Team USA just finished their exhibition tour before the 2024 Paris Olympics with a 5-0 record but the star-studded group failed to impress while doing so. They nearly lost their last two games to South Sudan and Germany, and those displays have led to Charles Barkley claiming that the 1992 Dream Team was better than this group.
“It puts me in a bad mood, when they compare the Dream Team (1992) to this current team… I hope that after seeing these results there are no doubts about who is the best team, all our victories were by more than 30 points, without asking for a single timeout. “
With this team being headed by LeBron James and Stephen Curry, there was talk of it being arguably the greatest one ever assembled. When a group gets that tag, they are expected to dominate on the court, but that wasn’t the case against South Sudan and Germany.
It took some heroics from LeBron to come away with a 101-100 win over South Sudan and he came up big in the clutch once again in the 92-88 win over Germany. You expected better from this group but with that being said, these were just exhibition games at the end of the day and Kevin Durant didn’t play in them either.
This 2024 team should only be judged on what they do in games that matter, not these contests. The 1992 Dream Team infamously lost a scrimmage 62-54 to college players and that isn’t held against them and rightly so, because it didn’t matter.
Despite the hiccups in the exhibition games for this current squad, I still expect them to win the gold at the Olympics. Will they be as dominant as the Dream Team was? There is absolutely no chance of that.
The 1992 Dream Team called zero timeouts and beat their opponents by an average of 43.8 points at the Olympics. I don’t think this group potentially not being quite as dominant should be what determines a debate on which is the better team though, simply because the level of competition is not the same.
That’s almost seven times the number that the Dream Team had to play against. The game has well and truly gone global and domination like what we saw in 1992 is impossible to replicate now. Do I think that team would win the gold if they played today? Yes, but they wouldn’t be anywhere near as dominant as they were back then. As for who would win a match between 1992 and 2024, I think it could go either way.
Shaquille O’Neal Believes His 1994 Team Would Beat The 1992 Dream Team
Shaquille O’Neal could have also been part of the 1992 Dream Team, but Christian Laettner ended up being picked over him. To this day, he isn’t all too pleased about that and O’Neal claimed his 1994 team would beat the 1992 Dream Team.
“I should have made Dream Team 1. So I made the Dream Team 2, but that was the World Games. But we didn’t make the 92 team. They wanted to appease me and put me on the 94 team, the World Games, and we won that.”
“Then they put me on the Dream Team 3. It was a joke. It was easy. But now it’s not so easy. Like, I know now you got LeBron and those guys coming back.”
“It ain’t gonna be easy like it used to be. And that’s scary. I remember when we were here and Europe was here, but now it’s, the gap is really, really close. Dream Team 2 could have beat Dream Team 1. 94 is Dream Team 2.”
While I think the 2024 team could beat the Dream Team, I don’t think that the 1994 team could have. It had big names like O’Neal, Reggie Miller, Alonzo Mourning, and Dominique Wilkins, but they weren’t good enough to beat that Dream Team.
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