Why shouldn't they? Other countries have been using their pros for years. And what does the NBA have to do with the US team? What about the NBA players who play for other countries in the Olympics, and who are often their home country's best chance to compete? Should they be banned from play by the NBA (can the NBA shut them out of the Olympics? ) just because the US has the most talent?

All-but-failed states like Nigeria just don't have the stuff to assemble teams that can compete with first world countries. They lack the standards of living to make basketball skills widely available to the populace, the lack the resources to hone that talent and to organize and train and field a competitive team. None of this is the fault of the US team. Admitedly, they could probably be less obnoxious about it, but that's what people have been saying (albeit sometimes in hushed tones lest they be called racist) about the NBA in general for years. However, even in amateur sports leagues, basketball teams and players don't slow down their play to let cripples or untrained players keep up with them. They don't bench their best players when up against a club that hasn't put in the same practice time. Instead, divisions are selected and organized to group comparable teams together, or at least, teams with similar resources and talent pools, so as to maximize the chance of victory occurring solely on skill at, or dedication to, the sport in question.

What's the point of another country winning the gold medal when they know they are only beating a US team playing under severe restrictions? In the film "Miracle" about the US Hockey team in 1980, Kurt Russel's character snottily asserts the superiority of his team's win over the so-called Dream Teams of professional athletes, claiming that his bunch of amateurs and nobodies who peaked that year at the Olympics is the REAL "dream team". And he is right to a point, but the idea of the original Dream Team was not winning at all costs but the thrill of seeing some of the greatest active living legends of the game on the court together, and the United States FINALLY getting a chance to show the world what the best Americans were capable of, rather than the 4th tier players up against the best of the rest of the world.

The Dream Team that Russel's character sneers at was exactly what he and his fellow US Olympic coachs and their athletes had been up against for years. The stars of the Soviet hockey team were no more amateurs than Lebron James et al are today (the difference being, the US government is not going to punish Kobe Bryant by confiscating his home and voiding his contract if the US only comes away with the Bronze medal). They were elite, professional players and the US was only one of the last countries to do what everyone else had been doing for years.

By taking away the best US players, you deprive the less talented countries of their own chances for an equivalent of the "Miracle on Ice."