Aaron Hope 
The reason we took such pride in the 2008 USA Olympic Basketball team’s gold medal is because after a few years of faltering, we finally got back to the kind of greatness we’d been raised on. USAB had won three golds in a row before their unfortunate collapse in Greece in ’04, and nobody played a bigger role in that three-peat than a guy who knows a thing or two about those. Scottie Pippen repeated as Oly champion in 1996 as a part of Dream Team II rocking one of the most easily identifiable basketball sneakers ever created: the Nike Air More Uptempo. This USAB edition of ‘The AIRs’ shows that Nike’s been using the same white/navy/gold (and red) palette for its US athletes for two decades now, and though the ‘Olympic’ Air More Uptempo release has come and gone at House of Hoops, you can grab a pair today from Osneaker or on eBay.
