Sports
Assemble a men's basketball Olympic team that can win gold – ESPN
Some of the NBA’s best players will compete against Team USA at the Paris Olympics, so the U.S. must, as Carmelo Anthony said, “put our ‘Avengers’ together” in hopes of taking gold. Pick a starting five from the roster pool of American heroes (plus a couple of snubs). We’ll add up their projected 2025 RAPTOR ratings to give you a score out of 100%.
Grades based on projected 2024-25 NBA ratings in estimated RAPTOR, an all-encompassing metric that mixes a player’s box-score performance with his on-court impact. Using RAPTOR, each lineup gets a predicted net rating — point differential per 100 possessions — when it’s on the court, and that lineup score is graded on a 0-100 scale depending on how closely it matches the best possible projected lineup. It’s hard to get a perfect 100 on your first attempt, so keep trying until you nail it!
Written by Neil Paine. Edited by Jim Merritt.
Produced by ESPN Creative Studio: Te’Drenna Coleman, Quinn Costantini, Alecia Hamm, Elliott Muñoz and Garrett Siegel.
Illustrations by Alex Wells.
