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For the second time in history, European basketball may have caught up with us.
When the U.S. men’s team opens Olympic play in Paris, the current members will have it as hard as ever to win the gold medal. It’s because the NBA players will be facing mostly their professional brethren.
Most of the 30 NBA teams have foreign players, who are the stars on some of them. Too many to list, but you know who I mean because your favorite team might have several.
The foreign-born players join professional teams in their homeland during the off-season, and the competition Team USA faces will be stiff due to the talent of Europeans and their lack of fear playing against NBA stars on the Dream Team.
This happened one time before, in 1976 in Montreal, when Dean Smith coached the amateur Americans with four UNC players and seven from the ACC. Smith put together such a roster because he not only wanted talent but also players who knew how he coached and would abide by him.
Phil Ford, the point guard on that ’76 team, said he “knew how good the competition would be since they were professionals from other countries and we were college kids” with only a few practice games going to Canada.
Ford remembers the criticism Smith received after also naming Tar Heels Walter Davis, Mitch Kupchak and Tom LaGarde to the team, along with Duke’s Tate Armstrong, Maryland’s Steve Sheppard and N.C. State’s Kenny Carr from the ACC. Indiana’s Quin Buckner and Scott May, plus Notre Dame’s Adrian Dantley, Tennessee’s Ernie Grunfeld, and Michigan’s Phil Hubbard were also chosen.
The foreign opponents also had some great college players, such as Butch Lee of Puerto Rico, which lost 95-94 to the U.S. Lee played collegiately for Marquette, the school that would beat UNC in the 1977 NCAA championship game.
Yugoslavia lost two close games to the Americans, the second for the gold medal in Montreal. Their star was Serbian Drazen Dalipagic, the 1978 Yugoslavian athlete of the year who was named one of FIBA’s 50 greatest players in 1991. Ford calls Dalipagic one of the best players he ever faced.
“It stuck with me that was the first time I ever heard Coach Smith say winning is the most important thing,” Ford related. “He wasn’t preparing the team for life. It was put together to win the gold medal.”
And it did. “We went in thinking that we could win, but we knew it wasn’t going to be easy. We didn’t go in really cocky like we were gonna walk through it. So we were prepared to play every game,” Ford said.
USA flag-bearer LeBron James and his teammates also better be prepared in Ol’ Paree!
Featured image via Associated Press/Kin Cheung
Art Chansky is a veteran journalist who has written ten books, including best-sellers “Game Changers,” “Blue Bloods,” and “The Dean’s List.” He has contributed to WCHL for decades, having made his first appearance as a student in 1971. His “Sports Notebook” commentary airs daily on the 97.9 The Hill WCHL and his “Art’s Angle” opinion column runs weekly on Chapelboro.Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees, and you can directly support our efforts in local journalism here. Want more of what you see on Chapelboro? Let us bring free local news and community information to you by signing up for our newsletter.
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