When Mike Krzyzewski took over the national team - partly because of a very strong recommendation by Dean Smith, by the way - it was in serious decline. He turned it around in a major way, to the point where a lot of teams started to think that beating the US was impossible.
That didn’t happen by accident.
A lot of work and thought went into restoring USA Basketball and part of that was Coach K persuading the NBA players to buy in in a different way.
They were not going to have the mentality of the 2004 team that kept itself apart from the rest of the America team in Athens.