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When it comes to the Olympics, there’s nothing quite as much fun as watching the U.S. men’s national basketball team soar its way to yet another landslide victory. While the red, white and blue has dominated in plenty of sports over the years, swimming comes to mind, our men’s basketball team is a true athletic juggernaut. Not satisfied with simply winning games, this is a team that seems to go out of its way to obliterate opponents with as much showmanship as it can muster.
Take DeMar DeRozan. On July 26th, in an exhibition game against China, he did his best to break the Internet as he attempted a 360-degree poster with a defender at the rim at the tail end of a game that the U.S. would eventually win by 50 points. Although the attempt ultimately fell short, the sheer audacity of the move had everyone from the fans on Twitter to teammate Kevin Durant abuzz with glee.
Plenty of people were hailing the dunk attempt as one of the greatest of all time, which seems something of an overstatement, considering it happened at the end of a blowout in what essentially amounts to a practice game, but that’s the spirit of what this team has been bringing to the Olympics for almost a decade. Each move is bigger, better and badder than the last, much to the unmitigated glee of everyone at home and in the stands.
Try to pinpoint a team that can incite a tidal wave of nationalistic fervor better than our men’s basketball team. Every four years, our nation comes together for a handful of weeks, setting aside differences both petty and political, and uniting as one entity with a single purpose in mind: to cheer on our champions. With another Olympic tournament fast-approaching, it bears remembering the road that has led this squad to the levels of domination we see today. Though it’s hard to imagine now, there was a point at which our American superstars weren’t basketball’s global powerhouse.
Twelve years ago, an unfamiliarly disjointed and out-of-step Team USA suffered an embarrassing loss to Argentina at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. Although they eventually took home the bronze, the result may as well have been a last place consolation prize for a team that had been so widely regarded as the clear frontrunner. That loss, followed by a subsequent third-place finish at the 2006 World Championships, proved to be invigorating.
At the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the “Redeem Team” stepped onto the world stage. As evidenced by their nickname, a moniker that pays deliberate homage to 1992’s Dream Team, oft-considered the greatest assemblage of basketball players in the history of the sport, the team was on a mission to not only bring home the gold but also take back the title of greatest in the world by whatever means necessary. As LeBron James famously declared in a feature with TIME magazine, the sentiment that surrounded the team was, “It’s the gold or it’s [a] failure.”
With longtime Duke University men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski at the helm and headlined by a bevy of world-class superstars such as James, captain Kobe Bryant, who recently retired from the NBA, Carmelo Anthony, and Dwyane Wade, the Redeem Team steamrolled its way to an undefeated record and the gold medal, beating each team they faced by an average of almost 30 points. Each win was punctuated by the flair we’ve come to expect from Olympic basketball. There were thoroughly disrespectful crossovers, constant, unrepentant steals and, of course, thunderous dunks. One got the feeling in the audience that the fight just wasn’t fair.
That same feeling of heavyweights with something to prove has persisted. It followed the Americans into London for the 2012 Olympics, where the team notched an Olympic single-game record with 156 points scored against Nigeria en route to another undefeated record and another gold.
On August 6th, the U.S. will enter the ring again, eager to hold tight to the championship belt as the 2016 Rio Olympics get underway. Simply judging by the show that this new group of Olympians, highlighted by household names like Chicago’s Jimmy Butler, the newest Golden State Warrior Kevin Durant, and reigning NBA champion Kyrie Irving, have put on leading up to the Games, the chances of a repeat are high.
In five exhibition games, the American powerhouse has steamrolled its way through the likes of Argentina, China, Venezuela, and Nigeria, posting a total of 514 points while allowing just 299. China, which will face America in its first preliminary round match-up, fell victim to two consecutive defeats at the hands of Team USA, losing by 49 and 50 points respectively.
It’s difficult to say that the taste of that last, humiliating defeat on the world stage still lingers on the tongues of this current roster. Of the players that appeared on the 2004 Olympic team, only Anthony remains, the old stalwart amidst this new nexus of superstars. But even without any recent losses to draw inspiration from, a sense of alpha-dog pride persists. No longer is Team USA competing against the rest of the world. Nowadays, the real competition is against the legacies of those teams that have come and gone.
The hunger for recognition endures as each new iteration eagerly follows in the footsteps of legends past, ready to stamp their own names in the annals of basketball forever.
