Both United States basketball teams entered the 2016 Olympics overwhelming favorites to win gold. But so much attention is focused on the dominance of the men’s squad — rife with NBA stars and so spectacular that it’s an earth-shaking embarrassment when they actually lose — that the women get short shrift.
Think U.S. men’s basketball is dominant? Check out the women’s team
The women’s team hasn’t lost an Olympic game since 1992 and has placed in the top three in every global tournament since then. That’s more than the men can say.
Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images
That’s especially unfortunate considering that the women’s team has been more dominant than the men in the Dream Team era.
The women’s team hasn’t lost a game in the Olympics since 1992, and have lost in the FIBA World Championship just twice over that span. There wasn’t a global basketball tournament in that 22-year span at which the Team USA women failed to medal.
The men have been awesome, too: they registered all three of those Olympic losses in Athens in 2004, where they limped through group play and finished with bronze. The FIBA Worlds have been less kind, with bronze finishes in 1998 and 2006, plus an ultra-embarrassing sixth-place finish in Indianapolis in 2002. That disaster presaged the Athens bronze and helped spark a renewal of dedication to USA Basketball from the NBA and many of its best players.
One interesting bit of context to put the United State men’s relative lack of dominance in FIBA Worlds play: that .887 winning percentage in those tournaments is just a shade under the Warriors’ .890 winning percentage in the 2015-16 season. That speaks to how spectacular the women’s team has been. Their performance in all global tournaments since 1992 is the equivalent of a 79-3 season.
Maybe this season’s Warriors squad can stack up to that standard.
