Associated PressCoach Chuck Daly talks with the United States team in a preliminary round game with Croatia in 1992.The video, nearly 20 years old, shows the Dream Team doing something they never did at the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona: losing. They faced a group of top college players that included Grant Hill, Bobby Hurley, Penny Hardaway and Chris Webber, who vowed: “I’m not going to be intimidated.”
The never-before-seen coaches’ tape is part of a documentary, “NBA TV’s The Dream Team, presented by Right Guard,” that will be shown on the league’s network on June 13. In part, the video shows Webber gleefully jamming and Hurley easily slicing through the Dream Team defense.
“These young kids were killing us,” Scottie Pippen said in the documentary; he and the assistant coach Lenny Wilkens said the team played tentatively.
“We didn’t know how to play with each other,” Pippen said.
The final score of the scrimmage in La Jolla, Calif. — Collegians 62, Dream Team 54 — looked nothing like the results of the Olympic games that the Dream Team won by an average of 43.8 points.
“Some of these college players should be probably be playing on this team,” Larry Bird said afterward.
Although NBA Entertainment covered the Dream Team with its own cameras, the scrimmage tape was made by USA Basketball. “A couple of years ago, when we were starting this project, we asked them, ‘What do you have?’ ” said Dion Cocoros, vice president for original production at NBA Entertainment.
Told that the USA Basketball had the scrimmage at its archive in Colorado Springs, Cocoros said, “Give me what you’ve got.”
The documentary also has tape — from USA Basketball and NBA Entertainment cameras — of a far more famous pre-Olympic scrimmage: Michael Jordan’s team against Magic Johnson’s in Monte Carlo.
Twenty years is a long time to wait to make a documentary about a major sports event like the Dream Team’s easy ride to a gold medal, especially with so much video sitting in the league’s vault.
“We never knew when it would air,” said Danny Meiseles, executive producer for production, programming and broadcasting at NBA Entertainment. “We just knew we had to document the history.”
The scrimmage lost to the college players was a fix, part of Coach Chuck Daly’s plan to demonstrate to a team loaded with 11 future basketball Hall of Famers that they could lose in international competition.
“He threw the game,” Mike Krzyzewski, who assisted Daly, along with Wilkens and P. J. Carlesimo, said in the documentary. Daly calmly told Krzyzewski during the scrimmage, “We’re all right.”
(In 2008, Krzyzewski made similar remarks when he said, “Chuck wanted them to lose.”)
In the documentary, he said: “If you look at how much Jordan played and how he subbed the guys in, not picking up, not making any adjustments; he knew what he was doing.”
Asked why Daly did not confide his intentions to his assistants, Krzyzewski said: “We probably would have screwed it up.”
Before the news media filed in after the scrimmage, Daly ordered that the result be banished from the scoreboard. At their next, and final, scrimmage, the Dream Team trounced the collegians.
And Jordan played a lot more.