![]() ![]() In fact, the Dream Team’s dominance – and the global audience of eyeballs it brought to the sport – is arguably the greatest legacy of the 1992 Olympic Games, period. “I don’t think Dirk or Yao or the world is inspired by basketball if it wasn’t for ,” veteran sports reporter Marc J. Many of the biggest names among foreign-born NBA players – some of whom would go on to play for Team USA in later Olympics – recalled watching the Dream Team dominate on the Barcelona hardwood. Some of those fans became professional basketballers themselves while the NBA season before the games featured just 23 players hailing from outside the United States, the 2022 season saw 120, coming from more than twice as many countries. The Barcelona games were broadcast in 69 countries, transforming viewers around the globe into basketball fanatics. Other players took pictures with the Dream Team before and after the games, human Olympians seizing their chance to immortalize their moment facing off against basketball’s pantheon of gods. During one game, an opposing player was caught gesturing for a teammate on the bench to snap a photo of himself guarding Johnson. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of their biggest fans were their Olympic competitors. ![]() ![]() Now Jordan’s jacket, signed by the shooting guard himself, is open for bidding at Sotheby’s through 28 June.īut the Dream Team didn’t just win (all six of its) games – it won hearts and minds. Surprising no one, on 5 July 1992, the Dream Team beat Venezuela by 47 points, mounted the podium clad in Reebok-crafted American flags and received their gold medals. “It was the most fun I ever had on a basketball court.” “Everybody asks me about that game,” Jordan told the magazine’s Jack McCallum. The most spirited competition that the squad faced was actually during practice Sports Illustrated dubbed a legendary scrimmage match three days before the Olympics as the “greatest game nobody ever saw.” They averaged 117.3 points per game, blowing away every team by double-digit margins and all but two (Croatia and Puerto Rico) by more than 40 points. It would be an insult to say that the Dream Team brought their game like a gun at a knife fight – in fact, the Americans dominated the court like a battle tank. In 1992, Jordan and the rest of the Dream Team were all grown up – ballplayers at the top of their game. Still, they were barely old enough to celebrate with champagne. (This loss reduced the American record in Olympic games to an embarrassing 84–2.) Jordan and Dream Teammates Patrick Ewing and Chris Mullin had been to the Games before, back in 1984 while in college, where the team claimed gold after going undefeated in tournament play. In previous Olympiads, NBA players were forbidden from competing by the International Basketball Federation, but the rule was changed after the Soviet Union beat the Americans in 1988. We simulated the teams against each other 1,001 times in a 48-minute tilt.The original Olympic Dream Team poses for a group photo in Barcelona, Spain. Though the final tally was never disclosed, the Dream Team lost by eight points. Select team upset the Olympic squad in a 20-minute scrimmage. And yet that's just what happened when the U.S. While Chris Webber, Grant Hill, Bobby Hurley, Anfernee Hardaway, Allan Houston, Jamal Mashburn, Eric Montross and Rodney Rogers formed an exceptional corps of college talent in 1992, it's more than a stretch to suggest they could compete with, much less beat, the best the NBA had to offer. While the scrimmage will likely be shrouded in mystery for years to come, 's basketball simulation engine allows us to take the speculation to another level. With little available evidence to explain how such a thing could happen, the public was left to ponder. Shortly after the team's formation, they tested their chops against a group of college stars and lost. The aura surrounding the Dream Team is so strong that even their scrimmages are the stuff of legends. Though their dominance is hardly in need of hyperbole, we can't help but picture players whose abilities were waning (Bird, Johnson) or burgeoning (Robinson, Pippen) as though they were at the apex of their careers in 1992. ![]() The Dream Team's mystique seems to grow with each passing year. ![]()
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