Stockton Set For More Gold Jazz Point Guard Selected For Dream Team Iii Along With Newcomers Olajuwon, O’Neal

Lenny Wilkens got his Dream Team on Sunday, and he wants this squad to be as distinctive as the one that rolled to the gold medal in Barcelona in 1992.

An assistant coach of the original Dream Team, Wilkens sidesteps the subject of which might be the better squad - the original with Magic and Michael or the new one with Hakeem and Shaq.

“I’m a little partial to the first team,” Wilkens said Sunday. “I don’t think you’ll see a team like that again. Each team will make its mark. We’re going to go out there and be us and not somebody else. We’re not going to try to compete with what that team did.”

USA Basketball made most of the roster official Sunday, announcing a squad that includes four players from the 1992 team and one naturalized U.S. citizen.

Named to the 1996 USA Basketball Squad for the Atlanta Games were: Spokane native and Utah Jazz guard John Stockton, Orlando guard Anfernee Hardaway, Detroit forward Grant Hill, Utah forward Karl Malone, Indiana guard Reggie Miller, Houston center Hakeem Olajuwon, Orlando center Shaquille O’Neal, Chicago forward Scottie Pippen, San Antonio center David Robinson and Milwaukee forward Glenn Robinson.

Malone, Pippen and Stockton were on the original Dream Team, as was Robinson, who also won a bronze medal in the 1988 Games, the last all-collegian national team. The other two roster spots will be filled next year, probably in the spring.

One of them could be given to Magic Johnson, who recently announced he would not come out of retirement and rejoin the Los Angeles Lakers. Johnson has expressed a desire to play in the Olympics again.

The announcement Sunday came on network television, and represented a welcome change for the NBA, which has locked out its players and been unable to reach a labor agreement with the union.

The selection of this Olympic team was largely without the controversy that surrounded the makeup of the 1992 team, when Detroit’s Isiah Thomas wasn’t included and Michael Jordan had to be persuaded to take part.

This time, Michael Jordan said early on he didn’t want to be considered for a spot, and there were no glaring omissions. Passed over were three members of the world championship team, Charlotte’s Larry Johnson, New Jersey’s Derrick Coleman and Seattle’s Shawn Kemp.

Following the world championships, USA Basketball officials quietly made it known they were displeased with the showboating and unseemly behavior by some players of the gold medal team, and those players wouldn’t be invited to Atlanta.

Wilkens may not want to make any comparisons, but that doesn’t mean his players will follow suit.

“This Dream Team could take on all the other Dream Teams put together,” said O’Neal, a member of the 1994 U.S. world championship team, known as Dream Team II.

“This team is really deep, more so even than Dream Team II,” Miller said. “We are really strong in the center position, with Hakeem, David and Shaq. We have two of the greatest point guards in Penny and Stockton, and we have the most talented three (small forward) in the game today in Scottie Pippen.”