry described is actually also the fault of the Dream Team.
In 1992, the U.S. team had 11 NBA stars and Christian Laettner, who was entering his rookie pro season that fall. There were nine other NBA players on the other Olympic teams in Barcelona.
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As the Olympic tournament gets underway in Lille, France, near the Belgian border, there are an Olympic-record 51 players in the men’s tournament who played in the NBA last season and 81 with at least some NBA experience. A few are superstars.
One of them, Nikola Jokić, is a three-time MVP of the league, a champion who will lead Serbia against the United States. Serbia is the reigning runner-up at the World Cup with several players who have NBA size, talent and experience.
Greece’s Giannis Antetokounmpo has two NBA MVPs and a league title. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, an MVP candidate with the Oklahoma City Thunder, leads a Canadian team full of pros. Victor Wembanyama, the 7-foot-4 reigning NBA Rookie of the Year who is just 20 years old, is the latest addition to a French national team that features multiple NBA pros.
The collective panic that ensued last week after the Americans were nearly defeated by South Sudan, a country younger than Wembanyama, obscured the fact that the South Sudanese team includes several players with NBA experience and one player, 17-year-old Khaman Maluach, who will be leaving for Duke in the fall.
Over the past five years, including two FIBA World Cups, one Olympic Games and the exhibition schedules leading up to those events, the U.S. men have lost nine times. The only game the Dream Team lost was an exhibition game — against a collection of America’s best college players after a night of partying.
And that’s the standard every American team has had to live up to ever since, even though it’s no longer fair.
“It’s the strongest field we’ve ever had,” U.S. coach Steve Kerr said. “The game is getting better all over the world, there are more NBA players, but teams are also getting more comfortable playing us, so we know every game is going to be tough and we have to prepare for that and be ready because these teams are coming after us.”
Kerr served as an assistant for USA Basketball under Gregg Popovich, the coach of the 2019 World Cup and the 2021 Olympics. Popovich, the most successful coach in NBA history, has said that coaching his country was the most pressure he has experienced in his storied career.
Expectations do not match reality. Winning is taken for granted and losing is a total failure.
Given that these are the shackles that every American team faces – win as expected or you stink – it seems like there is little that can be done from a legacy-building perspective for the current team.
The most likely scenario is that the U.S. will battle through six games in France and emerge with a fifth consecutive gold medal. Durant will win an Olympic record fourth gold in men’s basketball. James will get his third medal; Curry and Embiid will get their first in their first Olympics. None of them may ever play for the U.S. team again. At this tournament, they will give American fans fond, lasting memories with clutch performances in thrilling games.
“These are stories that have yet to be told and unfold,” James said when asked what cultural impact this team could have to live up to the Dream Team comparisons.
Team USA can lose too.
Of course, that’s possible. If the Americans lose their game to Serbia on Sunday, as the 2021 team lost to France in Game 1 in Tokyo, then alarm bells will ring and criticism will be leveled at this team from across the Atlantic.
A defeat in the knockout stage, where there are no second chances, and a Dream Team repeat becomes a historic nightmare.
And then there’s the possibility that something unimaginable will happen to those who follow international basketball closely, something casual fans often take for granted: that this team, with names and resumes that rival the Dream Team, will find that extra edge it needs to blow away the competition.
In that scenario, the U.S. men’s national team would be remembered forever, even if it wouldn’t be respected to the same extent as the Dream Team.
“We don’t take these things for granted,” Davis said. “You don’t come in and be like, ‘Oh, we’re the Monsters and we’re going to crush everybody.’ Those days are long gone.”
That is true, but that has not stopped every American team from being judged by what the Dream Team accomplished eight Olympiads ago.
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(Top photo of LeBron James and Stephen Curry: Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)
