Why are there hardly any good White American NBA players?

So, the reason black people don't dominate tennis and soccer is because of opportunity and culture.

The reason black people do dominate basketball is...<s>opportunities and culture</s> genetics.

 

The athletic advantage is slight, but it is there. That is my belief. And in a sport such as basketball, African-Americans not only have the athletic advantage, but they also have more opportunities to play it from an earlier age. So when you add both of those factors together, it only increases the disparity in their representation at a professional level. Where as in tennis and soccer, their athletic advantage is not enough to overcome the other factors, on the whole.

For a culture-neutral example, consider track competitions. Why is it that short distance sprinting is dominated by black athletes? In theory, running is something that all kids do from a young age, no matter whether you were brought up in the inner city or in the suburbs. Surely, there has to be some genetic factor there?

 

I guess this fool never heard of White ChOCoLATE aka JeZUS with a BaSKetBAlL

 

I would also say it also has to do with socio-economics and geography.

If you want me to over-generalize here... There are more white Americans that live in the suburb than black Americans. Being that suburbs are more spaced out than the inner-city or urban areas, there are more baseball and football fields. So at a young level, there are more white Americans playing baseball/football and developing their skills. This lessens the pool of white talent available to play basketball.

Urban areas might have more black American kids (once again I'm over-generalizing here). They're too tight and small for fields, but a fine size for basketball courts. The pool of black American players becomes bigger at a pro level because there are more kids playing the sport at a young age.

 

Athletic achievement stopped being organic, the praise and recruiting stopped being local and the necessary commitment required a choice between practicing and working out eight hours a day year round or breaking 1100 on Math and Verbal. Also, there are all kinds of great white players and full blown development networks in predominantly white environments, though moreso in the northeast and Ohio Valley, sports and black culture just got a lot more closely linked in the early '90s.

 

I know so many have been talking about genetics and athleticism being the biggest factor, I don't buy it. Do you think black Americans are the only black people in the world?

Let's look at Africa!

Where do the African countries sit compared to the rest of the world in International Basketball? Not very well. How do they compare in soccer? Pretty damn good! Sure the Europeans are still the best at soccer, but the gap is nowhere near as large. This is due to culture. Africans play soccer at a young age. The opportunity to play soccer at a young age is higher than basketball, as over in Africa you can play soccer with nothing but a ball (often don't play in fields like the Western countries do). Basketball on the other hand, needs a ring and backboard. It's hard for a 3rd world country to build so many basketball courts.

 

Ambitious blacks were banned from excelling at anything other than sports or entertainment, particularly since those were originally compensated with blue collar wages and no ownership of output. Remember blacks were even marginalized within the military before Truman. The generational achievement model, if any, could only realistically focus on those endeavors, especially in the South where 90% of blacks lived until the '30s and 0% could enroll in colleges or be licensed for any skilled professions.

 

Yeah they have skills ofcourse but the level of those skills are not even comparable to even the level of a top 300 tennis player.
And it's not only the height factor is also the pure athleticism. Jump high run fast power and strength. In tennis there are top 100 and top 50 players that are slow as hell (for a professional sportsman). One of my favourite Fabrice "the Magician" Santoro was probably less athletic that some of the posters in this forum but because of his amazing skills and amphidexterity he was top 50 most of his carreer and played in Grand Slams in 4 different decades! (1989-2010). And top 50 player that's the equivalent of an nba starter.

Tennis as a sport relies MUCH MUCH less on athletic abilities than on skills.
It's a very different type of sport than basketball.
And those skills must start to be learned at a very early age(usually from before 5 for most kids who end up pro).

 

A similar question is the lack of Asian nba players. I want to say s. American as well, but Argentina knocks that out of park.

Is it development, science, commitment, genetics, culture and fortitude?

I'd think all of it comes into play. Sports is about pushing yourself to your limits and also trusting in the coaches and the system to make sure you do it in a sustainable and safe way.

If your body gives out, tough luck.

If your mind gives out, opportunities were elsewhere anyways.

If the system fails you, hopefully you can find a different way to make it.

The naturally gifted monsters out there don't need all three to click.

If you're too poor to own equipment or playing time, you might be to ignorant about the sport existing.

So if you play any of these factors onto a single life, so many things have to click. The whole Kenyan argument is part of the equation but not the entire story.

 

I've never seen an average height black guy be able to dunk real good until Iverson.

 

IMO...

There's the Fast Twitch Muscle fibers as mentioned in an earlier post. African Americans just have more of them.

There's plenty stories of players coming up from rough beginnings and find their way to the NBA. It really doesn't cost any money to play basketball. You can just show up to a park and play. Hell, I played barefoot with a free rubber ball I got from PizzaHut when I was younger(which i still have btw :grin: ). Hockey, Baseball, Football, Tennis can be costly - equipment, leagues, etc. So perhaps it's a black dominated sport out of the lack of alternative opportunity in other sports?

 

It is all about genetic. Likely.

 

Never heard of Spud Webb?

 

I remember Oscar Schmidt talking about how dominant Soccer is that no one gives a damn about basketball in Brazil. But if American pop culture can be popularized there and american rap music makes it big there, i guarantee all the black Brazilians will get into basketball there too when they realize they can make as much money playing basketball as they can playing soccer.

One big problem with Brazilians(Portuguese) and other Latin american countries(spanish) is that they just don't want to learn any other language. So there's a big communication barrier. They have so much pride in their European conqueror's language that they will go as far as to pretend they don't speak English at all when they actually can get by with a conversation. It's stubborn and stupid.

Anyway, i really think culture is the biggest factor in the OP's question. Our media always showcases super athletic black guys doing 360 dunks in commercials, etc. It's already established black Americans have a physical edge due to selective breeding started back in slavery. But, even if white americans start to selectively breed for physical attributes rather than social and financial status, these athletic white americans will be growing up being shown that basketball is a black man's sport. Commercials, current players etc. The sport dominated by black men and black culture. That athletic white kid is going to see football/baseball commercials or movies and see the handsome white QB or pitcher getting the hottest girls in school, etc. Those are going to be his dreams as they are today. Nothing will change due to the culture surrounding the sport of basketball.

Long gone are the days of the pure point guard being the equivalent of the Quarterback. Long gone are the Cousey's, West's, Pistol's, Stockton's, Price's, Jwill's, or even Nash's. Now they all want to be Allen Iverson who just wanted to be a mini Jordan.

 

Just a thought as far as lack of any hard science to support or refute opinions ...
Aren't the testing results from both the NFL and NBA Pre-Draft Combines a great source of historical, empirical data from which to draw conclusions about the overall athleticism of different races?

I don't have the time, but if someone does, I'd be very interested to see what conclusions can be drawn from such a large set of measured, comparable data over such a long time period

For instance ...
If you were to take the 20 fastest 40-times each year from the NFL Combine over the past 25 years ...
That's 500 different players from all over the country spanning a quarter century
Of those 500, how many were white players?

For those looking for scientific evidence to support their views, I'd say this is as good a set of data to analyze as you could hope to find
Hope someone has the time and inclination to due so ... I'd be very interested to see the results

 

Which has ended forever ago as many people in DND would say over and over again.... I don't think that's been established at all. Is Blake Griffin a result of that? Derrick Rose? How many black people are actually 100% African? The answer is that according to multiple studies the average african american has about 22-25% of European in them.

Better yet, this whole "Selective Breeding" idea is something that didn't even last long. We are not talking about 1,000 years of it or anything close, it was a blink of human history and genealogy. Not only that, but not every Master practiced this form of Eugenics. So within about the 200 years of slavery selective breeding would not have happened quick enough to have the effects that people are explaining here and once slavery ended whatever was done would have been undone by black people mixing with pretty much every other race available within the USA from that point on.

So no, it isn't because of selective breeding. Swimming is considered a very athletic sport. Why is it again that all the best swimmers are white?

This is the problem with "Race" science. Is that people have been mixing since the dawn of time. It's not like dogs, where breeding has been controlled since the first man met wolf. It hasn't been controlled at all.

 

I don't think you can use the NFL/NBA combine as a sample size. Those are already some of the best athletes both sports have to offer. The sample size has already been reduced by several factors others have posted before.

 

In Brazil when you play football you are GOD. If you play basketball you are just famous. Also the number of nba players are just 450. And that's from all over the world. The number of football players and good football teams are much more.

that's not a scientific process because the pool in the first place is not analogous of the general population. Most of those athletes would be black already. The less athletic people would have been rooted out long before it came to the nba draft. Or athletic people of other races that chose to take on another sport, or not take sport at all and choose another carreer.

This is the first time I read about this "selection" theory and it's quite interesting to me that there are people who believe this.
We are all products of selective breeding- by nature. Some generations of slaves doesn't make such a difference in the DNA.
Heck modern people from eastern and central Africa have more of a case to say this, since the ones who are able to reach reproducing age are the ones, who have the genes more adapted to survival and live through countless diseases, famines, wars etc without the comfort of modern medicine for much longer a period of time than the descentants of slaves.
So when someone wonders why modern Kenyans and Ethiopeans are the best long distance runners, the answer surely has to do with genes imo. Better adapted genes over the course of millenia. Along with culture (more people from those countries would take up running as a sport in a way to escape poverty. And the majority of the population all run in their everyday lives for long distances to go to school, other villages so the best would be spotted from an early age.).

 

Blake griffin is pretty good.

 

How about Asians then? Can you agree that on average, an Asian person is less athletic (at least in activities involving running and jumping) than the average white or black person? And if you do acknowledge that point, are you suggesting that whites and blacks are equally athletic due to the relatively large degree of mixed breeding over the years, but Asians, who traditionally have not mixed with other races to the same degree, are less athletic?

Isn't the more rational explanation that certain races have natural genetic advantages for certain traits? I'd argue that for running and jumping, someone who is of majority African ancestry is, on average, is more athletic than someone of of majority Caucasian or Asian ancestry. For upper body strength, it may very well be that someone of majority African ancestry has no distinct advantage over someone of majority Caucasian or Asian ancestry. It may even be that they are somewhat disadvantaged with respect to that trait (which might help explain why the world's strongest power lifters frequently come from from Scandanavia).

Of course, for any given race, you wil have natural variation among individuals of that race, resulting in a bell curve like distribution. Take the fast-twitch muscles needed for jumping, for example. Chase Budinger would fall on the higher end of the bell curve for those with predominant Caucasian ancestry. Hakeem would fall on the higher end of the bell curve for those with predominant African ancestry. There would be one more more bell curve for those with mixed Caucasian and African ancestries, and this is where most African-American athletes would fall.

I would imagine that the bell curve for the African ancestry would fall somewhat to the right of the bell curve for the Caucasian ancestry. The result is that the number of Africans at the highest end of their spectrum outnumber the number of Caucasians at the highest end of their spectrum. When you consider that sports at the professional level generally require the highest level of athletic ability, black representation in a sport like basketball, where jumping is a crucial trait, will exceed white representation.