With the 20th anniversary of the 1992 U.S. Olympic basketball Dream Team almost a month away, there’s been plenty of talk lately about what that team meant to the globalization of basketball.

While the 2012 squad can’t match the ’92 team’s roster, which consisted exclusively of hall-of-famers — minus Christian Laettner — it has the opportunity to capture Olympic gold against the most competitive field yet.

Let’s be honest — when the original Dream Team was assembled in 1992, basketball was nowhere near the global sport it is today.

Back then, the NBA had only 21 international players. In 2010, the league had upped that number to 84, according to NBA.com.

If the Dream Team hadn’t done what it did in the manner that it did it, it would’ve been considered not only a disappointment but, frankly, a travesty.

Here was a team made up of the best professional players (once again, minus Laettner) plucked from the best teams from the best years from the best league from the country that literally invented the sport.

The best-of-the-best-of-the-best-of-the-best.

We weren’t expecting wins; we were expecting massacres. And massacres we received.

In Barcelona in ’92, the Dream Team averaged a margin of victory of more than 51 points during the six-game stretch, including a 79-point evisceration of Cuba in the first game of the tournament.

Twenty years later, gold is still the expectation, but it certainly isn’t guaranteed. In the past, USA faced teams with one or two NBA players; now, teams like Spain, France, Argentina and Italy boast starting lineups filled almost entirely with NBA talent.

If the U.S. team isn’t 100-percent committed to going for the gold, there are plenty of countries eager to place an arrow straight through the bulls-eye painted on the center of its targeted back.

Just take a look at the embarrassing 5-3 record compiled by the Larry Brown-led squad that won bronze in 2004 in Athens. Talent wasn’t the problem with that team — even the best foreign rosters paled in comparison to the U.S. The inevitable complacency that came with being the best basketball team in the world had finally set in, and the U.S. had lost its stranglehold on worldwide basketball supremacy as a result.

The team looked to the likes of Allen Iverson, Stephon Marbury, Carmelo Anthony and a 19-year-old LeBron James for leadership; it was a team that lacked motivation.

But even before 2004, the question was never, “Who has the best basketball team in the world?” The U.S. will have the best team on the floor in every game it plays — that’s a given. The question has instead become, “How does this iteration of the U.S. national team stack up against its predecessors?”

And that’s how we have to look at the 2012 squad.

Can this team — whose roster has been thinned significantly by injuries to Derrick Rose, Dwight Howard, Chauncey Billups, LaMarcus Aldridge and, most recently, Dwyane Wade — win the country’s fifth gold medal in six Olympic games since professional athletes were allowed to participate? Can it enter the debate against the ’92, ’96,’00 and ’08 teams, all of which can claim the title as the greatest of all-time?

That is the (two-part) question.

And when the 2012 U.S. team steps onto the hardwood floors of the generically-named Basketball Arena at Olympic Park on July 28 in London, that question will be answered.

Hopefully in the affirmative.