OTL: White Americans in the NBA

That's not what I said at all.
Playing NBA rules, the U.S. might still be in a position where it never has lost a game.

 

It has nothing do with the rules. It's all about our players not spending four years in college.

 

Interesting discussion here. When I was in high school, I had friends of both races who played on the basketball team (I played football and baseball myself). All of them told me the unwritten rule of pickup ball is, if you're white, you have to prove you can play; if you're black, you have to prove that you can't.

Stupid racist stereotype? Yes. Inaccurate? Hell yes. But at least when you're in high school, kids don't mince words.

Watch any broadcast of college or pro basketball, and you'll hear that same old playground stereotype repeated endlessly by announcers.

They just use words like "blue-collar," "natural athlete," "hard-worker" and "long bodies."

For the record, there are plenty of black Americans who work in blue collar jobs. Someone please pass that information along to Jim Nantz and Brent Musburger.

 

Epitome of this was when Joe Alexander was coming out of West Virginia.
Phenomenal athlete. Great leaping ability for a 6-8 guy.
Very little love for the game, and constantly frustrated his coaches by not committing to getting better.
And yet the pre-draft analysis was loaded with the "hard worker" stuff.
Do a google on "Joe Alexander" "draft" and "hard worker." Amazing stuff.

 

Same with Kirk Hinrich. People wanted to compare him to John Stockton and they were not even close to the same type of player.

There was an interesting story about Grant Hill a few years ago where he talked about how when he was in high school the poorer black kids hated the fact that he played basketball. His parents were rich and he drove a BMW to school. He didn't <i>need</i> to play basketball so why was he taking a spot from somebody else?

 

Halberstam had a great article in 1987 about Magic and Larry that talked a lot about the racial sides to their stories, the type of writing I don't know if you'd see today. It also might have been Halberstam who observed that Magic had a more traditional middle class upbringing while Bird had the hardscrabbled life, the dad who committed suicide, etc.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/web/COM1057184/1/index.htm

 

Well, we all know how much pro and college football's popularity has been affected by criminals... Or has baseball's attendance has fallen off completely because a bunch of players are thought to be cheating...

 

Most of the best players in recent years though haven't been four-year college players. Jennings might win RotY, and he didn't even play any college basketball. Lebron, Dwight Howard, Carmelo, Kobe, Garnett, Wade and others were all good to great from day one, and while you can claim that four years of college might have helped them get better, I'm not sure this is the case.

Is it better to have professional coaches, a couple million and being put in a tough spot to produce immediately, or to do the college thing, juggle class work (well, sometimes) and basketball, but to play a ton of minutes against inferior competition? It's hard to do a study just because there isn't a ton of high school players who went directly to the NBA, and you're not going to get a fresh supply now. But I imagine high school ---> NBA has a better group of players than college seniors ---> NBA.

 

Sggreenwell, stop while you can. Heads have previously exploded here over the high school-college debate, no matter how much evidence there is that, yes, guys straight from high school can do just fine in the NBA.

 

No one ever said they can't do just fine.
Just that it's too much of a crapshoot.
If you've got the talent of a Kobe or LeBron, you're the only one who can screw it up.
If you've got the talent of a Gerald Greene or Ndudi Ebi, you might want to learn how to play the game before taking on pros.

 

sgreenwell, I was being sarcastic because there is one poster on this board that thinks Lebron won't reach his potential because he didn't spend four years learning from the tit of some egomaniac college coach.

 

Panc, he still has not won one single game in an NBA Final.

But Kobe did prove me wrong, and the fact that no one worth a piss will stay beyond two years anymore makes the argument impossible to prove.