The Dream Team’s nightmare

(This is Bringing the Heat, an as-often-as-I-feel-like-it feature where I say something that will probably get me yelled at on Twitter.)

Every so often, the question pops up in some form or another as to whether the current U.S. Olympic basketball team would beat the Dream Team. The responses, in my anecdotal surveying tend to be fairly mixed, but the popular agreement, I think, is that the Dream Team would still run things.

And no. No, no, no, no, no.

If you take the best collection of NBA players right now, or the U.S. Olympic team, or assemble it any way you want, today’s players would smoke the Dream Team off the court. (This is in a time machine, “pick up Jordan and company in 1992 and drop them in the present for a basketball game” scenario. No modern training or nutrition or whatever.) It wouldn’t even be a game. I’ll even take it a step further: If you put the ’92 Dream Team in the NBA right now and had them play the season, it wouldn’t even make the playoffs.

First off, we gotta chill on the deifying of the Dream Team. It was at its time the best basketball team ever assembled, and it ran circles around the other teams in the Olympics. They were also playing a mishmash of players who weren’t in their stratosphere. At a glance of the Croatian (silver medal) and Lithuanian (bronze medal) rosters that year, I count seven — five Croats, two Lithuanians — who played in the NBA, and only two — Toni Kukoc and Arvydas Sabonis — who you actually have strong reason to know today. Sure, some of those guys were big-time pros and star players in their home countries, but this was still not a who’s who of basketball in 1992.

In other words, I could put together a quiz bowl dream team of Ken Jennings and James Holzhauser and Brad Rutter and it would be a great group and they’d roll over the local middle school academic team, but the margin of victory wouldn’t really tell you much. It’s great that the Dream Team won their games by an average of almost 50 points, but it isn’t actually that informative.

Also, it’s worth keeping in mind that, of the Dream Teamers, four (Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Clyde Drexler, John Stockton) were over 30, including Bird at 35, and a 32-year-old Magic who was in the middle of his HIV absence. It was definitely a who’s who, but a lot of the guys were definitely past their prime.

And finally, the biggest reason: Athletes today are so damn much better. We know intuitively that if we put an athlete from today against his counterpart in, say, 1940, the guy now is going to run the joint. But sometimes we underestimate just how different these things are. An athlete today is worlds better than his grandfather (metaphorically), but he’s also miles better than his father (again, metaphorically). If you want to argue that Michael Jordan is the best basketball player of all time, I might disagree, but it’s a conversation between him and LeBron James. But if you want to argue that Jordan is the best player to ever play basketball, I’ll laugh you out of the room, because mere era differences are enough to swing it LeBron’s direction. In a time machine scenario, LeBron would roll Jordan without much effort, and only MJ’s legendary competitiveness would even make it interesting.

This goes for every sport. If you put the ’72 Dolphins in the NFL today, they’d go 0-16 (or 17, I guess — that’ll take some getting used to) and lose embarrassingly in every game, and they’d only do that well if you gave them some invincibility spell that prevented them from dying in the first quarter of the first game at the force of the hits. But even the 1995 Super Bowl champion 49ers would struggle in a big way in today’s game. And yes, Mike Trout is a better pure baseball player than Ty Cobb, but he would also make Tim Raines or Dale Murphy look silly. Guys now are just so much better that any comparison that ignores the context of the time and ability relative to their peers just eliminates any sort of balance. The modern players will win it 150 times out of 100.

This is not an insult to the Dream Team! They were fantastic for what they were, and for a long time were the best basketball team every formed. They were great. But they were also put together almost 30 years ago and, you know, time passes.

Would the Dream Team be the worst team in the NBA in 2020? Probably not. The Cavs and Warriors and Timberwolves and some other teams were really bad. But if you show 1992 Scottie Pippen and David Robinson some warmup videos of, I don’t know, Giannis Antetokounmpo or Luka Doncic, and they’d be calling the local exorcist. Zion Williamson would have Patrick Ewing in tears, and James Harden would be laughing at John Stockton for an hour and a half.

When the season ended, the 30-35 Orlando Magic were in line for the eighth seed in the Eastern Conference. The ’92 Dream Team would have to battle them for that last slot. And I think they’d lose.