When asked if the 2012 Olympic team could beat the famed Dream Team of '92, Kobe Bryant told a reporter, "They obviously have a lot more size than we do. With Robinson, Malone, Ewing, and those guys. Some of those wing players were also a lot older, at the end of their careers. We have just a bunch of young race horses. You know, guys who are eager to compete, so I don't know. It would be a tough one, but I think we'd pull it out."
Because this is the dumb world we live in, these totally innocuous comments immediately became a thing people talked about. Charles Barkley weighed in:
"I've got to tell you, I just started laughing, because how old is Kobe Bryant? And he's calling us old? At the time, we were only 28 or 29. That just made me laugh... Other than Kobe, LeBron and Kevin Durant, I don't think anybody else on that team makes our team."
Then Michael Jordan weighed in from, you guessed it, the comfort of a golf cart:
"I absolutely laughed. I imagine he's trying to say it to legitimize his own Dream Team. But to me it's not even a question what team is better. I'd like to think that we had 11 Hall of Famers on that team, and whenever they get 11 Hall of Famers you call and ask me who had the better Dream Team. Remember now, they learned from us. We didn't learn from them...For him to compare those two teams is not one of the smarter things he ever could have done."
Will someone finally say something that isn't dumb about this non-issue?
Thank God for Larry Bird.