The date was September 28, 1988, and the Summer Olympics were roaring along in Seoul, South Korea. The game of basketball saw an intense matchup between, at the time, bitter rivals.
- A Dream Team Of Stars
- The Dream Team Pros vs. College Players
- Coach Daly’s Statement To The Dream Team
- The Dream Team Gets Their Revenge
- Next
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This rivalry wasn’t born on the basket court, it steamed from political differences as the Cold War was at its highest point.
It was the semi-finals game between the United States basketball team and the Soviet Union basketball team.
At this time, no NBA player was eligible to play in the Olympics. In other countries, professional league players were allowed to play only because they were considered amateurs by FIBA.
With pride on the line, the USA team lost to the Soviet Union 82-76. This hurts America. But by the time the 1992 Olympics would come around, the United States team would be ready.
In 1989, FIBA voted to change the rule and allow NBA players to participate.
The Soviet Union proposed to limit the national teams to only two NBA players, but this was unanimously rejected.
On September 21, 1991, the first ten players were selected to the roster:
– Michael Jordan
– Scottie Pippen
– Magic Johnson
– Larry Bird
– John Stockton
– Karl Malone
– Patrick Ewing
– David Robinson
– Charles Barkley
– Chris Mullin
The remaining two roster spots weren’t selected until nearly eight months later, on May 12, 1992. First, Clyde Drexler was selected over Detroit Pistons guard Isiah Thomas.
Then, as a nod for the amateurs who represented the USA in the Olympics throughout history, the U.S. basketball committee decided to select Christian Laettner of Duke University.
Now, with the 1992 Olympics Men’s Basketball Team set, they’d surely go on to dominate any opponent that stands in their way. Right?
A Dream Team Of Stars
If you look at the roster of the 1992 Dream Team, you’d think all that talent would be able to go out and easily play the game together.
Yet, this isn’t the case. If you look back at certain NBA teams that have placed three or more All-Stars on their teams, many times, it doesn’t work out, at least not right away.
The perfect example of this would be the 2004 Los Angeles Lakers. The Lakers already had the dynamic duo of Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal but decided to add two aging legends in Karl Malone and Gary Payton.
On paper, this team looked unbeatable. They were the clear favorites from the beginning of the season.
Even after stumbling during the regular season, they played true to form during the playoffs, easily making the NBA Finals. There they’d face the team with no real star player, the Detroit Pistons.
Those “no star” Pistons would go on to dominate the Lakers, winning the Finals 4-1, ending the Lakers dynasty, and the Kobe-Shaq partnership we all grew to love.
So, when the 1992 USA Men’s Basketball Head Coach, Chuck Daly, started holding practices with the team, he wanted to prove a point to his star-studded team.
The Dream Team Pros vs. College Players
Head Coach Chuck Daly brought in the top college players to form a team and to scrimmage against the Dream Team.
A few notable college players who would go on to be stars in the NBA themselves were Chris Webber, Penny Hardaway, Allan Houston, Grant Hill, and Jamal Mashburn, to name a few.
The idea was to get the Dream Team ready for a live-action play. A way to build team chemistry, even though most people in the media didn’t think team chemistry mattered on a team with this much talent.
This is where Coach Daly’s brilliance came in. It wasn’t the fact he’d bring in top collegiate talent to play the Dream Team, but the strategy he used in the scrimmage.
When the pros played the college kids, they quickly realized this group of young men could really play. They particularly struggled to stop Chris Webber, who dominated at the rim.
Allan Houston shot the ball lights out from three-point land, and point guard, Bobby Hurley, who only ended up playing 269 games in the NBA, successfully attacked the paint repeatedly against the mighty Dream Team.
“I was on the college team that beat the Dream Team, and so we practiced with them in La Jolla,” Grant Hill said in an interview in 2015. Me, Chris Webber, Penny Hardaway, Allan Houston, Bobby Hurley, Eric Montross, Jamal Mashburn, Rodney Rogers. The first day we practiced against them, we beat them by 20.”
“Houston hit 10 threes in the scrimmage. They couldn’t do anything with Webber. I’m telling you, Webber was killing these guys. We all had our moments. Bobby Hurley though, they couldn’t keep him out of the paint.”
Grant Hill stated his college squad defeated the Dream Team by 20 points, but that is debatable. It’s been reported the final score was 62-54.
We may never know the true score since Coach Daly removed the score from the scoreboard before the media entered.
No matter what the score really was, the game looked like it belonged in an episode of the Twilight Zone. But there was more to the story than just a bunch of college kids beating the snot out of the best professionals in the world.
Coach Daly’s Statement To The Dream Team
In an interview on a Dream Team documentary for NBA TV, Larry Bird noticed something interesting about the scrimmage against the college squad.
“They were playing great… then I noticed that Michael Jordan’s not playing.”
That’s right, Coach Daly played Michael Jordan for limited minutes in the scrimmage. He also intentionally made bad coaching decisions. These moves were noticed by Coach Daly’s assistant coach on the Dream Team, Mike Krzyzewski.
“He threw the game,” Coach Krzyzewski said. “If you look at how much Jordan played and how he subbed the guys in, not picking up, not making any adjustments; he knew what he was doing.”
This is a bold statement from Coach Krzyzewski, a statement that Grant Hill disagrees with.
“Coach K said they threw it,” Hill said. “I love coach K, but I’m not buying it.”
Despite whom you believe, Coach Krzyzewski or Grant Hill, the next time these two teams would play, there would be a completely different outcome.
The Dream Team Gets Their Revenge
After being beaten by a group of top college players, members of the 1992 Olympics Men’s Basketball Team had nothing but high praise and respect for their young opponents.
“These young kids were killing us,” Scottie Pippen said about the scrimmage. “We didn’t know how to play with each other.”
Larry Bird had this high praise for Chris Webber:
“Chris Webber was a man. I thought, ‘boy, that guy’s coming into the league. I gotta get out of here’.”
Michael Jordan even chimed in on the group of college players:
“We got killed today. They beat us and they played well. We’re so out of sync and so unsure about things that we feel comfortable within normal situations. We don’t have any continuity at all. If they were in the Olympics, they’d win the silver medal.”
Even though the Dream Team was praising the college players, deep down, they wanted their revenge.
The next and final scrimmage between the two teams, the Dream Team finally looked like the team the media was hyping them up to be.
“The next day, we couldn’t get the ball over half-court,” Grant Hill said about the rematch.
The Dream Team reportedly beat the college players by 100 points the next game. Like Hill said, the defense by the Dream Team was so stifling, they could barely get the ball over the half-court line.
After the second scrimmage, the Dream Team was finally whole as a team. Coach Daly’s plan worked to perfection. They knew they could be beaten.
The Dream Team wouldn’t take their foot off the gas against any team, no matter how low their talent level may be.
This was a beautiful experiment that led to basketball perfection during the Olympic Games. The Dream Team won the Gold, and they won by an average of 44 points.
Thanks to a “thrown” scrimmage, and a redemption scrimmage game, the world got to see who truly were the best basketball players in the world…
Oh, and in the second scrimmage game against the college players, Michael Jordan played a lot more than he did in the first game. It’s safe to say, Jordan took it personally.
