Kobe Bryant believes the current Olympic team could beat the 1992 Dream team. |
Would
somebody…anybody…please tell me what the hell is wrong with aging Los Angeles
Lakers superstar shooting guard Kobe Bryant?
Just about
two weeks ago, Bryant made the foolish suggestion that the current 2012 Olympic
basketball team would beat the ballyhooed, beloved and now, legendary, Dream
Team that featured 11 NBA Hall of Famers back in 1992 when they took the world
by storm as the first NBA players eligible to compete in the Olympics.
My
thoughts?
Bryant is
taking some sort hallucinogenic because there is absolutely no way today’s
group of players, particularly in the frontcourt – and it’s easy to see that
the ’92 Dream Team would likely blow out their counterparts of today – and
guess what, m man Charles Barkley – among others – agrees.
"Well,
just from a basketball standpoint, they obviously have a lot more size than we
do -- you know, with (David) Robinson and (Patrick) Ewing and (Karl)
Malone and those guys," Bryant told Yahoo! Sports a couple of weeks
back.
Hall of
Fame forward Charles Barkley basically laughed at Bryant’s suggestion in an
interview on The Mike Missanelli Show on 97.5 The Fanatic Philadelphia .
"Oh
yeah, that's no disrespect," Barkley said. "I ain't got to badmouth
them. But like I said, their point guards weren't going to beat us. That's a
no-brainer."
I have to
agree with Barkley, there’s no way today’s Olympic hoops team would have been
able to stop – or even slow down – the 1992 Dream Team’s frontcourt.
After
opening mouth and promptly inserting foot, Bryant then made an even more
foolish comment and one that showed he may need a little bit of help with his
math homework too, providing me, Barkley and every other sensible hoops fan
with a load of laughter.
"But
they were also -- some of those wing players -- were also a lot older, at kind
of the end of their careers. We have just a bunch of young racehorses, guys
that are eager to compete. So I don't know. It'd be a tough one, but I think
we'd pull it out."
"I
just started laughing," Barkley said. "How old is Kobe Bryant? He's
34? And he's calling us old? At the time, we were only like 28, 29. Michael
Jordan and me were the same age. We were both 29. Other than Kobe , LeBron and Kevin Durant,
I don't think anybody else on that team makes our team."
I have to
agree with Barkley that, outside of the aforementioned trio, no player on
today’s Olympic team even makes the 1992 Dream Team, though I will admit that
Chris Paul could easily replace John Stockton in my opinion, but then again,
Isaiah Thomas should have been a member of the 1992 Dream Team and he wasn’t
so, in that case, Paul wouldn’t have made the ’92 squad.
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