Golden State Warriors forward Harrison Barnes (40) gestures after scoring against the Cleveland Cavaliers during the second half of Game 7 of basketball’s NBA Finals in Oakland, Calif., Sunday, June 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
Marcio Jose Sanchez, AP
Preparations are underway for the U.S. Olympic basketball team. Time to pull the roster together for the gold medal march. Roll call, please
LeBron James? He’s taking his talents to … the off-season. “I could use the rest,” he said.
James Harden? He’s resting, too.
Stephen Curry? Ditto. He wants to rest up and heal up late-season knee and ankle injuries. (And maybe it’s just as well, given his play in the finals.)
Chris Paul? You guessed it. He’s choosing rest over Rio.
Russell Westbrook? He declined, but thanks for asking (he didn’t say anything about resting).
You can also forget about Gordon Hayward, John Wall, Blake Griffin, Kawhi Leonard, Anthony Davis and LaMarcus Aldridge, too. They all declined. Damian Lillard was a late addition to the original pool of 30 players considered for the team, and even he withdrew his name.
This is embarrassing. Players bled the U.S. team as if it were Cuba. Maybe they thought they were being invited to something really terrible, such as “The View.”
Fortunately, they found a few volunteers for the Olympic gig. The roster will include Kevin Durant, one of only two players with Olympic experience, and Carmelo Anthony, who will be making his fourth Olympic appearance. Anthony can’t win in the NBA, but in the Olympics he’s won two gold medals and one bronze.
The rest of the 12-man roster, which includes nine NBA All-Stars and three members of the Golden State Warriors (it would’ve been four if Curry had said yes): DeMarcus Cousins, Draymond Green, Kyle Lowry, Paul George, Jimmy Butler, DeAndre Jordan, DeMar DeRozan, Klay Thompson, Kyrie Irving and Harrison Barnes.
Harrison Barnes?
It’s certainly no Dream Team. It’s not even a daydream team. Apparently, the novelty has worn off for NBA players, and if the vast majority of top players don’t want to play in the Olympics, it might be time to return to the use of collegiate players.
But even if the NBA’s best players accepted the invitation, there will never be another Dream Team, which of course took the 1992 Games by a perfect storm. And as long as we’re going with the storm metaphor, it occurred only because of a perfect storm of events.
There will never be a collection of players playing in the NBA at the same time that can match the Dream Team, which included Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Karl Malone, John Stockton, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Clyde Drexler, among others, all of them were in the prime of their careers. It was a team so deep in talent that Isiah Thomas was left at home and no one missed him.
There was a wave of nationalism at the time that rallied the superstars to represent their country in 1992. For decades Americans had dominated the Olympics by using collegians — and then they began to falter. At the 1988 Games, the U.S. team finished with a bronze medal.
To further drive home the point that the slip was real. Americans finished second in the 1987 Pan Am Games, second in the 1989 FIBA Americas championship, third in the 1990 World Cup and third in the 1991 Pan American Games.
Rules were changed, allowing professional athletes to compete in the Olympics, and the NBA just happened to have a historic generation of players waiting for the call.
They were called the greatest collection of basketball players ever. They played eight games in the 1992 Olympics. They won by a margin of 43.8 points per game. They called zero timeouts. That’s pretty much all you need to know.
Each Olympics since then, the team has become less and less dreamier, the nadir coming in the 2004 Games when NBA players were relegated to the bronze medal. (For the record, Americans have won 14 of 17 Olympic golds in which they participated, which excludes the boycotted 1980 Games.)
And now the NBA stars are ambivalent about the Olympics. They’re sitting out the Games because of injuries, ongoing free agency business, and fatigue from the excruciatingly long NBA season.
So the NBA will send its junior varsity team to the Olympics. Durant and the Warriors will probably still be good enough to win the gold medal, but it’s not the juggernaut the team could’ve been.
Doug Robinson’s columns run on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Email: drob@deseretnews.com
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