With the right metric, that can be surprisingly accurate, but there’s one issue here: Olympic tournament basketball is a different beast. The general approach is to use a metric, weigh by the number of minutes everyone plays (or is projected to play), and calculate a weighted mean. You may see a handful of other articles using some advanced individual stats to determine how great certain teams are. Then there’s the issue of international team strength: the game has expanded in other countries over the years. With only a handful of games, we can’t truly state how good every team was. In fact, using a different but valid penalization technique, the penalization was even more severe. Ridge regression penalizes numbers for better predictions, and there are so few games that the penalization is heavy. Why are the ratings so much smaller than the SRS ones, and what’s ridge regression? Both questions are actually important here. You come to the same conclusion - the 1992 Dream Team “wins” with a rating of 12.9 compared to 9.2 for the 2012 squad. I calculated similar team ratings but with ridge regression.
The older team wins here again with an SRS of 43.5 versus 28.0. Basketball-Reference’s SRS is popular for dealing with this, and it’s available for the Olympic tournaments both for 19. Raw point differential, of course, is pretty basic, so are we missing any key information? You can adjust for schedule strength, which is pretty important for a tournament because, naturally, teams don’t have identical schedules. The 2012 “ Regime Team” is outclassed there. They won every game by at least 30 points. However, the 1992 team is even more impressive, with a point differential of nearly 44 points per game. The 2012 team clobbered opponents, beating them by an average of 32 points per game. The 73-win Golden State Warriors team, for example, beat opponents by a little under 11 points per game - and that’s from arguably the most successful regular season ever. Since both Team USA squads were undefeated in the Olympics, one can look to another measure of team strength: point differential. But, again, most teams have weaknesses, and the 2012 roster can take advantage of the shorter three-point line significantly more than the original Dream Team. I just know that the two teams are fairly evenly matched except for the frontcourt, where the 2012 team could be out-rebounded and out-muscled. I do want to strongly state that a gut test, or eye-test, for these two teams has a difficult problem to overcome: how much has basketball progressed since then, and, consequently, will the 1992 squad be ever-so-slightly outdated to the extent that they could lose this fictional match-up? I don’t know how LeBron James will fare against Jordan or Pippen, no one does, so let’s not pretend like we know with certainly. Also, remember that not everyone was in his prime in 1992 - e.g.
Both sides have weaknesses, relative to each other. And to take advantage of their size, they’d need to slow the pace more, which was not how they destroyed opponents. They also had Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, Chris Mullin, and Larry Bird. I imagine “old-school” purists will note the defensive power of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and David Robinson (or Patrick Ewing) together, but the team isn’t perfect there.
But the smaller 2012 team won’t have the advantage of overwhelming athleticism, which they relied on versus larger, more immobile international opponents in the last Olympics. Looking at the two rosters below, there’s a glaring difference - the 1992 team is much larger with two traditional centers, two traditional power forwards, Christian Laettner, and even some larger perimeter players.Ī size advantage isn’t key for the Olympics, as the Americans have routinely run through other teams in the last few tournaments with smaller roster. An eye on match-upsĪt the first level of analysis, you can look at the appropriate matchups of the two squads. But what would happen if those two teams clashed? Who would win? The answer is complicated, clouded by tall tales and few trustworthy numbers, but the question will never die. With the 2016 Summer Olympics opening soon, we’re all going to hear plenty about the mythic 1992 Dream Team and how the current generation cannot compare - even the zenith of the Coach K-USA Basketball era, the 2012 Summer Olympics roster.