Editor's note: This story was originally published on May 2. Watch an encore presentation of Episodes 3 and 4 of "The Last Dance" on Saturday at 8 p.m. on ABC.
Who belonged on the Dream Team? Was Isiah Thomas denied a deserved spot because of bad blood with Michael Jordan?
"The Last Dance," ESPN's documentary on Jordan and the 1990s Chicago Bulls, has renewed debate about Thomas' absence from the Dream Team. After one episode highlighted Thomas' Pistons leaving the court rather than shaking hands with the victorious Bulls after the 1991 Eastern Conference finals, Thomas lamented the possibility that the action cost him a spot on the 1992 U.S. Olympic team -- the first to feature NBA players, producing the greatest collection of star talent basketball has ever seen.
So should Thomas have made the Dream Team?
MORE: Replay "The Last Dance" Episodes 1 to 4
Let's go back to 1991, when a USA Basketball committee including NBA executives Russ Granik and Rod Thorn was selecting the first 10 players for the Dream Team, to see who belonged on the roster with the hindsight perspective of advanced stats.
Point guards
Essentially, the 10 original Dream Team picks broke down into two point guards, four wings, two power forwards and two centers.
For each group, we'll look at three metrics and two awards to balance current level of play and career accomplishment.
My wins above replacement player (WARP) statistic reflects value in the 1990-91 season, and I've also listed players' career totals through that year. Win%, the per-minute version of WARP, is a forward-looking projection based on the previous three seasons. I've also listed All-NBA appearances over the past three seasons and career All-Star appearances.
According to Jack McCallum's account of the selection process in his book "Dream Team," Thomas had plenty of support from the USA Basketball committee. McCallum quotes the late C.M. Newton, then athletic director at Kentucky, as asking, "Wait a minute. We have a team [the Pistons] that won two straight championships and a coach [Chuck Daly, the head coach of the Dream Team] who coached that team, and we're not taking the best player from that team?"
Ultimately, Jordan's opposition to having Thomas on the team -- as well as the unwillingness of any other member of the Dream Team to advocate for him -- doomed Thomas' chances, per McCallum. But it's worth remembering that the decision might have been more difficult a year earlier, in 1990, with the Pistons coming off their second championship.
By 1991, Thomas was already on the downslope of his career. Limited to 48 games by a wrist injury, he'd averaged a career-low 16.2 points per game during the 1990-91 season. And though Thomas was credited as the most important figure in the Pistons' championship runs in 1989 and 1990, he wasn't an elite contributor during the regular season. He'd last been picked for the All-NBA team in 1986-87, while John Stockton had been chosen each of the previous three seasons as he came into his own as a player.
Given his career accomplishments, Thomas would certainly have been at home on the Dream Team. But if the committee was looking to choose the best point guard as of 1991 to back up Magic Johnson (still a few months away from the HIV diagnosis that would force him into retirement), Stockton was the clear choice. And even Kevin Johnson, an All-NBA selection each of the previous three seasons as well, had a reasonable case as a better player at the time than Thomas.
Wings
The selection of Clyde Drexler as one of the final two players on the roster rectified the committee's biggest oversight in choosing the original group of 10. Drexler was coming off a season in which he ranked eighth in the NBA in WARP and was on the All-NBA second team along with Chris Mullin. He was likely more deserving than Mullin of the last spot on the wing, with Jordan the clear first choice.
The other two picks went to players at different stages of their careers. On pure merit at the time, Larry Bird was a borderline choice. Yet it's impossible to imagine a "Dream Team" that didn't include the three-time MVP and one of the league's best players ever. At the other end, remarkably Scottie Pippen had never made an All-NBA team and had just one All-Star appearance as of his selection. But it was obvious from the Bulls' title run that Pippen had become one of the league's very best wings, which he backed up in 1991-92 as an All-NBA second-team pick.
For all the furor over Thomas' omission, Dominique Wilkins was also a difficult cut. He was closer to his prime, having made the All-NBA second team in 1990-91.
Power forwards
According to "Dream Team," the USA Basketball committee had concerns about Charles Barkley on non-basketball grounds. In March 1991, he'd been suspended a game for spitting at a fan Barkley said was heckling him. (Barkley missed, and instead hit an 8-year-old fan sitting courtside.) It's unsurprising that Barkley's talent won out. He'd been an All-NBA first-team pick each of the previous four seasons.
Kevin McHale had a reasonable case on legacy grounds, having been one of the NBA's top players in the 1980s. But like Thomas, he was four years removed from his last All-NBA appearance. Karl Malone, on the upswing of his career, was clearly the better player in 1991.
Centers
As at power forward, the two choices at center were reasonably clear. Again, Robert Parish had a legacy case, but David Robinson and Patrick Ewing were unquestionably the two best centers eligible for the Dream Team. Nigerian-born Hakeem Olajuwon, the other best center in the NBA at the time, wouldn't be naturalized as a citizen until 1993. He went on to represent the U.S. in the 1996 Olympics.
Last spot
One of the final two spots on the 1992 Olympic roster was earmarked for a college player, a decision McCallum quotes committee member Donnie Walsh as calling "a gift to the college guys." USA Basketball favored consensus national player of the year Christian Laettner over the two players picked ahead of him in the 1992 NBA draft, Shaquille O'Neal and Alonzo Mourning.
Laettner, one of the most accomplished college players ever, didn't have the same impact in the NBA and is the lone member of the Dream Team not in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as an individual player. (The team was inducted into the Hall in 2010.)
That left the committee with one spot for an NBA player in the spring of 1992, by which point the choice of Drexler had become even more obvious. He'd joined Jordan on the All-NBA first-team backcourt in 1991-92 and would soon lead the Portland Trail Blazers to their second Finals appearance in a three-year span. Meanwhile, Thomas' aging Pistons had bowed out of the playoffs in the first round.
Had Drexler been chosen instead of Mullin during the first go-round, a perfectly balanced roster with two players at each position might have convinced the committee to take a third point guard -- which ultimately would have come in handy when Stockton suffered a non-displaced fibula fracture that limited him to four games in Barcelona. In that case, Thomas could have benefited, though Kevin Johnson, Mark Price and even Tim Hardaway (all three picked to the All-NBA team in 1991-92) were coming off better seasons.
To some extent, I suspect the furor over Thomas' omission from the Dream Team has served to make him seem like a more obvious choice than he really should have been at that stage of his career. The record does suggest Thomas would have been on the team if not for Jordan's opposition. Still, if USA Basketball was looking primarily to select the very best players at the time of the 1992 Olympics, the evidence suggests they got it just about right.