Olympics 2016: How the Redeem Team continues to impact USA Basketball
RIO DE JANEIRO — “The Star-Spangled Banner” played before Team USA took on China Saturday night and all 12 members of the U.S. men’s Olympic team were lined up, heads bowed, with their right hands over their hearts. NBC cameras scrolled down the line and caught center DeMarcus Cousins yawning, which served as a precursor for what fans would eventually wind up doing as the Americans opened up a tournament they are expected to dominate with a ho-hum 57-point win.
Get used to it. Most, if not all, of these games in Brazil will be noncompetitive snooze-fests as the U.S. attempts to win a third consecutive gold medal. But before bemoaning what could be a boring bulldozing of the competition, it might be time to take a step back and admire what has wrought America’s wrath on the world.
So much has been made about how the one-and-only Dream Team in 1992 – led by legends Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird – inspired the world to embrace the game so tightly that it didn’t take long before the gap was eventually closed with humiliating international defeats from 2002-06.
But what can no longer be overlooked is how the Redeem Team in 2008 – led by Carmelo Anthony, LeBron James and Kobe Bryant – not only restored America’s place atop the sport but ensured that the pride to maintain would remain the same eight years later. Spain, Serbia, France, Lithuania and Australia could present some challenges, but Team USA’s greatest opponent in these Olympics will be complacency.
There are “some good teams out there, but it’s about us at this point,” Anthony said after the U.S. trounced China 119-62 at Carioca Arena 1. “We’re not really concerned about anybody else.”
That Anthony can speak with such confidence is a reflection of how far USA Basketball has come since Jerry Colangelo took the reigns of the program and placed coach Mike Krzyzewski in charge of leading the resurrection in 2005. Only 12 years ago, Anthony was a member of that embarrassing team in Athens that is responsible for three of America’s five losses in Olympic competition.
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Anthony immediately understood the significance of what his team accomplished in 2008, but experiences the impact every day as he looks around at a team of mostly 20-somethings determined not to feel the pain he endured in Athens.
“I share those experiences with everybody. Everybody knows. Everybody watching knows what that feeling was. Especially me. I was there,” Anthony said. “For me, I try to build off that, in the back of my mind, I know what that feeling is. I can’t put that into words.”
Kevin Durant watched the U.S. capture gold in Beijing from his home, disappointed that he was the last player cut but motivated to eventually find a place in the program. Durant is now a leader, the man Team USA leans on for a flurry of demolishing buckets – such as the 3-point barrage he used to vanquish China in the first half en route to scoring a game-high 25 points.
“It was very inspiring. I was upset I didn’t make the team, not at Coach K or Mr. Colangelo because I knew I had to wait my turn. But I wanted to be a part of that. I wanted to be a part of that Redeem Team,” Durant said. “But I told myself, keep working and at some point, my time will come. Now, I’m living my dream out.”
A decade after the Dream Team’s conquest in Barcelona, Yao Ming became the first international player with no prior training on American soil to go first overall in the NBA draft. Yao’s arrival did wonders in raising the popularity of the game in China but it has yet to produce an influx of players from that country who could come close to being productive players in the league.
Talent continues to enter the NBA from outside the U.S., but the separation in depth was readily apparent at the start of the second half of Saturday’s win. Seemingly taking mercy on a team that it led by 29, Krzyzewski sat all of his starters and went to his bench in the third quarter – that second unit featured four NBA All-Stars and a fifth player who made first-team All-NBA.
“It’s difficult to compare the teams and the legacies, but you never know what this year will be like,” said Durant, who won his first gold medal in 2012. “It’s a different story, but you can look back and appreciate each one, if you go back and do your research on them. At the end of the day, what’s for sure is the medal and that’s what we’re trying to get.”
The summer after he graduated high school and prepared to begin his lone year at USC, DeMar DeRozan remembers watching the purpose and passion with which the Redeem Team played, never imagining that he would one day have “USA” across his chest.
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“At the time, me playing for the Olympics was far-fetched in my mind. And now to see it coming back around, and me to have the opportunity to do what they did, hopefully somebody watching us, will say something eight years from now,” said DeRozan, whose ferocious two-handed dunk over Chinese guard Zhao Jiwei summarized the lopsided win. “Anything we can do to send off those positive vibes and try to inspire not just to our fans, but the whole country, that’s what it’s all about.”
The days leading up to the 2016 Olympic team’s debut had a couple of embarrassing situations – Draymond Green mistakenly published a photograph of his privates on social media and TMZ reported on Friday that at least three players, including Cousins, DeRozan and DeAndre Jordan, “accidentally” went to a well-known brothel in Rio before leaving after a few drinks. Until the next distraction, the focus has now shifted back to the game instead other stuff.
“Yeah, basketball,” Cousins said, chuckling.
Yeah, basketball. The game the U.S. once again wants to proclaim as its own, using the Rio Olympics as another opportunity to flex the dominance that was re-established in 2008.
“The way that they describe that ’08 team, we were just sitting around talking about it, it was powerful, it was special. We wanted to prove to everybody that we was the best in the world and we went out and proved that,” Anthony said before pivoting to the latest Team USA incarnation. “We won by almost 60 points [Saturday]. We still can be better. That makes us scary. That makes it fun. We wanted to send a statement to the rest of the world. We was locked in. It was about business.”
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