It was a bit of a fluke, but who cares? They still did what no one else could ever have done.
Duke legend Grant Hill talks here about his experience in 1992 with the Select Team and their legendary scrimmage victory over the Dream Team.
Remember, the Dream Team had Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, David Robinson, Charles Barkley, John Stockton, Patrick Ewing and other celebrated talents, including Hill’s Duke teammate, the recently graduated Christian Laettner.
The Select Team featured Hill, fellow Devil Bobby Hurley, Chris Webber, Anfernee Hardaway, Allan Houston, Jamal Mashburn, Eric Montross and Rodney Rogers. All of them would go on to significant NBA careers except for Hurley, who was nearly killed in an automobile crash in his rookie season and Montross, who bounced around for a decade before retiring.
To an extent, US coach Chuck Daly manipulated the scrimmage to allow the Dream Team to lose as both a warning and motivation.
And as Hill says here, the motivation apparently worked: the Dream Team more or less shut down the Select Team from that point
It probably didn't help that Rodney Rogers talked trash to Larry Bird after the first scrimmage, telling him that he hadn’t hit a jump shot since 1984. Bird was near the end at that point, but he knew how to respond to a challenge and he lit up Rogers and the college kids mercilessly after that. In true Bird fashion, he told Roges exactly how he was going to score on him and then did it. Jordan and Pippen were lethal on defense too. What could you do?
Still, Hill and company had the memory of a lifetime. It must have been sweet.
