The 2024 U.S. Men’s Basketball team > The Dream Team?
If I saw you suggesting before the Paris Olympics that this year’s American squad was greater than 1992’s, my reaction was visceral and immediate: You’re going to need to show your work on that calculation.
That they’d need to show it, the members of this year’s star-studded version of Team USA.
You wanted to anoint this team — which struggled to get past South Sudan in its Olympic run-up — the best and the greatest? My inclination was to let them win the thing first.
Suggesting this team was the greatest of them all, pre-Paris, seemed like great fodder for a psychology course — a real lesson in recency bias.
Like folks might need to brush up on their art history. Like this could serve as a study in perspective and a refresher course about how profoundly impactful the Dream Team was. How iconic. How incredible. How cool.
How that squad, featuring the airified stylings of Michael Jordan in his prime, as well as Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and eight more Hall of Famers, really got the whole globe round-ball rocking.
It felt like the math wasn’t mathing when you tried to reduce it to numbers: Yes, I know Magic was 33 that summer in Barcelona and Bird was 36 and neither was at the height of his powers, but, uh, LeBron James is 39, Steph Curry is 36 and Kevin Durant is 35. Great still on a nightly basis, but not greater than they’ve ever been.
So I wasn’t sure what type of apple-to-apples equation you were trying to feed me in an attempt to override a core belief I’d held since I was a kid watching as the Dream Teamers cemented themselves as the greatest men’s basketball team ever. As in forever-ever.
But consider me summer-schooled. Get it; got it. Aha!
In this example, one team dominated its competition, averaged 117.3 points and won its eight games by an average of 44 points, including winning its semifinal by 51 and its gold medal game by 32.
The other team averaged 105 points and won its six Olympic contests by an average of 19 points. It had to rally from a 17-point deficit to win its semifinal by four and then needed a late surge to win the gold in an 11-point victory in the Olympic final.
Clearly, one team has the edge.
It’s Team 2, this year’s team, the one that had to fend off such superior competition — a deep pool of talent traceable in many ways to the Dream Team 32 years before.
MJ, Magic and Bird — and Charles Barkley, Scottie Pippen and Patrick Ewing. Karl Malone, David Robinson, Clyde Drexler and John Stockton. Players who inspired and impressed and got the ball rolling around the globe nine Olympics earlier.
