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LAS VEGAS — Jerry Colangelo, chief of USA Basketball, gave his usual welcome speech to the sixth rendition of the NBA-infused U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team at the Wynn Hotel last Thursday.
Colangelo told the collection of NBA stars, headlined by LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Carmelo Anthony, to be extra motivated during these London Games when round-robin play opens July 29 vs. France.
“This could be the last team as we know it,’’ Colangelo said. “So I’m telling you just in case. This could be your legacy.’’
The Summer Games will go on in 2016, but perhaps never again with a U.S. Olympic team super-stacked with the NBA’s best and most famous. A 20-year era — dawning with the 1992 Dream Team — might be ending with a movement now afoot to have the 2016 Olympic competition become a 23-and-under event and save the full roster of NBA superstars for a basketball World Cup, modeled after the soccer event.
Twenty years ago, Team USA’s first — and, by far, best — NBA Olympic squad — was born. A contingent led by Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley and Scottie Pippen stormed Barcelona, winning by an average margin of 43.8 points, and changed the world.
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No hyperbole is strong enough to describe what the original Dream Team meant. If this is the last hurrah, it’s important to understand its origin.
“That was a seismic reaction to the game,’’ U.S. Olympic team coach Mike Krzyzewski, then a Dream Team assistant, said this week. “If you’re really a basketball player, you’ll recognize those moments in time. The Dream Team was a huge moment in time. It really was an explosion that generated an activity all over the world.’’
As Johnson put it last month during a conference call to promote NBA TV’s Dream Team documentary: “It had such a big global impact on the game and it allowed kids around the world to dream that they can play in the NBA one day. The game grew in popularity and it grew in terms of our own personal brands, in terms of all the individuals. I mean, Michael Jordan became even bigger.’’
Rick Welts was the NBA’s marketing chief in the years leading up to the Dream Team’s formation. He had struggled selling the NBA to advertisers in the 1980’s, but said that 1992 Olympic team changed the marketing landscape forever.
“There won’t ever be a group of athletes in a team sport that will be viewed the same way,’’ said Welts, now the Golden State Warriors president. “In America, some people thought it was unfair, but it was embraced with enthusiasm worldwide that’s never been found in the Olympics. It propelled the league forward on an international stage much quicker than we could’ve anticipated. We couldn’t keep up with it marketing-wise.’’
And it wasn’t NBA commissioner David Stern’s creation. Hardly.
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“To his credit, he has always said ‘this wasn’t our idea,’ ’’ said author Jack McCallum, whose book, “Dream Team,’’ was released yesterday. “He’ll go down in history as the commissioner during the Dream Team and it may get lost it wasn’t his idea. But he maximized it.’’
The impetus for its 1992 formation often has been assigned to U.S. college players losing the country’s stranglehold on Olympic/international gold medals, with the 1988 bronze flop in Seoul the final straw.
But the real catalyst was a former Belgrade meat inspector, Boris Stankovic, the secretary-general of FIBA for 26 years who was known as the David Stern of Europe. Without Stankovic’s obsession with getting NBA players into the Olympics during the late 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. Olympic Team might be headed to London with a college star such as Dion Waiters as its starting shooting guard.
With Stankovic’s push and the Americans’ decline on the international stage, the timing was perfect. In the 1987 Pan-Am Games final, Team USA was beaten by Brazil and Oscar Schmidt’s 46 points. Schmidt was considered an amateur despite making nearly $1 million that year playing for a pro team in Italy.
At the 1988 Summer Games, John Thompson’s bunch finished with the bronze medal. The Soviet Union, led by mammoth center Arvydas Sabonis, crushed the Americans, 82-76, in the semifinals and won the gold. Yugoslavia earned the silver.
Krzyzewski said it was no fluke. The level of international competition was rising. Coach K — guiding the last Team USA squad ever fielded by all college players — failed two years later at the 1990 World Championships in Buenos Aires. The Americans lost in the semifinals to gold medalist Yugoslavia, armed with future NBA stars Drazen Petrovic and Vlade Divac.
“We played against the Yugoslavian team and the Russian team that had Lithuanians,’’ Krzyzewski said. “There was no way our college kids could beat them. [The European teams] were men. They were all pros and many became NBA players. It was the right thing to do.
“I knew college kids weren’t going to beat those guys anymore, especially in the international game. They may beat them if we brought them to us and played the collegiate game. It’s a different game. Different lane. Different clock. Different ball. All the nuances. In tennis, it would be as drastic as going from grass to clay.’’
Nevertheless, the Dream Team’s foundation was laid years before. Stankovic was its true architect.
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Stankovic was embarrassed FIBA — the governing body of basketball worldwide — was ignored by the NBA. Across the 1980s he had discussions to get NBA players into the Olympics. The crusade barely created a ripple among the NBA’s cognoscenti.
“He was a selfless and selfish guy,’’ said McCallum, who helped coin the Dream Team’s indelible moniker. “He was a visionary guy. But part of it was selfish. It drove him nuts that FIBA was supposed to be running basketball and the NBA didn’t know what FIBA was. FIBA wanted to be with the in-crowd. The only way to do it was to get the NBA into the Olympics.’’
Before the 1988 Olympics, Stern, NBA deputy commissioner Russ Granik and Stankovic met in New York City. The best they could do was stage the McDonald’s Open in Milwaukee, pitting the Bucks, a Milan team and Russian national team in a round-robin.
Even after the 1988 disappointment in Seoul, Granik said he doesn’t remember any outcry from NBA brass to get involved.
“It never came from us,’’ he said. “Nineteen eighty-eight bothered me as a U.S. basketball fan, but I had accepted NBA players weren’t ever going to be in the Olympics.’’
Stankovic kept pushing. In 1989, the FIBA Congress set up an emergency meeting in Munich to vote on the issue. It had been turned down in 1986, 31-27, with 17 countries abstaining. USA Basketball was then called ABAUSA.
The Soviet Union and ABAUSA both voted against NBA player participation at that 1989 meeting. Didn’t matter. The vote passed, 56-13. NBA players could play. But now the question was, would they?
“We knew it was going to pass,’’ Stern said in “Dream Team.’’ “But we were absolutely not enthusiastic about it. It was sort of like ‘OK, what do we do now?’ ”
The vote received little media attention. Nobody believed the NBA would get its players to give up their summers to train and play in the Olympics for free.
“There was a fair amount of opposition,’’ Welts said. “And it was coming from America.’’
“Stern said to me many times, it seems to come with as many problems as it did value,’’ McCallum said.
When Johnson became the first player on board in 1991, the floodgates opened. That same year, Johnson had been diagnosed with HIV, forcing his immediate retirement from the NBA.
“Once Magic was in on this thing in 1991, it started to form,’’ McCallum said. “Stern was smart enough to know, we got Magic, it’s going to be a big deal.’’
With the public still lukewarm, McCallum, then writing for Sports Illustrated, gave the concept a seminal boost. In a cover story written as the squad was being formed, he wrote in his lead, “It’s a red white and blue dream.’’
The magazine’s cover photo featured the five presumed starters — Jordan, Magic, Ewing, Barkley and Karl Malone. The headline writer took McCallum’s theme, and the cover shouted “Dream Team.’’
For the very first time.
“What it did was give it a marketing focus, we can call them something,’’ McCallum said. “Even when I wrote the story, the concept was vague. It was a year before the Olympics. Now, holy [bleep], here’s the team and they have a name. The story was a sensation. And my neighbor took the cover, laminated it and made a poster board. And he wasn’t even a sports fan.’’
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As much as Stankovic pushed Stern, there is debate whether the Dream Team would have happened in 1992 had Thompson’s 1988 squad brought home the gold.
“Clearly the reputation of American basketball was at stake,’’ Welts said. “There wouldn’t nearly have been the motivation. The timing wouldn’t have been right. We were no longer able to compete for the top medal in international play. All the ingredients were there.’’
Stankovic proved a visionary in all respects. In 1991, he told basketball writer Jan Hubbard, “I’m hoping one of our [non-U.S.] teams can win a gold medal by 2004.”
Argentina did just that, winning gold in Athens.
Five teams removed from 1992, the 2012 squad battles the heat in Vegas this week as perhaps the last direct descendants of the Dream Team.
Anthony understands the team’s legacy.
“They left their ego and last name at the door and focused on playing as a team,’’ he said. “The way they did it, with so much class, they changed the game. It changed USA Basketball forever.’’
marc.berman@nypost.com