Following the incredible success of the 1992 Dream Team, the United States fielded another star-studded roster at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. That team too, widely hailed as Dream Team II, unsurprisingly cruised to a Gold medal win. While they went 8-0 in the tournament and won by an average margin of 31.8 points, they averaged 15.2 points less than their predecessors. However, according to Grant Hill, that was by design.
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During an appearance on the All The Smoke podcast, the Hall of Famer revealed that players on the 1996 roster intentionally took their foot off the gas late in the games and avoided scoring for a bizarre reason. Hill explained,
“In the Olympics, true story, nobody wanted to be the leading scorer because you got drug tested. The only person that got drug tested every game was Karl Malone. It was Karl Malone and whoever the leading scorer was… “
“So at the end of games, everybody’s passing to each other because nobody wanted to shoot. And it looks like we’re being real unselfish, but nobody wanted to score,” the seven-time All-Star added.
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Hill added that the drug testing took place immediately after the game and went on for nearly an hour. Since none of the players were willing to go through that ordeal, they avoided tacking on points to their tally and gleefully gave up the ball to their teammates to score.
The numbers back his claim. In the 1992 Olympics, Karl Malone was Team USA’s third-highest scorer with 13 points per game, behind Charles Barkley (18) and Michael Jordan (14.9). However, four years later, the team’s top scorer, Barkley, averaged only 12.4 points.
The 1996 team is the only US Men’s National Team roster that had a top scorer averaging less than 13 points per game since the nation began fielding NBA players at the Olympics. Despite the players’ reluctance to run up the score on their opponents, the team thrashed every opponent they faced, went undefeated, and won the gold medal on home soil.
