"I think it's the same bar that makes any great sports story fodder for a documentary," director John Weinbach said in an interview prior to the film's release. "It’s a human story that happens to be framed around sports. The Redeem Team is a combination [...] of the Dream Team and the Other Dream Team. Unlike every American basketball team until then, these guys had lost. They had lost not once, not twice, three times. The ’02 team had lost in the world championships. The ’04 team had 'lost' by only winning bronze at the Olympics. The ’06 team had lost. And it’s about the different notions of success. And when you’re an American basketball team, there is only one metric for success: It's winning.
"But the part that made this [story] attractive to me, not just as a sports story, but as a film, is that the main guys in the film — LeBron, Carmelo [Anthony], Dwyane Wade, Kobe, Coach K [Mike Krzyzewski] — all had different things they were trying to redeem in Beijing."
P.E. frontman Chuck D is an avid sports fan himself, and "Harder Than You Think" has become something of a soundtrack mainstay over the years. It was memorably featured in ESPN's 2011 Big East tournament coverage; and also in David Ayer's 2012 cop drama End Of Watch, as well as the trailer for Ice-T's 2012 documentary Something From Nothing: The Art Of Rap.
