Serious question.

Do you want the current version of basketball's Dream Team to win in Beijing?

Is it unpatriotic to hope they lose? 

Here's why I ask.  My sneaking suspicion is maybe 25% of US sports fans wouldn't mind seeing USA Basketball upset.   That would be 5% who will say that out loud and 20% who keep it to themselves.

Reasons?

Resentment of the NBA.  Past US Olympic teams didn't adapt to international competition.  They simply took the NBA game with them and carried the pieces back home stuffed in their travel bags.

Admit it.  At some level didn't that feel good?  Teams with better fundamentals schooling overpaid and under motivated NBA players.  Basketball being taken back from the hype machine. 

Americans love the underdog.  Pulling for Team USA in basketball is like cheering for Microsoft.  Actually, it's like cheering for Nike.  You do remember Nike?  Nike is the voice down at the end of a long dark alley telling the people who run the sport, "You can have all the money in the world and it will only cost your soul.  You weren't using that anyway, am I right?"

How do you pull for a Nike travelling squad?  Maybe it's just a coincidence, but the team is made up entirely of players who wear Nike or Nike affiliated brands (except for Dwight Howard).  A win for Team USA is money in the bank for the evil empire.

The Star Syndrome.  Nike looked at this year's Olympics and saw the opportunity to promote......wait for it.....LJI Squared (LeBron James International Icon).  They rushed out an ad for the Chinese masses featuring James besting an elderly Kung Fu master, a couple of dragons, and two animated Chinese girls.  The Chinese authorities took offense, saying it insulted the motherland.

In truth, the ad was rejected because everyone knows James would have dunked repeatedly on the elderly master, dropped fifteen in the second quarter on the dragons, and then gone eight scoreless minutes in the third against the animated girls before coming back to almost, not quite, pull it out.

Americans don't love Mike Krizyewski.  OK, exclude the few odd million who suddenly discovered they were Duke fans when Coach K came to Durham and started winning big time.  The rest of us aren't so sure if he is the character guy who gives all those nice speeches or the whining, profane, borderline head case whose sideline demeanor stirs fond memories of Joesph Stalin.

Man bites dog.  You want to see the US lose because it isn't supposed to happen.  And the things that aren't supposed to happen are always more interesting than the things that are.  Like 30 point blow outs and a US gold medal in basketball.

What's America got to do with it, anyway?  The Olympics are more and more like college sports.  The players are only vaguely connected to the institutions they represent.  These are professional athletes making a career choice to be involved with a marketing vehicle.  Some of them no doubt factor in pride in their country.  How many do you think?  50%, 30%, 10%?

In the end I'll watch, and in the end I'll kind of sort of pull for Team USA.  Why?  Same reason I support any team from Texas.  It's where I was born, the home team.  But should Team USA lose I won't feel all that bad.  And I'm betting neither will the players.