They came back not just losers but scorned, widely depicted as being deficient and lacking in character. So it was entirely fair to wonder how many of the 12 members of the U.S. men's Olympic basketball team would suffer hangovers into the NBA season. Would Emeka Okafor's stone hands really doom his rookie year? Would Amare Stoudemire, now in his third season, demonstrate any kind of basketball IQ? Would LeBron James's concentration develop to the point where he'd be the kind of complete star his talent promises? Would the whole lot of them, in the wake of sporting humiliation, amount to anything better than highly paid prima donnas? Or would they actually learn something of consequence during their summer misadventure?
With 60 percent of the NBA season now over, there are plenty of indications that suggest that the summer not only wasn't a waste, despite a 5-3 record and a bronze medal finish, it was a career-enhancer for many of them, or in the case of the youngest players, a nice kick start.
Even Allen Iverson, who'll turn 30 in June, isn't too old to learn some new tricks. "Being more of a vocal leader at this point in my life is important for me," he said. "That's what I took back [from the Olympics]. I always led by example but I've never been that vocal leader. I'm nine years in. I'm getting old. At some point you gotta look in the mirror and start thinking about what you can do to make your team better."
Stephon Marbury, who promised on his final day in Athens to apply what he learned, is shooting a career-high 47.3 percent, which is dramatically higher than his 43.4 career shooting percentage. In fact, Marbury has never shot higher than 44 percent in his career until now. Combine that with a career-low turnover rate and it states pretty clearly that Marbury was serious about improving his shot selection and being more earnest about taking care of the ball once he got back to the NBA.
Similarly, Lamar Odom is a 44 percent career shooter and last season shot 43 percent. But this season he's up to 47.5 percent. He's averaging a career low in turnovers despite playing on a Lakers team that plays at a fairly fast pace. And he is averaging a career-high 10.3 rebounds, two more than his career average.
It would be pretty foolish to attribute Stoudemire's healthy offensive increases primarily to what happened over the summer, unless we want to count the Suns' acquisition of playmaker extraordinaire Steve Nash, who is spoon-feeding Stoudemire for what seems like a half-dozen uncontested dunks a game. But what that also proves is that Stoudemire is just fine intellectually on the court. What he clearly had to have learned more about in Athens was where to be on the court and how to play off a highly skilled teammate.
Not everybody has shown dramatic improvement. Tim Duncan was already nearly the perfect player. Richard Jefferson was injured after 33 games and is out for the season. Carmelo Anthony's game appeared to have regressed. But the Nuggets' dysfunction (three coaches in little more than three months) had plenty to do with that, and Anthony seems to have returned to his rookie form since George Karl came aboard as coach. And if Stoudemire's improvement is difficult to calculate because of Nash's presence, imagine how difficult it is to assess Dwyane Wade's fabulous sophomore season while tag-teaming with new partner Shaquille O'Neal.
Still, it would be silly to argue that Wade, who has played great some nights without Shaq, didn't learn a lot under Larry Brown last summer even if neither man knew it at the time.
One of the team's biggest problems was the number of extremely young players. Okafor, Anthony, Stoudemire, Wade, Carlos Boozer and James — and that's half the team are downright babies in terms of international experience. They had none.
Gregg Popovich, the Spurs' head coach and an assistant to Brown in Athens, said in a recent conversation: "A number of them never thought things could be that tough. They never knew competition could be that good or that circumstances could be such that you had to dig down further than you ever had to in the past."
"Just going over to the Olympics and losing . . . a lot of it was very humbling for all of us," said Wade. "People came back with a chip on their shoulder and wanted to show the world we are good players."
The team was portrayed as almost non-patriotic, even though the 12 who participated agreed to play and in almost every case was enthusiastic about playing. The frustration with the dozen or more stars who turned down invitations was somehow misdirected at players such as Iverson, who was as excited to play in the Olympics as anything he's ever done. The players knew they were being ridiculed and even booed at home. While Richard Jefferson became the first player on the all-black team to say some of the criticism seemed race-based, or at the very least culturally based, there were plenty of people in Athens who felt race had plenty to do with the criticism.
One of them was NBA Commissioner David Stern, who said in a conversation last week, "In the context of many fans who think hip-hop and the NBA are the same thing, they saw in the struggles of this team a chance to stress their repudiation of hip-hop."
Of course, the coach was plenty critical of the team, sometimes publicly, which didn't sit well with Stern, the members of USA Basketball or some of the players. Much of Brown's frustration was at having so little time (three weeks) to prepare the team, something he repeatedly reminded reporters, even before the team got waxed in the Olympic opener by Puerto Rico. There are those in important basketball circles who believe Brown, a great coach at every level, tried too hard to fit the players into his view of the international game rather than devising a system better suited to the skills of players such as Stoudemire and Shawn Marion, whose slash-and-dunk games are alien to the polished catch-and-shoot skills European and South American big men so often display these days.
If you took the same 12 players and entered them into an Olympic tournament against the same opponents today, would the U.S. team win?
No. Excelling in the NBA isn't the same as excelling in international competition because shooting is so important in world play and the culture of basketball in America simply doesn't value shooting the way it values getting to the basket and dunking. So few Americans shoot the ball well that the U.S. team, even if Brown had 12 weeks instead of three, would still struggle, and will likely struggle in Beijing in the 2008 Summer Olympics.
That said, it's pretty clear the players who participated weren't just going through the motions, as they were often accused. "They put in effort," Stern said. "I appreciated their professionalism throughout . . . in coming out to win the bronze medal after the disappointment" of losing in the medal round.
Stoudemire played only 7.1 minutes per game at the Summer Games and James averaged just 11.4 minutes. Yet Popovich believes they are the two players who might have benefited from the summer more than anybody else on the team. "It might sound crazy," Popovich said, "because Amare didn't play very much and [because] the style of play [in the Olympics] isn't what he's doing in Phoenix. But I thought it helped Amare because he came out and practiced hard every day. He absorbed as much as he could and was a real trooper. And he went back to Phoenix and wanted to prove he was a real player and that he needs to be in the game for his team.
"I think the other guy who really got a lot out of it," Popovich said, "was LeBron. Larry is a taskmaster, and he wants things done a certain way. Initially, I'm not sure LeBron was buying it or understood what Larry was trying to get at. But each day LeBron was better and better and was just like a sponge and really began to embrace the day after day after day of doing drills, doing whatever it took to get better."
The immediate questions, as the playoffs approach, will include whether the players who participated in the Summer Games will have enough left to be strong for the playoffs. As easy a time as the Dream Team had in cruising to a gold medal in the summer of 1992, Michael Jordan talked often about how burned out and injured many of those Olympians were late in the NBA season. Of course, those were veteran players who had popularized the game and were praised more than any American basketball team in history.
The 12 players of the 2004 U.S. team, with the criticism perhaps still ringing in their ears, are still hoping to earn the accolades and praise. As unlikely as it seemed at the time, perhaps the disappointment of Athens is exactly what will launch them toward both.