The Atlantic
The U.S.’s most successful sporting export has achieved its greatest success.
"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 that player selection mattered little, strategy and tactics were irrelevant, and rule changes made no difference—the Americans would win anyway. More than that, winning alone was insufficient. They were expected to destroy their opponents.
"But in those destructions, the seeds had been planted, working with a confluence of other factors—the proliferation of the internet, more televised broadcasts globally, and the NBA sending its players around the world to increase their profile—to raise the standard of international play.
"And in the process, America’s most successful sporting export has achieved its greatest success: Americans are no longer the best at it. The U.S. has long cultivated the narrative that it is a place for immigrants, the best and the brightest, to create amazing things and generate extraordinary wealth, and that the example the country sets can inspire people the world over. The story is not entirely true, nor is it so simple. Yet it is a narrative the country seeks to promote nevertheless, and the standard by which I’m suggesting we judge the changes in basketball.". . .
