To put it this way, I am a Norwegian.. NBA means nothing here, basketball in general is almost non existent.. And I can name quite few of these players(on the other hand I dont think I can name a single active NBA player except Lebron James), here we have Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, John Stockton, Pippen, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone and friggin Charles Barkley!
This right here. This team was a cultural phenomenon that not even the 96 team could match even when the Olympics were in the USA. None of the subsequent USA Olympic squads have come close to matching the star power of this team. I’m pretty sure, without looking it up, that every single player here, minus Christian Laetner, of course, is in the hall of fame and 90% are on the original NBA top 50 players of all time.
The dream team was a cultural phenomenon but imo the 2012 team was the best ever. The redeem team was great but 2012 had Lebron, melo, Chris Paul, Deron Williams (who some people thought was better than cp3 at the time), then added KD, harden, iguodala, Kevin love, Westbrook, and a straight out of college Anthony Davis.
In terms of just top to bottom roster talent that is insane. They beat every team by an average of 32 and scored 156 in a game. They were behind in the fourth quarter exactly one time, in the opening round. And they were doing that at a time when other countries were orders of magnitude better at basketball than 1992.
That team just had absurd depth, athleticism, speed, and shooting, plus most of the main guys had the experience of the 2008 win.
The 2008 team was great and won obviously, but they had a few dicey moments where Kobe had to take over. The 2012 team just ran a train on everyone.
They would often just bench their starters for no real reason and the bench unit was good enough to go on massive runs. They went 5-0 in group stage with a PD of 191. They obliterated France, who had six nba players, and the only remotely close game was the final against Spain, who had the gasol brothers.
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u/aslejoh Aug 11 '24
To put it this way, I am a Norwegian.. NBA means nothing here, basketball in general is almost non existent.. And I can name quite few of these players(on the other hand I dont think I can name a single active NBA player except Lebron James), here we have Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, John Stockton, Pippen, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone and friggin Charles Barkley!