Call It The Esteemed Team

"We have to understand our responsibility," Krzyzewski says. "We don't have to celebrate individual things. They act like they've done it before, which they have."

Let's just say it's been a long time coming.

When pro players made their Olympic debut in 1992, it looked like a win-win proposition for the NBA, which got to use some downtime over the summer to dress its product in red, white and blue and present it to a huge worldwide audience.

The Dream Team lived up to every hope, rolling over opponents who were dazzled to be on the same floor, right down to Angola's Herlander Coimbra, who asked to pose for a picture with Charles Barkley after the game in which Barkley elbowed him.

The problem quickly became that no subsequent U.S. squad could live up to the Dream Team's esprit, excellence or popularity, which they all quickly tired of hearing about.

Two years after the Dream Team, the U.S. sent its "Young Guns" to Toronto for the 1994 world championships, which they won in appalling fashion.

Bristling at comparisons to what was being called Dream Team I, the young guns played casually, puts their heads back and howled, struck poses and talked trash.

Said Gaze, then still playing: "I don't know if 'vile' is the right word, or 'disgusting.' There should be at least some pleasure in playing the game, some dignity."

Replied Johnson: "I didn't come here to make friends. I've got enough friends. We came here to kick some behind, and that's what we're doing. We're basically taking a lot of countries to school."

That ended the practice of tacking on roman numerals to the name "Dream Team." Having wound up with something more like Hell's Angels, horrified NBA officials made sure that was the last international competition for Johnson and fellow gangstas Derrick Coleman and Shawn Kemp.

The 1996 Olympic team in Atlanta was well-behaved but bored. Interest waned. The big story in U.S. basketball was the women, who were about to get their own league with the WNBA.

The attitude resurfaced in 2000 in Sydney, where demonstrative Vince Carter had run-ins with Gaze and Shane Heal, Australia's little point guard, and Aussie fans made derisive chants.

The U.S. won the gold medal but only after close calls against Lithuania and France, signaling the debacles to come.

Colangelo, taking over after the 2004 Athens train wreck, had a wide array of friends from abroad -- including his daughter-in-law, a former Italian freelance writer -- and knew only too well what the world thought.

"I really do believe from everything I know from people I respect, the people in the world thought the American teams didn't respect them," Colangelo says. "Didn't respect them as teams, as individuals, arrogant, that kind of thing. And that had to end. . . .

"From those first meetings with players, I said, 'Look, this is what people think of us. We have to change this. We have to come in with a whole new attitude. We have to show respect for our country, show respect for our team, show respect for our opponents. And anything less than that's not going to fly.' "

This is still sports, so the U.S. team can't win unless it wins, but its most important legacy for me will be the standard it set for a U.S. team's behavior.

Long may it wave.

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mark.heisler@latimes.com