Larry Bird’s final career basket was the Dream Team at its best
His last layup came not against the Lakers, but Lithuania.
It was a seemingly forgettable play, notable only because it upped the United States lead to exactly 50 points. John Stockton received the inbounds pass, calmly avoided a swarm of defenders before dishing to Clyde Drexler, whose touch pass found a wide open Larry Bird cutting to the basket. Bird, as he had down thousands of times in his illustrious career, converted the layup.
Two points.
Michael Jordan, by then resting easily on the bench after another masterclass performance, stood to wave his towel and smile. Cheering the precision play, Jordan inevitably had no idea what he and the viewing public had just witnessed.
They had just seen the final points of Larry Bird’s career.
https://youtu.be/7aPvNA0tPWY?t=1h12m9s
In retrospect, it was an anticlimactic moment for one of the greatest basketball players of all time. Bird had played more than 34,000 minutes in the NBA, winning three MVP awards. He had totaled 3,897 points in the playoffs alone, making some of the most clutch shots of any Celtic in the team’s storied history. And with Magic Johnson, he helped to elevate the league’s popularity in the course of their great rivalry.
Yet his final two points were made in garbage time of the 1992 Olympic semifinal (he was the only Dream Team player to go scoreless in the gold medal game).
But it was more than that. Displaying the unselfish offense of three future Hall of Famers, it was the best of the Dream Team distilled into a single play. Never actually challenged by the awed opposition, U.S. superstars were free to show a brand of basketball that was the ultimate crowd-pleaser. In their role as “goodwill ambassadors,” exquisitely worked layups that would otherwise have been forgotten afterthoughts took on more meaning.
For Bird, the end-of-game score proved even more than that. Though the world wouldn’t learn it for another 10 days after winning gold against Croatia, his playing days would end following the Barcelona Olympics. On August 18, 1992, the Celtics legend announced his retirement. His final points had not come against the Lakers or the Knicks, but in a 127-76 rout of Lithuania.
Since that time, no members of the Celtics have ever played for Team USA at the Olympics. For Bird, a co-captain of the greatest basketball team ever assembled, it’s one more Celtics distinction that he could hold on to for a long time.
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