DavidS... I agree with most of your post, except your assumption that Americans are more athletic. See, the NBA is WAYYYYY to small a sample to take into account the entire population, especially considering that at this point in history, it is still predominantly American. I can think of many instances of simply jaw dropping foreign physical specimen, basketball or otherwise, that simply have not made it to the American television screen. The point is that we have a handful of foreign players in an American league hardly tells the whole story. Comparing Lebron to Dirk and Pau is also comparing the finest American specimen to a handful of foreign players. Developing physical abilities and fundamentals do not have to be exclusive. One can spend time doing both. The point is quite simple: the pure physical only talent would never survive internationally where they would in America. Thus, what you see is the more all round international player. Of course, there is also the case of covering one's weakness. Dirk can't compete physically with some muscular player, so he makes up by working harder, working on speed and shooting. In the end he ends up being the better player because he improved the other aspects of his game to survive in Germany. A pure physical specimen might not work as hard because they take their natural talents for granted (the best example of course, can be found in America).
DavidS, I think you have this one covered, but just a few comments. The BIG"O" is expressing the "old school" perspective on professional basketball. West said essentially the same things just the other day. I have heard or read similar comments from Magic, Kareem, Dr.J, Byrd, Barkley, Russell, and many others. The NBA is simply a reflection of the "culture shift" that has or is taking place in the society at large; in families, in churches, in schools, in the workplace, and so on. The decline of traditional values has produced many outcomes and the triumph of "style over substance" is just one of them. This issue is at the root of most conflict on this board. The bottomline is that fundamently sound teams still win championships, while many other teams and players are simply "darlings" of the marketplace.
you mean the way he's better than duncan or garnett or kobe or tmac or shaq? of course that's ignoring the fact that dirk is amazingly coordinated for a 7 foot guy, is quite fast for a guy that tall (speed isn't part of athleticism now?), and can jump fairly well. i.e. he's quite an athlete himself. i have such a problem with the thinking that americans should somehow have a monopoly on great basketball players or that we could shut foreigners out of the league if we just knew fundamentals or "knew the game" the way foreigners do. it's never possible that certain populations will have certain skill sets and that they won't necessarily be better or worse, just different. and it's also not possible that we dominated basketball (and still do) because we got about a 50 year head start on the rest of the world and they are just now starting to catch up in terms of training and playing and caring about it. in the way we continue to catch up to the rest of the world in soccer the more we actually put into it, the rest of the world catches up to us in basketball. it's not because they "play the right way" or do the prettier things better, it's just because they are good and because it was inevitable that they would produce good players once they concentrated on basketball. europe's not some small island nation or something, they've got hundreds of millions of people. teach hundreds of millions of people to play basketball and the thought that none of them should be able to compete with out hundreds of millions is ridiculous. all things being equal, i would think basketball talent would be fairly evenly distributed throughout the world. it just takes having the resources and facilities to be able to develop that talent, and not many places have that the way america and europe do. is it any coincidence that europe became the first place to start producing basketball talent? another thing is people don't seem to care what europeans can't do, just what they can. europeans seem to be able to be taller and retain shooting touch for the most part and they seem to be better as a whole at the "pretty" aspects of basketball. of course they don't play defense when they get here, they don't rebound when they get here, they don't know how to post up. or do those not count as knowing how to play the game? lets face it, we don't own basketball talent, no matter how fundamental we'd like to think we aren't and could be and no matter how much we owned it in the past. give the rest of the world a chance to catch up and it's inevitable that they slowly will. as for oscar's take on the state of the game vs when he played. robbarnett said pretty much what i said when the full article was put in the "francis has made 3 ASG's so he's popular" thread. it's just a "back in my day things were better, people respected there elders, things were cheaper, etc etc" type piece. people knew how to guard people? oh yeah, people must've really been hustling back on the break and really digging in on halfcourt defense to hold teams to only 120 and 130 a night. i mean, Lord knows those set shots don't guard themselves. people knew how to dribble with both hands? oh, now he's calling out the dribbling skills of today's players. if you're going to lament the playground state of the game, don't attack the thing playgrounders are great at, dribbling. watching espn classic and such, it seems like when you go 1980's and earlier, a lot of guys look like they would piss themselves if they had to dribble with their offhand under pressure. and then of course saying something stupid like lebron is just a highlight reel dunker. yeah, we all know 18 year olds just come into the nba and tear things up by only knowing how to dunk. nevermind the fact his court vision and passing were highly thought of coming into the season. i guess he just puts up 20/6/6 all on dunking. of course according to this place steve francis does it, so i guess it's possible. and finally, DarkHorse, depends what you mean by the stars of yesteryear being stars today. if you mean, if you gave them the same training methods and teaching of the game and same advantages today's players have that they could be stars, then yes they could. i tend to think for the most part in any sport, the stars of any era would be the stars of any other era all things held equal. however, if you mean i could just pluck the actual player out of the 60's or something and put him in today's nba and they would be stars, well then i doubt very much they would be. today's players (as it is in all sports) are so physically superior to their past counterparts it's amazing. they'd be too fast to guard, to fast to break down, and too big to muscle up on or rebound on. i'm not saying yesterday's stars would be terrible, just they would not be stars. i would think baseball is probably the sport in which you could best transpose people across eras and expect similar performance. basketball and football, the athletes have just evolved too much to expect it to happen. i'm sure i forgot something i wanted to say in all that writing but that's all i can handle for now.
Nice way to completely spin my words. TD is the best player of that group, but guess how he plays? TD is also the least athletic (except arguably Shaq) of that group. I don't see your argument. Where would Shaq be without the 50 lbs or so he has over the just about everybody else? Take away Kobe, TMac or KG's athleticism, they might still be GOOD players but not GREAT, and that's the problem. In nowhere did I suggest that international programs are more ept at training players, just that they don't ignore the fundamentals. Dirk is a relatively quick big man, but he's nowhere near the athleticism of, say... Vince Carter. But to get to the NBA, he MUST first compete in the German league, where a much greater degree of teamplay and fundamentals are required. So he must learn them. It's a simple matter of adapt or don't play.
i GUESS big O was trying to say too much bussiness is not good to NBA. unfortunately, he was drunk when he wrote this article. So, plz, leave him alone. he is poor guy. Did he graduate from school? his article is full of contradictions.
DavidS, I commend you for the length of your posts. Fine work. You show an amazing ability to read other people's minds and to put words, many of them, into their mouths. I will respectfully agree to disagree with you. I believe that the truth lies somewhere between your point of view and mine. You are entitled to your own interpretation of Oscar's comments, but my opinion is that his quotes clearly demonstrate that he is uninformed and biased.
don't get me wrong but black people always complains that white people are racist...but they refuse to look in the mirror..black people are just as racist as whites.......some...some blacks are nice and educated....
Since this post deals quite a bit with the loss of fundamentals in the NBA I wanted to throw out a couple points about that and see what you guys (gals?) think. One of the most oft cited statistics for the decline of fundamentals is the seemingly ever-downward spiraling field goal percentage. What I have not heard mentioned along side that stat is the fact that the league has allowed a more and more physical style of play. With the exception of the hand-checking rule a few years back, defenses have been allowed to initiate contact with offensive players on as ever-increasing basis. (BTW I have not seen hand checking called like it was 4-5 years ago in a while.) All this contact leads to poor shooting percentages. But the league has also chosen to allow more contact by offensive players like Shaq (yes Shaq is offensive). The NBA loosened rules to allow Shaq to “dislodge” the defender from his position. Does anyone remember what that was called charging? This was done to keep this high profile player in the game rather than on the bench with fouls. This is a butts-in-the-seats approach to rule making: if Shaq puts butt in the seats, the league needs to make sure he stays on the floor. This is my biggest critique of the NBA, the star system, giving star players preferred treatment in the sphere of “rule interpretation”. I think the league would have more exciting, more competitive games if there was a more balanced approach to game calling.
DavidS makes a lot of good points, and I think his interpretation is what Oscar R. was trying to say -- that the NBA system has serious problems in the quality of play. People have been arguing about this for a long time, blaming a number of parties, including the NBA, the NCAA, ESPN, the media and others. Kryten, I believe the reason for disagreement b/w you and DavidS has a lot to do with the somewhat inflammatory beginning of the article, which insinuates that Yao is somehow "cheap" or inferior. You're right that the Big O has his own biases -- being an American himself, it's natural to relate more to the American players, and I wouldn't be surprised if he really did want to see the game returned to the Americans. But I don't think that's his main point. Aside from those opening lines and some slight subtext in the discussion of Yao vs. Shaq, Big O's main argument is that the nba system is screwed up. Really, the only reason that the intro to the article sounds so bad is because people have different ideas about "cheap labor." Some people believe that cheap foreign labor is bad b/c this foreign labor steals jobs from Americans (e.g. illegal Mexican immigrants who come to America to work in the agriculture sector). If Robertson were taking this point of view, then I think you could rightly say that Robertson was being xenophobic. But another point of view is that foreign labor is not bad, but rather essential to America, because it makes up for the shortcomings of America. In the agriculture industry, there are lots of illegal immigrants who come to America seeking to do the dirty work of picking fruit from trees, harvesting crops, etc. And American farmers need these people, because frankly there aren't a lot of American citizens who want to do those jobs. How many of the Americans you know tell you, "I can't get a job picking fruit b/c all these Mexicans took my job"? That's right. Zero. The Americans who run farms are happy that Mexicans are coming over to do the dirty work for them, because NOBODY ELSE WANTS TO. The fact that we need immigrants to come do these dirty jobs shows that America's system is not self-sufficient, i.e foreign labor is a sign that our system can't function by itself. This is the point of view that I believe Robertson is taking. Robertson never says that Yao sucks. He calls him "cheap labor." In other words, he's a sign that our American system, if foreign players didn't exist, would stink. He does the dirty work that the Americans don't want to do, but without which the NBA would be less enjoyable to watch. I'll admit, he does say that Shaq is better than Yao. But that's not much of an insult, is it? He only brings up this point in the context of Yao's overwhelming media presence, not as part of an argument that Yao sucks. If he really wanted to insult foreign players, he would compare Yao to some scrub instead. But he doesn't, because that's not his main point.
