15 years ago, when the first ten players of the original basketball Dream Team were announced, American media celebrated the historic assemblage of talent, and who could blame them?  This was the cream of the crop from the NBA’s Golden Age led by iconic legends.

And for a teenager at the height of my NBA fandom, the 1992 Dream Team was really a dream come true.  Rallying a team of NBA legends and all-stars that knew no conference lines, no divisions, and would come together for two months wearing the same jersey, representing their country, and one common objective: to bring the gold medal back to the United States.

Other than two missteps; the inclusion of Christian Laettner, the sole college player, and the exclusion of Isiah Thomas (we’ll get to that in a later piece), the USA Olympic Committee got it right with their selection of  Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, John Stockton and Karl Malone, Scottie Pippen, David Robinson, Clyde Drexler, and Chris Mullin.

WOW.

But the 1992 US Olympic Team wasn’t just a dream to me, or just to Americans, the team led by co-captains and NBA rivals Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, was just as inspiring for many basketball fans around the world.

Operation Gold Medal (and Globalizaton)
What was lost in the Dream Team’s spectacle and their Gold medal-mission, was the far-reaching effects that would reverberate on the game of international basketball.

The original Dream Team was not only talented legends that introduced the masses to their basketball mastery on the world’s largest sports stage, but they were also diplomatic in accomplishing their goal (save for Charles Barkley).

On the other hand, subsequent USA National Teams (Dream Team II, III, etc.) would not represent the United States nearly as well.

With the Dream Team, national teams from around the world competed, lost by 40, and took photos with the legendary squad of basketball greats before, and after the game. But they would also learn valuable lessons on the court that would shape the game into what it is today.

While future iterations of the Dream Team would only alienate these same basketball fans.  This was particularly true with the 1994 team, named Dream Team II, that included abrasive personalities and poor sportsmanship from players like Shawn Kemp, Derrick Coleman, Alonzo Mourning, and Larry Johnson.

After watching Magic, Jordan and Barkley steamroll their adoring competitors, most Americans and many of its NBA players would spend the next two decades assuming the USA would stroll through the World Championships and Olympics.

And as we’ve learned, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Maybe 15-20 years to Improve…”
Whether they knew it at the time or not, the 1992 Dream Team would set the benchmark for their world’s progress, but how long would it take for the world to catch up?

Drazen Petrovic said at the time that it would take “maybe 15-20 years for European basketball to improve.” The way the Americans dominated the field, that seemed like it was hard to believe.

But Petrovic was spot-on with his estimate.  just 20 years after the 1992 Dream Team’s inception, the US Men’s National Team would be defeated in the 2002 World Championships.

But Petrovic would be surprised to hear that it wasn’t a European team as he predicted, but was a team from South America.  Argentina put an end to the USA’s 58-game winning streak in international competition during the 2002 World Championship.  And the US would also be defeated by the former-Yugoslavia and Spain in that same tournament.

However, the first hint that the world was catching up wasn’t in a United State’s loss, but in a close win.  During the 2000 Sydney Olympics,  Lithuania lost 85-83 to the United States in the semi-finals, and Lithuania had a chance to win the game, but their gutsy point guard, Sarunas Jasikevicius missed a three-point shot at the buzzer.

Final Scores were hints of things to come…
If you take a look at the final scores of all the original Dream Teams’ games closely, and you revisit the USA’s losses in the last decade, you’ll see that there’s a pattern in those numbers.

During the Dream Team’s run in 1992, the four teams that lost by the least amount of points during the Tournament of the Americas and the Barcelona Olympics were Croatia twice (33 and 32), Puerto Rico twice (38), Argentina (41), and Spain (41).

As we know now, three of those teams Puerto Rico, Spain, and Argentina have since defeated the United States in international tournaments.  While Croatia has had a tough time rebuilding, International teams are generally cyclical, and their golden years were in those early 1990s.  And it didn’t help when they would lost their legendary leader Drazen Petrovic in 1993 to a car crash.

Argentina, Puerto Rico, and Spain, along with Lithuania (whom lost to the 1992 Dream Team by 51), Greece and the former-Yugoslavia, are the teams that have defeated an NBA-led US National Team since 1992.

One can also track the progress, albeit not-very-scientifically, by the USA’s average margin of victory in the Olympics.

Since 1992, when the Dream Team had an average margin of victory of 45 points, the margin has since dropped throughout the years.

In the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Dream Team III had a margin of victory of 31.75.  In 2000 it fell to 21.6 (including the two-point win against Lithuania), and finally in the 2004 Athens Olympics, it was a mere 13.6 margin, and that was when they won.  In 2004, the USA would lose three times.

“These guys can really play,” said Magic Johnson after winning the 1992 Gold Medal. “There’s going to be a big problem sending them college guys. There’s going to be a big problem. You look over at these guys, Croatians, Lithuanians? You send them college guys over here, it’s going to be a problem.”

And as we’ve found out, it’s just not Europeans that would give the best NCAA guys a problem.  The rest of the world is now giving our best NBA guys a run for their money.  Six losses in the last three international tournaments is not a fluke, and in part, we have the 1992 Dream Team to thank for that.

Links and Resources: Dream Team Justified more Dreams (New York Times), United States 85, Lithuania 83 (Everything2), USA Basketball Official Site (USA Basketball)