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August 17, 2004 9:48 pm

Editorial: U.S. team's loss should not be surprising

By David J. Stern

USA TODAY

If USA TODAY thought our U.S. team would easily win the gold medal in basketball at the Athens Olympics, then it has not been reading its own sports pages.

In 1988 in Moscow, the Soviet national team beat the Atlanta Hawks; in 1990 in Barcelona, 1991 in Paris and 1999 in Milan, the Knicks, Lakers and Spurs eked out narrow victories over European club teams.

The USA's luck finally ran out in the 2002 world championship in Indianapolis, where a team of NBA players finished sixth.

In 1992, at the urging of the International Basketball Federation, U.S. professionals were invited to the Olympics. The premise: If the best players in the world could participate, then more kids around the world would play basketball and develop into elite players. It happened, and by the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the U.S. escaped with a gold medal only because Lithuania's three-point shot at the buzzer didn't fall.

The impact that the 1992 ``Dream Team'' has had on the development of international basketball is demonstrated anew in Athens, where eight of the 12 men's teams have NBA players on their rosters.

The Chinese team is led by Yao Ming of the Houston Rockets. Pao Gasol of the Memphis Grizzlies is Spain's leading scorer. Argentina beat Serbia-Montenegro, which has four NBA players on its roster, on a last-second shot by Manu Ginobili of the San Antonio Spurs. And, of course, the veteran squad from Puerto Rico, powered by point guard Carlos Arroyo of the Utah Jazz, gave the much younger U.S. team, without a single player with Olympic experience, a very sound thrashing.

The U.S. team will bounce back. The players are a committed group, proud to represent their country, and they know they have much to learn about, and from, international competition. They have championship coaches who are spending long hours teaching them to ``play the game the right way.''

The competition in Athens is good - in more ways than one. Sports fans are now learning what business has known for some time: Globalization ineluctably creates new and effective competitors, and any business that doesn't kick up its game a notch will fail.

More important, if a once-dominant enterprise obsesses about ``conquering'' rather than effectively competing, it will do neither.

David J. Stern is commissioner of the National Basketball Association.

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