When the notion of the Dream Team was born at the Olympic Games in Barcelona in 1992, Michael Jordan and his colleagues on the US men’s basketball squad practised harder than they played. The intensity of some of the behind-closed-door duels between Jordan, Charles Barkley, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson have passed into legend. There were no Olympians to challenge their hegemony so they got their kicks out of challenging themselves.

They won their matches by an average of more than 40 points at those Games and there was a joy in their dominance and a wonderful grace in the play of Jordan, in particular. Even if they were criticised for scorning the chance to stay in the Olympic Village and cocooning themselves in the familiar luxury of a five-star hotel, the spectators marvelled at the athleticism of some of the most famous sportsmen in the world.

The extent of their dominance was still an intoxicating novelty then. Eight years on, the joy has gone. They might still be certainties to sweep all before them on the way to the gold medal but, in their third incarnation, they are a Dream Team no longer. Their women tennis players have claimed that dubious sobriquet at these Olympics and, anyway, if their evolution since Barcelona is indeed the tracing of a dream, this bunch of snarling, cursing, graceless bullies represent waking up in a cold sweat.

The best players in the United States have chosen to stay at home. Shaquille O’Neal is not here; nor is Kobe Bryant, the LA Lakers wunderkind, nor Tim Duncan, of the San Antonio Spurs, probably the best current player in the National Basketball Association (NBA). In their place are a group of players famed mostly for the size of the NBA pay packets they managed to negotiate for themselves. Vince Carter, of the Toronto Raptors, is a rising star but, apart from him, the squad is B-list.

They are still staying in a hotel, and not in the Village. At these Olympics, it is a luxury establishment in the suburb of Parramatta. They are still beating their opponents with consummate ease, too.

Their margin of victory over China at the weekend was 47 points. Today, in the Superdome in Olympic Park, they crushed Italy, the European champions, by 32 points. They are so confident they are allowing their team leader, Alonzo Mourning, to miss two matches to go home to attend the birth of his second child.

Something else is missing now, too. If the joy has gone, so has the magic. The Americans are still out there on their own as a basketball nation but the ingredient that made them a phenomenon before has disappeared. Now they are just a very good team intent on humiliating rivals who will never really be rivals.

Men’s basketball at the Olympics had an element of fascination about it in Barcelona, even in Atlanta, purely because there was an exhilaration in watching the Americans excel but in Sydney it has become a tedious, ill-mannered academic exercise shorn of excitement.

The Italians did their best to stay with their opponents for the first 20-minute half but, towards the end of it, the Americans began to pull away. "Eventually," their coach Rudy Tomjanovich said afterwards, "the dam always bursts". As it burst, the Americans seemed to enjoy watching the Italians floundering. There was much eyeball-to-eyeball intimidation, derisory laughter and expletive-laden outbursts of aggression.

They did not break any rules but it seemed a shame that the only way they seemed able to motivate themselves for the slaughter was by bullying the Italians when they could have eased their way to an exhibition victory anyway. Afterwards, of course, the US players said all the right things about how hard their opponents had played, about how they couldn’t relax for a minute but everyone knew that was empty talk.

Allan Houston, who plays for the New York Knicks, did at least have the honesty to admit that the era of the Dream Team had passed. "We don’t consider ourselves to be that any more," Houston said. "The team of 1992 was the Dream Team and, since then, because the USA has included its best players, or most of its best players, that label has stuck.

"There are a lot of dream teams at these Olympics. I was speaking to Maurice Greene at the opening ceremony and he said there should be a track dream team. He’s right but we are just trying to be the best there is."

Perhaps it is time now for the whole concept to be laid to rest. A dream team is the antithesis of the Olympic spirit. It prides itself on elitism when it should be celebrating the whole. It is only about winning, not taking part. Most importantly, it is not about dreaming, it is about crushing dreams and crushing them with chests puffed out in absurd parodies of pride.

Those antics ensure that the Americans' matches are remembered, not for breathtaking moments like Carter’s alley-oop from Mourning’s pass that rebounded off the backboard, but for instants that make you want to grieve for lost honour.

On the court before the game, the Italians and the Americans swapped gifts. The Americans traipsed lazily back to their bench and handed theirs to an official who stuffed them into a plastic bag, mementoes that probably ended up in a Parramatta skip.