I hate the DREAM TEAM

I know this sounds a wee bit blasphemous but I HATE THE DREAM TEAM.  And before you recoil… yes… That Dream Team… the 1992 team… Yes.  The Justice League of Jordan, Bird, and Magic… Yes.  I don’t hate it in a vacuum, but I hate what it has spawned.  The result of its birth has disfigured the NBA (my first love) into a hideous beast, not fit for human consumption.

Back in 1988 my beloved John Thompson experimented with the US Olympic Men’s Basketball team.  The experiment failed miserably. Depressed and hazy USA Basketball decided to drown its sorrows in booze and copious amounts of meaningless sex.  So they called the town whore David Stern. They make a date, all the while Stern plots. As it happens, Stern is a gold-digger so the best way to maximize her situation is to get pregnant.  So she puts on the low cut mini, with the F-Me pumps.  You know the ones.  No man can resist.   She tells USA basketball she’s on the pill so we can go “skin-to-skin”.  USA Basketball says OK, and 4 years later the DREAM TEAM is born. 

The baby was beautiful…the baby was breathtaking. I was 20 years old at the time and all I wanted to do was babysit the Dream Team.  The summers of 1992 was magical. Seeing these guys play together was a cool treat served to us by the basketball gods on a hot August day. Little did we know that treat would turn trick and ruin the NBA.

Initially the Dream Team was a huge success.  Stern got what she wanted.  The NBA was a global brand which opened up new revenue streams.  The pie gets bigger so the slices get bigger. In a competitive arena there is great value in creating a zero-sum-game.  When you have a small pie the competition for that pie is immense.  A bigger pie means that some can get full after just having a slice. 

The 1992 Dream Team removed HATE from basketball.  And basketball is the lesser for it.  Isiah Thomas and Magic Johnson were best friends when Magic was doing all the winner, but Isiah noticed a change when he decided to go after what Magic had.  Isiah realized that on the court he needed to HATE his opponent in order to defeat him.  He needed to play with furious anger to WIN. 

People don’t understand how competitive basketball is.  They look at a game decided by 16 points and call it a blow-out. When all it means is that a team was better by 2 baskets in each quarter over the course of a 48 minute game.  Over 90% of NBA games are decided by 8 points or less, meaning the difference is 1 basket per quarter.  This in a league where both teams shoot between 45-55% on any given night.  The HATE is what gets you over the top. That HATE gets you to that loose ball, that extra rotation. HATE allows you to take that really hard foul.  Remove the HATE and you get mediocre outcomes.

Letting great players play together was a mistake.  They learned to like it.  And as the money got bigger, getting more help was the ultimate WIN/WIN.  No one wants the Barkley, Malone, Ewing Legacy, but why does no one want the Isiah Thomas Legacy either. He beat the 2 BEST ORGANIZATIONS OF ALL TIME.

So after the Dream Team you see things like. Clyde Drexler being okay with playing on Olajuwon’s team.  Glenn Rice and Horace Grant okay playing with Shaq and Kobe.  Gary Payton, and Karl Malone okay with chasing it.  This all culminating with the BIG 3 in Boston, Miami, and now the Four Horsemen in Golden State.  Kevin Durant just lost to Golden State four weeks ago in HISTORIC fashion, his teammate got kicked in the nuts not once but twice, and he has NO HATE in his heart for them.  He joins them 28 days later.  WOW. 

If you asked David Stern to go back to 1988 and posited him the question what would she have done different? I bet you she would say “I would have used protection, or tied my tubes in 1993.”  Don’t get me wrong we love the baby, but we don’t love what it grew up to become.