THE ICONIC MOMENT associated with the Redeem Team, rightly, is Kobe Bryant with his finger pressed to his lips.
The defiant pose, after a crushing 3-pointer as he was being fouled in a vital moment in the gold medal game, was dripping with symbolism — Kobe didn’t actually want anyone at Beijing’s Wukesong Arena to be quiet, and his legions of Chinese fans in the stands were screaming anyway. He meant to silence the belief that the Americans were no longer kings of the world court.
That replay will be on repeat this weekend in Springfield, Massachusetts, as the 2008 U.S. men’s Olympic team is formally inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Bryant’s 13 fourth-quarter points that day, and especially the four-point play that drove a spike into Spain’s heart, are some of the cornerstones of that team’s lore.
The redemption arc is what is so tangible about that summer, Team USA having been relegated to bronze in the 2004 Athens Olympics and the four years of suffocating shame that came in its wake. It too was a redemptive moment for Bryant, posthumously being enshrined for a second time this week, when considering the time and place of his career.
But while the celebration of the team will naturally have Bryant’s memory as a centerpiece, the story of the Redeem Team is so much deeper than just that fourth quarter, or just that summer.
That gold was a result of a torturous journey, and many of the players being properly honored by the Hall of Fame for it emerged with as many scars as sweat equity.
AFTER HE CONDUCTED his first practice as new Team USA coach in July 2006, Mike Krzyzewski made a tactical announcement. It was at UNLV in Las Vegas, the national team’s new home after Jerry Colangelo had taken over as the program’s savior and executive director. He was promised full roster control and a much more expansive budget, which then NBA commissioner David Stern had agreed to as part of his aggressive recruitment of the veteran executive.
Krzyzewski and Colangelo had been on a tour that was equal parts listening and preaching. They were going to respect the international game, they’d said repeatedly, and how it threatened to pass the Americans by — proven not only in Athens but at the 2002 world championships, where the Americans’ 59-game international winning streak ended and they finished sixth.
There would be a reverence paid to the rules, the opposing players and the panache. But then, in the wake of his first workout as coach, Krzyzewski declared: “Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I do not play zone.”
Krzyzewski was schooled by then-Army coach Bobby Knight to play fierce man-to-man at West Point. The Duke players in the 1990s under Coach K were not known for slapping the floor and then dropping into a 2-3. But that was hardly in the spirit of embracing the international game he’d been selling; zone defense had long been used effectively by European teams.
In 2007, Team USA was back at UNLV, forced to play and win the FIBA AmeriCup to qualify for the Olympics.
The 2006 summer had ended in another disappointment when a revamped and rethought Team USA had been humbled by Greece in the world championships in a game in which their defense had been shredded by basic pick-and-roll. Like 2004, they had trudged home with bronze medals that were shoved into a drawer and never looked at again.
On the first possession of the first game in 2007, against Venezuela, Krzyzewski’s team was in a zone defense.
This moment is not memorialized like Bryant’s 3-pointer, Dwyane Wade’s famous behind-the-back alley-oop pass in Beijing or a LeBron James power dunk. But these trials and lessons are equally part of the fabric of what that group went through long before they boarded the plane to China.
There are four players going into the Hall as part of the Redeem Team this weekend who have a unique understanding of that journey. Wade, James, Carmelo Anthony and Carlos Boozer were all part of the huge bronze medal disappointment in 2004, ending Team USA’s generation of Olympic dominance.
None of them played much — one of the many things then-Team USA coach Larry Brown was criticized for in the aftermath — and all of them disliked the experience.
“I’m sitting on the podium receiving the bronze medal like ‘this s— was a waste of my time,'” James said in the Redeem Team documentary that was released by Netflix three years ago. “At that moment, I definitely wasn’t playing for Team USA again.”
Three more players who ended up with gold around their necks in 2008 — Dwight Howard, Chris Bosh and Chris Paul — joined Anthony, James and Wade on the 2006 team in Japan for the world championships that was supposed to have represented a pivot to winning again.
They were all part of a group of players who answered Colangelo’s demand to make a multisummer commitment to the national team. For James and Anthony, it ended up meaning giving up months in the summer in four of their first five years in the NBA.
Instead of getting any sort of reward in 2006, they were exposed by the Greeks, who flaunted weak spots on the American roster and, for all the star power and star coaching, Team USA seemed incapable of doing anything about it.
There might have been some progress, some team building, but in the end the vibes, once again, were wretched.
“When we lost to Greece, and I lie to you not, we didn’t wanna come home,” Paul said in the book “Basketball: A Love Story.” “I’m telling you, we did not wanna come home. That’s one of the toughest losses that I’ve ever felt.”
But if there was a place where Team USA truly started its turn toward winning the 2008 gold, it might have happened outside Tokyo. The day after the loss to Greece, the team was down by nine points to Manu Ginobili-led Argentina, the 2004 Olympic champion that had defeated the U.S. on the way to that gold.
In a spot where Team USA could’ve let go of the rope — a trait the Americans earned during a run of international losses spanning 2002 until the previous day — the players dug in and turned the game, pulling away for victory and mildly avenging the Olympic loss to the Argentines. Thus began a winning streak that would last more than a decade.
Wade, James and Anthony combined for 69 points then committed, basically on the spot, to coming back the next summer (though Wade ended up not playing because of injury) to qualify for the Olympics after they’d failed to do so in Japan.
They were miserable — but determined.
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When the 2008 Olympic ‘Redeem Team’ chowed down at a gas station
LeBron James, Chris Bosh and other members of the 2008 men’s Olympic basketball team stop at a gas station for food.
DURING THE 2008 gold medal game in Beijing, the highly experienced Spanish team pulled to within two points of the Americans in the fourth quarter, and Krzyzewski called a timeout.
The legendary coach later said that despite all the NBA championship rings, college titles, MVPs and hundreds of millions in net worth in that huddle, he thought it was probably the most tense moment they’d all felt in their careers. Krzyzewski had prepared some things to say, but it was Bryant who took control.
“There’s plenty of players out here who are nervous,” Bryant said in the documentary about the situation. “I know they’re feeling the pressure much more than I am. I know I’m ready.”
Bryant’s next few minutes on the court are chiseled in the record books. This moment of leadership will forever have the appreciation of everyone involved with the program. But while it might have been the most memorable, it might not have been the most defining.
Neither was what Bryant did in pool play against Spain earlier in the Olympics. He stunned his teammates when he announced before the game in the locker room that he knew exactly what play the Spanish would start the game with and he intended to purposely barrel over friend and Los Angeles Lakers teammate Pau Gasol in an effort to send a message to everyone about his sincerity in this entire endeavor. Of course he did so, dropping a stunned Gasol to the hardwood with a scowl just seconds after tipoff.
But it was really the summer before, when the Americans had to win that FIBA AmeriCup event to earn the Olympic bid, that Bryant’s leadership campaign truly began.
Bryant’s example is legendary within USA Basketball, personified during the pre-tournament training camp when Bryant made sure he was in the lobby of the hotel when teammates came back from a long night at a Vegas nightclub so they could see him heading to the gym for a predawn workout.
It was during that time James, yearning to take the next step as a leader following his first taste of the NBA Finals months before, began to study Bryant’s habits and style up close. James later said that experience helped him find his voice and ethic as a leader, a trait USA Basketball continues to benefit from in the modern era. Soon James was joining Bryant in those early workouts and other teammates followed.
James was a leader of the 2024 Team USA that won a fifth consecutive Olympic gold in Paris, 16 years on from the beginning of the streak, when James set the tone with a dead serious and highly intense training camp again in Las Vegas. In a way, some of it can be traced to Bryant and the tone set in 2007.
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When Team USA sang happy birthday to 30-year-old Kobe
Throw it back to when Team USA Basketball sang “Happy birthday” to Kobe Bryant while he was holding his baby daughter Gigi.
ANTHONY AND HOWARD are double honorees in Springfield this week, going in for their playing careers as well as for their roles in winning Beijing gold. They will be the fifth and sixth members of the 2008 team going into the Hall for their individual careers, joining Bryant, Jason Kidd, Wade and Bosh.
James and Paul, both still playing in the NBA past age 40, will be making history as they are the first active NBA players who will be inducted.
Krzyzewski and Colangelo have been honored, as has Redeem Team assistant coach Jim Boeheim, who after three Olympic golds and two World Cup golds together eventually helped convince Krzyzewski to play quite a bit of zone defense at Duke.
In all, the Redeem Team is already one of the most decorated in history — the 1992 Dream Team had 11 Hall of Famers and remains unimpeachable.
Its role in basketball history is beyond secure and the fingerprints are all over the golds won in 2012 in London, 2016 in Rio, 2021 in Tokyo and then again last year in Paris. That’s a lot of years and a lot of victories to process and all the success can dull the appreciation when taken in the aggregate.
This celebration aims to make sure the uniqueness is properly recognized, but the reasons the Redeem Team is indelible starts well before, and goes well after, just 2008.
“When the gold medals were distributed in Beijing, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ being played, the flag being raised, it was a moment of total completion,” Colangelo said when the Hall of Fame honor was announced earlier this year.
“Very seldom does someone have an opportunity to have a game plan, watch it perfectly executed and get the desired result. That’s what happened and it put our USA Basketball team on a course over the last 20 years to a lot of gold medals.”
