In the run-up to the U.S. men's national team's first pre-Olympic warmup last Thursday, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Charles Barkley spent a great deal of time sniping back and forth about whose Dream Team would win head-to-head.
"It'd be a tough one, but I think we'd pull it out," Bryant said when pressed for a 2012 vs. 1992 prediction.
Jordan countered by scoffing at Bryan'ts assessment. "For him to compare those two teams is not one of the smarter things he ever could have done," he retorted.
Barkley upped the ante ("Other than Kobe, LeBron and Kevin Durant, I don't think anybody else on [the 2012] team makes our team."), and Pippen delivered the biggest boast of all: "I think we could probably beat [the 2012] team by 25."
Who's right? Sadly, we'll never know for sure, but with the help of some advanced stats, we can at least develop an estimate of the talent level with which each U.S. Olympic team was working.
The metric of choice for this exercise is Daniel Myers' Advanced Statistical Plus/Minus (ASPM), which uses box-score data to estimate on-court adjusted plus/minus impact for years in which play-by-play logs aren't available. Based on a weighted three-year average of their ASPM scores (plus a dash of regression to the mean), I created a "true talent" estimate for each NBA player in each historical season.
I then combined that number with each Olympic team's distribution of minutes, coming up with the expected margin of victory every Team USA roster would put up against a team of average NBA players from that season.
The best U.S. team since 1992? The original Dream Team, which would be expected to rout a team of average NBA players from 1992-93 by 23.1 points per 100 possessions. The key ingredient was Jordan, their top minutes-earner and, not coincidentally, owner of the best true talent rating of any Team USA player in the sample -- an expected impact of plus-8.9 points per 100 possessions when he was on the court. Even on the greatest team ever assembled, the best player of all time stood out.
But as great as the 1992 squad was, the Olympic teams from 1996 (plus-22.5 per 100 possessions) and 2008 (plus-22.4) aren't far behind.
Because the first Dream Team was so star-studded and dominant, the '96 version ("Dream Team III" for all of the aficionados out there) is often forgotten in the United States' pantheon of great teams. It shouldn't be, because top to bottom, it was as deep as any team the U.S. has fielded since the tournament was opened up to professionals.
There were no Christian Laettners or fading 35-year-old Larry Birds on the 1996 team. In fact, at that stage of everyone's careers, Mitch Richmond -- a 31-year-old, below-average defender at shooting guard who was coming off a good-but-not great 19.2 PER season -- was probably the "worst" player talent-wise on that team.
As for 2008's "Redeem Team," they boasted the United States' best collection of front-line talent since the original Dream Team, with LeBron James, Chris Paul and Dwyane Wade in the midst of historically great stretches of their careers, plus a still-in-his-prime Bryant at age 29.
When it comes to a hypothetical matchup between the 1992 and 2008 U.S. squads, a true-talent difference of 0.7 points per 100 possessions translates to roughly a 52.6 percent win probability for the original Dream Team on a neutral court. This in turn means the '92 team would win a best-of-seven series 55.7 percent of the time, with 31 percent of the series needing all seven games to determine a winner.
In other words, statistically, the differences between the 2008, 1996 and 1992 teams are so small that it's impossible to definitively say which was the most talented.
The 2012 Olympic team probably brings up the rear of that group with a talent rating of plus-20.5. Why the decline from four years earlier? Bryant and Paul are no longer as great as they used to be, Wade isn't on the roster because of knee surgery and while Durant is an outstanding player, a plus-4.4 ASPM the past 3 years (with an average-at-best defensive impact) means that his current talent rating is not quite on the same level as Wade or Bryant's was in summer 2008.
Despite all of that, the 2012 team probably would have been on par with the Redeem Team if Blake Griffin (expected true talent of plus-2.9) hadn't torn his left meniscus at Olympic training camp last week. Taking Griffin's place is highly touted rookie Anthony Davis, but if the history of No. 1 picks is any indication, his true talent level is going to be about plus-0.4, which costs the United States' 2012 team at least a half-point of expected efficiency differential, and probably more.
Also consider the 2012 squad is missing All-Stars Wade, Chris Bosh, Dwight Howard and Lamar Odom.
Although this would appear to render Bryant's braggadocio somewhat empty, at least the 2012 team will be in the neighborhood of the all-time greats. You can't even say that about the 2000 (plus-11.7 per 100 possessions) and 2004 (plus-13.8) squads, by far the worst pro-filled teams the U.S. ever assembled for the Olympic Games.
The teams seem worlds apart if you focus on how easily the 1992 team cruised through its competition, but those opponents also were composed of significantly less-talented players than the teams the U.S. will face during the next month. Given that the level of raw talent (relative to the NBA average) between the two rosters is similar, and that the average NBA player in 2012 is almost certainly better than the average player was in 1992 -- at the very least, he's bigger, faster, stronger and more athletic -- Bryant wasn't being altogether unrealistic.
In the absence of a time machine, we will never truly be able to settle the argument, but it's likely the 2012 team would be much more competitive against the Dream Team than many of us -- including Jordan -- initially would believe.
Neil Paine is a writer for Basketball-Reference.com