Those who were born in the blessed 70s or early 80s remember well the movie “White People Can’t Jump” with the brilliant actors Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson, where a white-skinned hustler who played excellent basketball demonstrated to everyone in practice how that I knew absolutely nothing about a game where blacks dominate. But this is a movie, but in reality, even in the final of the 1972 Munich Olympics, when the famous “Edeshko na Belov” occurred, it was obvious that the European basketball guys were not particularly lagging behind in development of the NBA’s male giants. It is surprising that now the famous American basketball player Dwyane Wade has said that international basketball is tougher than its American counterpart.
“Where I grew up, if you saw a white kid, you thought he couldn’t be better than you. Then I played international basketball and realized, “Oh no, they can really do something.” International basketball is tougher. To be honest, American basketball is weaker. The experience of participating in international tournaments immediately changed my perception. The game at the World Championship was different, harder. The United States learned its lesson from the bronze medal at the Athens Olympics. Until that moment, no one on the team would have thought that someone could beat us,” Wade quotes Mundo Deportivo.
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It is especially impressive that such revelations emerged immediately after the US team’s resounding failure at the recent World Championships in the Philippines. But Wade doesn’t know any of this. At those same Olympic Games in Athens in 2004, Dwayne was on a dream team that failed miserably in the semifinal against Argentina, and then almost made a mistake in the third-place game against Lithuania.
In addition to old Wade, that team included greats like Carmelo Anthony, LeBron James, Lamar Odom and many others. It turned out that White not only knows how to jump higher, but is also much more aesthetic and powerful in defense, especially in rebounding.
And yes, America learned the lesson only over a certain period of time, after which failures began to appear again in batches. And it’s not just about official matches, there were also defeats in friendly matches before the big tournaments. And now the German national team dominates the world, Serbia is not at all inferior to the guys from the NBA and most of the elite teams have representatives from the best American league.
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The magic and charisma that the participation of the first “dream team” in the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games brought to international basketball has come to nothing. In football terminology, everyone has long since learned to play real basketball and there is no longer a big difference between the NBA and, for example, the Euroleague.
