Why I Want Silver Or Bronze

Well, for one thing, I've always preferred the appearance of silver (and white gold, and platinum) to traditional yellow gold.

But no, I'm here to briefly talk about why I want the US Men's Basketball Team to not win the gold medal they are being widely, if cautiously, favored to win. I think the so-called "Redeem Team" needs to lose, and American men's basketball needs to keep losing, for it's own good. I don't want them to win until they've gotten it right and won for the right reasons.

The original Dream Team, and the only one worthy of the name, was the team we sent to the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, the first time the US had sent a team of professionals to international competition. The Dream Team was, first of all, that; more than any other international team it truly had a near-lock on the consensus best American-citizen NBA players of its era; the current team doesn't compare because it doesn't have guys like Tim Duncan or Kevin Garnett on it. Not only was the Dream Team almost exclusively composed of the very best players of its era, it also happened to represent a moment of particularly rich talent from the 80s/early 90s era of American basketball which hasn't been equalled until the last few years. TEN of the guys on that team were also on the NBA's 50 Greatest Players (from the first fifty years) list compiled in, I think, 1996. So the Dream Team was Dream-y. They also didn't really give much of a damn about their competition, and frankly they didn't need to. Famously, Charles Barkley was asked what he knew about their upcoming opponents, the Angolan team, and Barkley responded something like "I don't know much about them except that they're in trouble." It's vaguely possible that the coaching staff did some scouting, but I highly doubt the players listened to it; the talent gap was so enormous that the concept of having to spend time thinking about the best way to defeat an opponent would have been received as mildly insulting by someone like Larry Bird or Michael Jordan. The opposing players, too, were star-struck. Many asked for autographs, and Toni Kukoc, soon to be of the Chicago Bulls but currently playing for the Yugoslavian team and one of the best non-American players in the world, pissed off a lot of people by claiming that if the American Dream Team played an international Dream Team assembled from the best players from every other country, the Americans would still kick ass and take names (and sign autographs). And he was almost certainly right.

That wouldn't be the case today. I'd have to think more about the composition of a global non-American All Star team, but any team with a starting lineup of, say, Yao Ming, Dirk Nowitzki, Andrei Kirilenko, Manu Ginobili, and Steve Nash, and guys like Pau Gasol, Tony Parker, and Hedo Turkoglu coming off the bench, is at least a fair matchup for the current Olympic team. Over the past ten years there's been a shift in the public attitude of American basketball players, from the continuing casual assumption that they're the best of the best and they don't need to worry about it to the current proclamation that "Hey, these other guys are really good, we believe we're going to win but we absolutely respect these players and can't take them lightly." The problem is that I don't really believe that to be true. NBA players obviously respect their All-Star fellow peers, guys like I named in the imaginary starting lineup, but nobody on the American team in 2004 gave a moment's thought to the burning question of "How are we going to stop Carlos Arroyo?" The result was that the Puerto Rican point guard carved up the Americans and absolutely humiliated them, which was doubly depressing because Arroyo was an NBA player and not an especially good one. (Arroyo continued to play in the NBA, winning bigger contracts but never quite equalling the performance he gave in that game and never cementing his status as starting-quality. He just this summer signed a contract to play in a Spanish league.) I believe that the players actually do read and think about scouting reports now, but I still think there's an attitude on their part that needs adjusting; the mealy-mouthed clichés about how "We've just go to play as well as we can and show we're the best" barely pass muster as media-comment in the NBA, where you're at least expected to drop some Basketball 101 clichés as well.

But really, truly, I think the organization of USA Basketball needs an overhaul. It was apparently getting one four years ago when Jerry Colangelo, a figure of aging respect league-wide, the former owner (and current executive) of the Phoenix Suns, was made basically the American Basketball Godfather. However, all the talk about how they were going to implement a new approach, weren't necessarily going to recruit star player but were instead shooting for the best possible team, how you had to demonstrate a multi-year commitment to USA Basketball not only as a show of good faith and dedication but as a necessary attempt to replicate the chemistry the international teams have built up over years of playing with each other...all this has been overtly upheld but subtly undermined. I could say a bunch more, but I'll confine myself to note that some of the final player selections should be eyebrow-raising in light of the criteria I laid out above, and suggest playing favorites both with Colangelo and the team's coach, Mike Krzyzweski, but also on the part of the team's sponsor. Eleven of the twelve players have Nike contracts, and the sole non-Nike player, Dwight Howard, is marginalized in the semi-official video documentation of this team, and photographed in such a way that he can hide the offending logos on his shoes and, as a concession to his own shoe company, hide the Nike logo on his uniform. Supposedly the shoe companies are leaking some of their juice, but never ever ever underestimate how powerful they are in the world of basketball.