So the USA men's basketball team won another gold medal at the Olympics on Sunday.
Excuse me, but wake me up when you have something newsworthy pertaining to this matter to discuss.
The USA sent a star-studded cast of mostly NBA All-Stars to Rio and they did what everyone who knows anything about basketball knew they would do. They stacked the deck again and knocked off all comers, including winning the gold medal game over Serbia by a whopping 30 points.
And it wasn't even that close.
Which is why I've never been on board with sending NBA players to play in the Olympics. We should go back to sending the college kids to the Olympics like they used to back in the day.
Most of us received a lot more joy out of seeing a group of college players from the United States get together every four years and win gold medal after gold medal while beating the other country's pro players. Those kiddos were 63-0 in the Olympics before losing to the Soviet Union in the 1972 gold medal game in what was the most horrific display of late-game officiating since Dr. James Naismith invented basketball.
The USA came back and won the gold medal in the 1976 Olympics, and then boycotted the 1980 Games before returning to win gold again in the 1984 Olympics.
With no controversy to lean on, the USA was upset by the Soviet Union in the quarterfinals of the 1988 Olympics and wound up settling for the bronze medal. That stunning loss sent the USA basketball community in a tizzy.
Then in 1992 _ after FIBA eliminated the distinction between pro and amateur players _ the door was open for the current trend of parading NBA players to the Olympics.
In '92, the USA sent an NBA contingent of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Scottie Pippen, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, John Stockton, Clyde Drexler and Chris Mullin to the Olympics. The 12th man on that team was Christian Laettner, who was the third player chosen in the 1992 NBA draft and a consensus All-American out of Duke.
All of the aforementioned 11 NBA players are in the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame, while Laettner has been enshrined in the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.
The rest of the world could have rounded up its best players and put them all on one team and they still wouldn't have made Jordan and company crack a sweat.
Sure, the rest of the world has gotten better at playing basketball, and a lot of them have NBA players presenting their country in the Olympics. But those countries have always had pro players, and the United States still won gold medals an overwhelming majority of the times.
Basketball was invented here. And as long as the USA can get its best college players to participate in the Olympics, it's always more fun seeing them winning the gold medal than watching a bunch of overpaid future NBA Hall of Famers yawn their way to another gold medal.
Along the way to claiming this year's gold medal, the USA did have three close (wake-up) calls. One of them was against Serbia _ a contest during pool play that the USA barely won by three points when Serbia missed a chance late in the game to force overtime.
So much drama unfolded leading up to the rematch between the USA and Serbia in Sunday's gold medal game.
Final score: USA 96, Serbia 66.
You had a ton of fun watching that one-sided debacle, didn't you?
If they wanted to, the USA could have won by 60 points. And LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Kawhi Leonard, Russell Westbrook and James Harden were no where to be found.
When the USA wants to prove a point and shut up its critics, no one can come close to even making a basketball game interesting against them. No one.
The USA is that dominant. It's worse than stealing candy from a baby.
When the college kids represented the USA in the Olympics in men's basketball, at least the games had some mystery to them. At least you hunkered down in front of the TV in extreme anticipation to watch what was about to unfold.
Now, you only have to watch for maybe a half. Then, you switch to another channel where you'll probably have more enjoyment watching reruns of I Love Lucy.
Assembling the men's Olympic basketball tournament is like sending Mike Tyson to box somebody at the local YMCA. Or, like going to a movie and already knowing how it's going to end.
Furthermore, if I want to pass the day away by watching a bunch of NBA All-Stars run up and down the court, I can get my annual fix every February during the NBA's midseason All-Star game.
I, for one, wish there was a way to get the college kids representing the USA in the Olympics again, because the NBA players have totally destroyed my Olympic basketball experience.
