Ranking the Dream Teams

In referring to the informal, yet indelible nickname applied to the 1992 U.S. Men’s Olympic Basketball team, both Michael Jordan and former NBA commissioner David Stern said there was only one Dream Team. They were right, but Jordan and Stern are also men who know how marketing works. And even if the United States is an annoyingly self-serious country that refuses to give its national sports teams colorful nicknames a la Cameroon’s Indomitable Lions, or Jamaica’s Reggae Boyz, every U.S. Men’s Olympic Basketball team since has colloquially been referred to as the Dream Team too. Not all Dream Teams are created equal, however. As an Olympics devotee, I have been there for each of them, and formed some thoughts about...well, almost all of them, as you will see. Indeed, to quasi-honor the latest incarnation, a pleasing amalgamation of American basketball past, present, and future that regardless of Jordan or the late Stern’s only one Dream Team assertion is being heralded in some quarters as the most illustrious assemblage of talent since the original Dreamers, I explored the Dream Team’s brief history by ranking all nine versions preceding the Paris Olympics. And if you say that between Barcelona in 1992 and Tokyo in 2020-in-2021, there have only been eight Dream Teams, I say to you, reader, ha, read on.

Ersatz Official Dream Team Rankings

9. 2016. This team really didn’t thrill me, and that I don’t even have the desire or energy to try and figure out why says it all. 

8. 2004. It was unfortunate that Allen Iverson was the face of the one Dream Team that didn’t win Gold. He was a divisive player, berated as much as he was beloved, fair or not, and yet, unlike so many NBA stars that backed out of their commitment to playing in the 2004 Olympics, he honored his, and because he did and subsequently existed as that team’s most preeminent personality, he functioned as the lightning rod for its myriad critics. And yet, it was also apropos. Because if anybody was tough enough to be the face of the one Dream Team that didn’t win Gold, it was Iverson. 

7. 1996. In those days when the evening NBC Olympic broadcast was all you got and you had to watch whatever they wanted you to watch, I would beg them to cut away to indoor volleyball, or water polo when Dream Team II showed up. They weren’t really a Dream Team, even, more like a Somnambulant Team, a sluggish hardwood colossus that only occasionally rousted itself to excellence, and even then, more out of duty than anything else. They were the unsatisfying follow-up record to the multi-platinum smash. The 1996 Dream Team, in other words, was the answer to what happens after the dream comes true?

6/5. 2000, 2012. Both teams won Gold, even if both teams nearly lost to Lithuania, and yet, what stands out most about these two iterations were not the teams themselves but, respectively, Vince Carter posterizing Frédéric Weis of France and LeBron James’s three-quarter-court bounce pass. And if one might argue the Olympics are as much about athletic excellence, about extraordinary feats of strength, as they are victory and defeat, then Vinsanity and King James exemplified it. 

4. 2008. The only Dream Team that earned a different sobriquet – the Redeem Team. They followed the ignominious 2004 Dream Team, after all, earning storybook redemption when they defeated Spain 118-107 for Gold in a truly dramatic, tense contest that I got up in the middle of the night to watch live, one of my favorite sports-watching experiences of all time. This team’s real legacy, though, might be making their coach, sanctimonious Mike Krzyzewski, lovable, I swear, if only for a moment, when each member of the team hung its Gold Medal around Coach K’s neck (Olympic coaches do not receive medals). The Olympics have a lot of problems, so many problems, so many significant problems, and yet, this moment illustrates how they still retain the power to momentarily turn a bunch of egomaniacal millionaires into little kids having the time of their lives. 

3. 1992. Here is where I confess that as a youthful contrarian who did not take issue with professionals competing at the Olympics but who felt these particular professionals violated the (quasi) sacrosanct space of The Games where swimmers and divers and table tennis players were meant to be stars of the show, I rooted against the one true Dream Team every step of the way. (Also, I just love upsets!) But my perception not just of this team, and its manifestly awesome collection of talent, but of Dream Teams in general has evolved over the years. I see the value and the joy in how one might say that at the Olympics, the Dream Team players and the swimmers and divers and table tennis players are equals. But my eventual fondness for the original Dream Team ran deeper.

The alpha dogs of the Redeem Team and its 2012 Gold Medal-winning redux, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, would occasionally peacock and say one or the other squad could have taken the 1992 Dream Team, a boast at which the originals scoffed. Maybe they could have, maybe not, but I know that their 2022 Netflix documentary, The Redeem Team, cited that squad’s tone-setting moment as one during training camp when several of its players returned in the wee hours of the morning from a night out and saw Kobe already up and going to work out. This was business, see. But no one styled himself after Michael Jordan more than Kobe, and as Jack McCallum recounted in his Dream Team book, Jordan and cronies won the Gold Medal against Croatia in 1992 the very day after playing cards into the wee hours of the morning. If you can’t win the Gold hungover, you’re not as good as the real thing. Case closed.

2. 2020-in-2021. The Pandemic Era Dream Team won Gold but not without some serious struggles and some serious skepticism along the way, epitomized in their coach Gregg Popovich excoriating the critics and the doubters afterwards with a variation of the Nobody Believed in Us speech, the ubiquitous and utterly banal go-to motivational tactic of virtually every modern sports team in existence. If it was unfortunate, given Popovich’s general dislike of cliché, it was also revealing. It was revealing because it demonstrated how over time, the mighty Dream Team has become, in essence, just another team, as well as the warped sense of risk and reward that now goes along with choosing to participate on the squad. In Popovich’s fury, you could sense how the fear of losing overwhelmed the elation of winning, transforming their victory into a herculean maintaining of the status quo. That is melancholy, yet to me, in its own weird way, more valiant than anything the original Dream Team achieved.

1. 1992 College All Stars. Hey, it’s a list of dream teams, right, and what’s the ultimate dream team if not one that never even existed? Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s part of the original Dream Team lore that the only game they lost was a scrimmage against a squad of American college basketball players culled from the 1991-92 season – Chris Webber, Penny Hardaway, Bobby Hurley, Grant Hill, Jamal Mashburn, Allan Houston, Rodney Rogers, and the late Eric Montross. Coach K, an assistant on the 1992 Dream Team, always says their head coach, Chuck Daly, threw that scrimmage, but c’mon, nobody believes Coach K. Now, take that amateur all-star team and add a few other 1992 collegians like Shaq, Christian Laettner, Harold “Baby Jordan” Miner, and I don’t know, maybe future Virginia coach Tony Bennett to run the show when Hurley got tired, or FSU’s Sam Cassell for the same role if you wanted more swagger. To me, someone who has always preferred college basketball to pro, and to quite possibly no one else in the whole world, seeing if that team could have taken Croatia or Lithuania for the Gold, remains the ultimate Olympic basketball fantasy unfulfilled.