For Warriors’ Welts, Olympic team a dream come true

When the U.S. Olympic basketball team takes the floor at Oracle Arena on Tuesday night, Warriors president Rick Welts will be on hand. Though no one tosses around the term "Dream Team" anymore, Welts was instrumental in the development and birth of the concept, back in the late 1980s. [...] it was a concept that not only changed Olympic basketball, but also the course of the NBA. The concept started even before the 1988 Olympics, in which the United States, still fielding an amateur team, took home bronze. The Americans lost in the semifinals to a Soviet Union team fielding professional players. "We had international aspirations," said Welts, who was the president of NBA Properties, responsible for marketing the game. To foster a more formal relationship with the governing body of basketball, FIBA, the NBA created the McDonald's Championship, a tournament that featured an NBA team, a foreign national team and an international club team. In 1989, FIBA modified its rules to allow NBA players into the Olympics; they had been the only professionals banned. The only countries voting against the proposal were the Soviet Union and the United States. [...] it was a very popular decision...