Photo Credit: WENN
Now that the Olympics are behind us and both teams can be compared on the stat sheet, does Kobe Bryant need to apologize for his douche bag comment he made against the 1992 Olympic team comprising of NBA greats like Magic, Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Larry Bird & others?
Here’s Kobe’s comment to members of the press in Vegas right before the Olympics (Yahoo Sports):
“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 said. “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,” Bryant continued, the trace of a smile beginning to play its way across his face. “It’d be a tough one, but I think we’d pull it out.”
Capital New York did a comparison of the two teams:
But following the U.S.’s 107-100 victory over spain in Sunday’s gold-medal game, we can at least compare the stats of the two teams.
In eight games, the 1992 team shot 56.5 percent, while the 2012 team shot 52.3 percent. But the 2012 was more accurate from three-point range, on a greater volume of long-range attempts.
Defensively, the 1992 team has a major edge over their 2012 counterparts. Both teams held opponents to roughly the same percentage from three-point range, with 1992 checking in at 30.5 percent, 2012 at 33.2 percent. But the 1992 team’s opponents shot 39.3 percent on two-pointers; 2012′s opponents shot a far better 51.8 percent from two-point range.
The difference in defensive prowess on twos can be largely explained by a pair of factors. One is that the 1992 team had two of the finest defensive centers ever in Patrick Ewing and David Robinson. The 2012 team had Tyson Chandler, who averaged just 11 minutes per game, Anthony Davis, who averaged less than eight minutes per game, and long stretches without an interior defensive presence at all.
The other factor, and one that simply cannot be ignored, is that the competition is far better in 2012 than it was in 1992. The Lithuania team the U.S. destroyed in the 1992 semifinals probably would have struggled against teams like France and Argentina, which didn’t even medal in 2012. The Croatia team from the 1992 finals simply isn’t in the same class as the Spain team that gave the U.S. a fight for the gold on Sunday.
The 2012 team defeated its opponents by an average of 32.1 points, which is a lot less impressive than the 1992 team’s 43.8 point average.
But Kevin Durant’s Charles Barkley-like performance, along with LeBron James’ Olympic run, which easily outpaced Michael Jordan’s, will also be part of the debate going forward.
