The Redeem Team

Kobe BRYANT

LeBron JAMES

Coach
Mike KRZYZEWSKI

IF JERRY COLANGELO had doubts that his vision would take, they began to evaporate in the fall of 2005, shortly after Milwaukee Bucks swingman Michael Redd walked into a Chicago hotel suite for an interview with Colangelo, the man appointed to reverse the slide in the global fortunes of U.S. basketball. Dressed in sweats and with a garment bag slung over his shoulder, Redd greeted the former Phoenix Suns owner, then asked to duck into the john. Moments later he emerged—in a suit and tie. ¶ It's a story worth noting in part because Redd, a shooter of cane-sugar sweetness, will provide Team USA with a skill essential to success at the Beijing Olympics. But it's most notable because it shows that representing the land of the sport's invention is once again an honor worth getting gussied up for.

After decades of sending coaches overseas to stage clinics, the panjandrums of USA Basketball are now letting knowledge flow in the opposite direction. For the past three years Colangelo has presided over the first standing U.S. men's national team, using as his model the stable programs that have helped countries such as Argentina (at the 2004 Games) and Spain (at the '06 world championships) win the gold medals that Americans once took for granted. "It's a total 180," says guard Dwyane Wade of the Miami Heat, a returnee from Athens, where the U.S. was lucky to win a bronze. "In '04 we spent [three weeks] in training camp, then shot off to Greece. This team has been together for three years. We know the system and respect the system. We're just picking up where we left off [last summer]."

The U.S. program maintains a pool of 33 pros, all committed for a three-year cycle that includes a worlds and an Olympics. The team itself is chosen by a committee of one, Colangelo, who defers readily to coach Mike Krzyzewski. And an attitude overhaul is evident in all sorts of subtle ways. The USA on the uniforms pops in red, while players' names are writ in muted blue. Coaches and players all but pack copies of Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World with their playbooks, hewing closely to talking points that ban arrogant references to hoops as "our game." Even the team's official slogan (United We Rise) and unofficial nickname (the Redeem Team) imply room for improvement.

An autopsy of the debacle in Athens turned up a number of causes. The team featured only three holdovers from the group that had qualified the previous summer, and seven of the original nine invitees withdrew. In the end some 14 players turned down Uncle Sam, invoking excuses from family obligations to lingering injuries to the security situation in Greece. As a result, coach Larry Brown took charge of a team with an average age of 23.6 years, and it showed. Behind the scenes, problems of dress and punctuality festered, and on the eve of the Games, Brown wanted to send several players home. Body language is the Esperanto of basketball, and both Stateside and in Athens people didn't like what they saw. Some players heedlessly inflated expectations—as camp opened, Denver Nuggets forward Carmelo Anthony, then 20, guaranteed a gold—while others tried to pooh-pooh the poor results. "It's not like it's the end of the world," a 19-year-old LeBron James said in the aftermath of a loss to Puerto Rico.

Technically, LeBron—or LeBronze, as he came to be known—was right: The loss to Puerto Rico merely signaled the end of uninterrupted U.S. Olympic basketball hegemony dating back to the 1992 Dream Team. After losing to Lithuania in pool play and Argentina in the semifinals, Brown pronounced himself "humiliated," and the Americans headed home in a fog of alibis, citing the fouls whistled on center Tim Duncan and the zones they weren't used to shooting over. In fact, the U.S. sank the second-fewest three-pointers of the dozen teams in the tournament, a performance that recalls an old chestnut about as American as they come: "There are only two great plays—South Pacific, and put the ball in the basket."

ENTER Colangelo, 68, who over a half century has been a player, coach or executive at every level of the game. "The way they conducted themselves left a lot to be desired," he says of the 2004 team. "Watching and listening to how people reacted to our players, I knew we'd hit bottom." Colangelo told NBA commissioner David Stern that he'd only assume duties as managing director if he was given autonomy. It's a measure of how abysmal the situation was that he immediately got what he asked for.

In 2005 Colangelo arranged face-to-face sit-downs with every prospective national team player, to hear in their own words why they wanted to represent their country. The few good men to set things right wouldn't be paid or guaranteed playing time, much less a starting spot. Still, Colangelo says, "I got buy-in. Halfway through my talk with him, LeBron said, 'I'm in.'" Indeed, among the nearly 30 players he approached, only the San Antonio Spurs' Duncan and then Minnesota Timberwolves foward Kevin Garnett turned him down.