It doesn’t take long after you look at the bounty of talent on the U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team before you ask yourself the obvious question: Is this the greatest roster ever assembled?
Answering that question, of course, proves to be difficult.
Two contenders come to mind for the Best Team of All Time label: The 2008 Redeem Team from the Beijing Games and the generally accepted BTOAT, the 1992 Dream Team — the first U.S. Olympic basketball squad featuring professional players.
With all due respect to the Redeemers, the 2008 team falls out of the competition pretty quickly. While the top of the roster was loaded with LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Kobe Bryant, Chris Paul and Dwight Howard all more or less in their prime, the back half leaves a little to be desired.
The likes of Carlos Boozer, Michael Redd, Deron Williams, a then-35-year-old Jason Kidd and Tayshaun Prince don’t quite stack up to the backups on the 2024 squad. This group brought Anthony Edwards, Jayson Tatum, Bam Adebayo and Anthony Davis off the bench in a tune-up against Germany this week — with superstar Kevin Durant out because of injury. (The 2024 squad also had Kawhi Leonard at one point!)
This is really a showdown between 2024 and 1992, a team that dominated the Olympics with an average margin of victory of 44 points. But how do you compare the two rosters?
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You could try to line up the Basketball Hall of Famers on each side ... except the entire 1992 team was inducted into the hall together. Of course, every player on that squad except Christian Laettner was also inducted individually. The 2024 team, on the other hand, probably has three players who have uphill climbs to make the hall — Derrick White, Jrue Holiday and Tyrese Haliburton. The rest are almost certainly locks, though Edwards has a long way to go.
We could throw all the championship rings on the table, and that does become a little revealing. The 1992 team has 23 championship rings collectively. The 2024 team has only 15 rings combined in comparison, with the departure of Leonard costing them two more. In fairness to the Paris squad, guys like Edwards, Tatum, Adebayo and Devin Booker are early in their careers, so they have some time to catch up.
That’s another reason it doesn’t make sense to look at, say, NBA All-Star Game appearances side by side, because one group is very much still adding to its list of accomplishments.
So what, if anything, have we proved so far? Basically that it will be impossible to fully know how great the 2024 team is until everybody’s careers are said and done. Remember, Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen had won the league only twice by the Barcelona Games. Much of their legend was still to be written.
That doesn’t mean the current squad will shy away from any comparisons to the past.
“Do you see this team?” Adebayo said after a practice this month. “When you put a team like this, and you get compared to, like, the Dream Team, it kind of puts it in perspective how great this team can be if we play the right way.”
For now, if the current squad wants to even be mentioned in the same breath as the 1992 squad, it will have to bring home gold against the toughest competition the U.S. has ever faced in basketball. Squads like Greece’s and Serbia’s are led by multiple MVP winners in Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokić, respectively. France has a towering frontcourt featuring the NBA’s reigning defensive player of the year, Rudy Gobert, and budding phenom Victor Wembanyama. Canada’s roster is headlined by stars in Jamal Murray and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
If there’s one way the 2024 roster can definitely compare to the 1992 team, it’s that the defining stars of this era — James, Durant and Stephen Curry — will be taking the floor together.
“The last 15, 17, 18 years, myself, Steph, KD have been the talk of the NBA,” James told ESPN this month. “We don’t know how many more opportunities we’re going to have to even play the game. So to be able to have this moment at this point in our careers is just super special.”
Rohan Nadkarni
Rohan Nadkarni is a sports reporter for NBC News.
