Every four years, a new group of players known as Team USA enter the global arena for basketball supremacy at the Summer Olympics. This year, London is the host site and the Oklahoma City Thunder make up 25 percent of the team with Kevin Durant, James Harden and Russell Westbrook. While holdovers like Kobe Bryant remain, it's these fresh legs that will largely propel the group forward.
It's also the reason why Bryant says this team could beat the original Dream Team. This isn't uncommon to be asked to pit one group against another -- some kind of Olympic flexing and posturing. It happens every four years, so Bryant's words aren't that surprising. Still, he took the time to actually answer the question.
"Well, just from a basketball standpoint, they obviously have a lot more size than we do -- you know, with [David] Robinson and [Patrick] Ewing and [Karl] Malone and those guys," Bryant said. "But they were also -- some of those wing players -- were also a lot older, at kind of the end of their careers. We have just a bunch of young racehorses, guys that are eager to compete ... So I don't know. It'd be a tough one, but I think we'd pull it out."
Charles Barkley would likely beg to differ. However, it doesn't matter. At this point, it's part of the routine as the torch is passed from one group to the next.