The Last Great Men’s Olympic Basketball Team
August 9, 2008 by Sandy Mitchell
Filed under Basketball, Sports Rumors
A guest blog from Kevin Hunter, of b5media’s “College Fast Break“:
As Kobe, LeBron, Wade and Company try too bring back the gold and make up for the 2004 debacle where we can home without it for only the third time in history, it reminds me of the last great U.S. Olympic Men’s Basketball team that won the gold medal.
Prior to the Dream Team and when the Olympics was truly for amateur competition (at least in the U.S.), we sent our best college basketball players to take on the best in the world where we easily showed them who was boss.
The “Dream Team” in 1992 featured hall of famers Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, Michael Jordan, John Stockton and Karl Malone, just to name a few. Many would consider this team to be the best Olympic men’s basketball team of all time. The U.S. steamrolled over the competition and all hope faith was restored as the gold was awarded again to its rightful owners.
As great as the Dream Team was, it’s hard to consider it as the best team the U.S. has send to the Olympics.
I present to you the 1984 U.S. Team!
The 1984 team featured college all-stars that would go on to dominate in the NBA. The team featured such future stars as Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Alvin Robertson, Wayman Tisdale, Vern Fleming, Sam Perkins, and Chris Mullin and was coached by Indian’s Bobby Knight. This team was so good and had so much talent that future NBA hall of famers Barkley and Stockton were cut! This was the last team with college players to win the gold.
One may say, “Well, there was the Soviet boycott of the 1984 Olympics, so how do you know that they would have beaten them?”
We may never know, but you can’t deny how great this lineup was. The U.S. crushed its competition and easily won the gold with an 8-0 record. Every member of the team went on to play in the NBA with Jordan and Ewing having hall of fame careers.
The 1988 team that featured David Robinson, Danny Manning, Mitch Richmond and Dan Majerle ruined the chances of another amateur team ever playing in the Olympics again as they faltered and settled for the bronze medal.
That’s what makes the 1984 team so special. It was a team full of players who truly knew how to play as a team. And it showed (at least at that time) that our best amateurs could play against the world’s best.
It would be the last time the world would be beaten up by a bunch of college kids.
