‘We Beat the Dream Team’ is a delightful bit of basketball history
Grant Hill fronts an HBO documentary about one time the Dream Team lost.
So many sports documentaries of recent vintage are about a specific athlete or team and are dedicated to letting us know just how awesome and legendary that athlete or team was.
We Beat the Dream Team is kind of the opposite: It’s the story of the time the greatest basketball team ever assembled was defeated by a bunch of college kids, some of whom — though certainly not all — went on to become famous NBA players.
The Dream Team, which was the all-star team of NBA legends, led by Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird, went on a dominant run to the gold medal in the 1992 Olympics, the first time professional players were allowed to compete.
The team has already been subject to a large body of documentary hagiography, from the 2012 NBA TV The Dream Team doc to one chapter of The Last Dance to individual documentaries about members of the team. This is the relevant section of the 2012 film, which lives to this day on NBA TV’s YouTube channel:
Famously, 11 of the 12 Dream Teamers are in the Basketball Hall of Fame, and almost as many of them have had documentaries made about them (even the lone non-Hall of Famer on the team, Christian Laettner, was subject of a 30 for 30, I Hate Christian Laettner.)
We Beat the Dream Team has a fantastic angle: It tells the story of a scrimmage played before the Olympics between the Dream Team and the inaugural “Select” team, consisting of top college players at the time, brought in to practice against the Dream Teamers (“we were ‘selected’ to get our asses beat,’ one player says.)
But in that one scrimmage, played in a San Diego gym, the college players won, handing the Dream Team the only defeat of their existence. Sure, it was only about 20 minutes long, nor was it an “official game.” But it’s since taken on somewhat mythical status.
The Select team was led by Grant Hill, who serves as the narrator in the doc, and it featured a series of players who had various degrees of success in their pro careers. Just about everyone still living is a participant, including Chris Webber – who has avoided documentaries in the past — and Rodney Rogers, who was paralyzed years ago in an ATV accident.
There is footage of this game, although it’s not exactly high quality, and wasn’t shot for the purpose of ever seeing the light of day. But that’s okay- because director Michael Tolajian has a great deal more up his sleeve, including a delicious angle that’s saved for the third act.
It turns out that in that 2012 documentary, the legendary Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, a Dream Team assistant, had referenced the famous scrimmage- and claimed that the Dream Teamers threw the game through a mind game by coach Chuck Daly to make the team fear losing.
This is disputed, to various degrees, by just about everyone interviewed. And we even see Hill confronting Coach K, who coached him at Duke, over the dispute during a visit to his old coach’s podcast.
Hill, never known as the biggest personality during his playing career, proves a capable center of the film, and anyone who followed the NBA in the ‘90s is likely to enjoy the looks back at the likes of Penny Hardaway, Jamal Mashburn, and Allan Houston. Hill, incidentally, is now the “executive director” of USA Basketball, a role that has him choosing the Olympic team, as well as the Select team.
The film is also scored with outstanding music, whether it’s Bill Conti’s Rocky score or a healthy helping of Beethoven.
There’s another famous “Dream team behind closed doors” story, the time the Dream Team played a scrimmage along themselves; The Last Dance covered that, although no video footage of that has ever surfaced. Tolajian, who is credited as a producer of The Last Dance, also directed Once Brothers, an outstanding early 30 for 30 episode about how the friendship between Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic got caught up in Yugoslavia’s civil war.
And yes, it’s a rare documentary about Olympic basketball that doesn’t drag out Doug Collins to once again complain about the 1972 scandal.
We Beat the Dream Team is streaming now on Max and is called both “an HBO Original Documentary” and “Presented by TNT Sports” during TNT’s waning days of holding NBA rights. It’s pretty easily my favorite sports documentary so far this year.