The Atlantic

Why It’s Good That Americans Don’t Dominate Basketball

The U.S.’s most successful sporting export has achieved its greatest success.
Source: The Atlantic

During the 1996 NBA All-Star Game, the commentators on the television broadcast began discussing the chances that Jason Kidd, then a second-year guard for the Dallas Mavericks, would make that year’s U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team.

Kidd was a prodigious young talent, the commentators agreed, but his outside shooting remained a problem. “It might be the one thing that could keep him off,” Matt Guokas, one of the commentators and a former NBA head coach, said on the broadcast. Guokas’s broadcasting partner, Steve Jones, laughed. “They’re winning by 40-something points,” he said, referring to the typically lopsided victories of the “Dream Team,” “and we gotta worry about outside shooting?”

So dominant was the U.S. men’s basketball team in the 1990s

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