Kobe’s wrong, Barkley’s right!

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.