In the two-plus decades since the 1992 Olympics, the Dream Team has been celebrated and romanticized. References to it are wistful and reverential. The Dream Team represents perfection. In the basketball world, it was the greatest. How easily we forget that the basketball power structure in the United States thought the idea of having NBA players in the Olympics was repulsive. At the 1989 vote in Munich to allow NBA players in the Olympics, the U.S. organization (later USA Basketball), which
We are live on the air today from 2 p.m. EST until 3 p.m. EDT — and longer if necessary. Guests today are David Lee of the Golden State Warriors and columnist Jan Hubbard, who has some tales to tell about David Stern, Gregg Popovich and the 1992 Dream Team. [Read more…]
For David Stern, the Olympic experience has come full circle. The NBA commissioner has often found himself depicted as an international bully, and nothing could be further from the truth – at least as it applies to past Olympics. The oddity of such a charge is that it occurs only in this country, which leads us to one of the great mysteries of American sports journalism: How is it that so many journalists throughout the world know exactly what happened, yet accomplished