Just tapping the collective wisdom here. Either conventional IQ or Basketball IQ. Any ideas? I usually read Ray Allen. Emeka Okafor is certainly smart. Dike, too, right? Vlade seems pretty crafty. I detest all things Duke, but they do offer a pretty good ball/education package there, so perhaps guys like Hill and Battier ( but not Maggette, it seems). Matt Harpring seems very basketball-smart to me. Hinrich seems to be a smart guy on the come. Any others? You may contrast with dumb-as-a-stump, if you like, for entertainment purposes only.
Well I mean Chris Dudley went to Yale. Like most Ivy league schools, you can't offer scholarships, you can only bring it students who meet mininum requirements... but those are still pretty high. So he must have been pretty smart. They guys who went to Stanford... Childress and the Collins... who knows because they recruit heavily there.
I wouldn't necessarily coorelate players that went to "top tier" schools to be necessarily smart. Georgetown is considered top tier but some of our players we recruited were clearly there to play. on the other hand alum Boumtje Boumtje was one on the school math team and was also a nursing student and graduated with high honors. Sweetney was also pretty bright but I don't have any examples.
Jacque Vaughn was pretty good academically, if I recall. Amaechi is still studying for his PhD I believe, and Adonal Foyle went to Colgate, I think, and was fairly smart.
Luke Walton seems to have pretty high basketball IQ. Maybe I'm biased. Players in the past seem to be smarter than the current players, in general. Bird and Magic are the clear examples. Clyde, Stockton, Mo Cheeks, Dr. J, McHale, Isiah, even Rodman are all very smart guys.
Troy Murphy seems like a pretty smart dude. Dennis Rodman had tremendous BBall IQ. Always in the right place at the time.
I'd have to agree those guys were smart. On the other hand, there were stupid players then, too. Kobe is an interesting case. He seems to know a awful lot about the game. He is very aware what is going on around him. Yet, he also has this overweening arrogance that allows him to rationalize ridiculously stupid, selfish things. Maybe he thinks he can always make it up.
first i think we have to define smart, because theirs book smarts, game smarts, financial smarts and then just general smarts. i also want to add, all those overrated players with huge contracts are geniuses (or atleast their agents), especially guys like shawn bradley who get paid to sit. you can blame it on the GMs but a player has to have some intelligence to fool an idiot.
you're absolutely right... but Georgetown and Stanford recruit... as in someone with a 1000 SAT could get in and get a scholarship. It is forbidden at Yale to do that. So an NBA player from Yale A) has the motivation to go to a tough school B) must have really good scores (though below the media of accepted students of course) Grant Hill -- not sure about academics or whatever, but he just seems so bright and eloquent when he's interviewed. Very scholarly, sooo different from the average NBA player.
That was a false rumor. He does speak the languages, but I believe he got around a 1180 on his SAT (which is still on the higher end for NBA players). Kobe does seem to understand the game really well, which is why it confuses people why he has those streaks of selfishness and horrendous shot selection. It's probably arrogance. Shane Battier is very amiable and eloquent in his interviews. One of the smarter guys that I've seen in the NBA.
He's retired now, but I think that David Robinson had at 4.0 grade point average at the Naval Academy, and I know that one of his majors was mathematics and he may have even had a second major (history?). That is almost unheard of-- the Naval Academy is as tough as the Ivys to do that well. Alan Henderson had a 3.9 GPA at Indiana, with a majors biochemistry and pre-med. He had gotten a near perfect score on his SATs, went to the best private school in Indianapolis (Brebuf), and was accepted into Stanford and Harvard before he chose Indiana for basketball. I think that he still intends to go to medical school after he retires from the NBA. As many have mentioned, though, book-smart ain't court smart. Magic and Bird had court smarts but are pretty inarticulate. Same for Chris Mullin. Among active guys, people who just seem to make smart plays consistently include Brent & Jon Barry, Robert Horry, Fred Hoiberg, Avery Johnson, Kirilenko, Boozer, Duncan, Battier, Posey, and Kidd.
