There are two ways to be remembered when you play for the Team USA Olympic basketball team. Either you win a gold medal and live forever as a hero or you fall short and live in infamy. More often than not, Team USA finds a way to get the job done.
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We’re creeping up on the one-year anniversary of Steph Curry putting Team USA on his back and beating France with some of the most outrageous shot-making the world has ever seen. The original Dream Team is still regarded as the most dominant team ever assembled. On the other side of the coin, the 2004 Athens squad lost to Argentina and had to settle for bronze.
DeMar DeRozan was on the 2016 American Olympic team, and though that team won the gold in convincing fashion by beating Serbia by 30 points in the gold medal game, he believes that squad is criminally overlooked.
“They never talk about our 2016 team like that, you never hear anybody talk about it,” he said on the 7PM in Brooklyn podcast. It’s a good point, because despite being loaded with talented players like Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, Jimmy Butler, Kyrie Irving and others (The Kid Mero wasn’t far off when he called it ‘a 2K team’), for some reason that squad isn’t held in as high regard as others.
Melo was on four Olympic teams, and he used his experience to explain why he believes the ’16 team doesn’t get enough love. “From my experience, ’04 losing, ’08 coming back and redeeming ourself, ’12 was like stamping ’08, like, ‘OK, we gonna double-down on what we did,'” he said.
He continued by saying, “‘[The ’16 team] was almost like a bubble championship in a sense, because this was the time when Zika was going on, and remember, a lot of people canceled, a lot of people wasn’t f****** with the Olympics because of Zika, and they was gassing us and saying Zika was in Brazil.”
The situation was so dire, especially with rumours swirling around that we all collectively put that time out of our minds, just as we might eventually do the same for the COVID pandemic. It wasn’t a happy time, so people want to forget about it.
DeRozan remembered all the precautions they had to take because of the fear of Zika. “They gave us like a bag full of f****** mosquito repellent … We were smelling like mosquito repellent all day. I remember the first practice we went to, we go in the gym bro, I remember we all look at each other and said, ‘Man that s*** don’t work.’
“We all ate up already. I’m talking about everybody had mosquito bites. After that day we stopped spraying that s*** on us because it didn’t work.”
Melo also said that team chemistry could have played a factor in how that team is remembered. “We had guys on the team who weren’t really rocking with each other. We had personalities on the team: Draymond, DeMarcus Cousins, Jimmy Butler, myself, Kyrie.”
A 30-point win for the gold medal might make it seem that the 2016 team cruised to victory, but that wasn’t the case. They only beat Spain by six in the semifinals, and their three wins in the group stage came by a total of just 16 points.
DeRozan is used to being overlooked, whether it’s as part of the Olympic team or in his 16-year NBA career. He’s a six-time All-Star and three-time All-NBA player who averaged over 20 points per game for 12 seasons in a row and counting, and he’s done that on four different teams. Yet somehow, he lacks the flowers he deserves.
