You may have heard the legendary story about the one game that the 1992 USA basketball “Dream Team” actually lost.
The story goes that their head coach, and former NBA champion head coach with the Detroit Pistons, Chuck Daly set up a pre-Olympics scrimmage against a college basketball all-star team. Daly stopped the game early and purposely made strange substitutions to ensure the USA lost a game and knew they weren’t invincible.
On The Players’ Tribune podcast entitled “Knuckleheads” hosted by former NBA players Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles, former NBA All-Star Jamal Mashburn tells a different story from those scrimmages. Mashburn was part of the college team put together to play against the greatest basketball team ever assembled, and a moment with former Celtics legend Larry Bird is one he will never forget:
Former Celtic Rodney Rodgers made the poor decision to talk trash after his college team beat Bird’s Team USA. Bird not only gave him around eight buckets in a row during the next scrimmage, but he actually told Rodgers the exact move he was going to score on before he did it.
The lesson is clear: never talk trash to Celtics legend Larry Bird.