Mudge
01-21-2008, 04:16 PM
As a huge fan of English Premier League football (Arsenal, specifically), I am regularly confronted by English fans pissing and moaning about the lack of English players on Arsenal's team (a trend that is spreading to the other teams in the league, which, because of the richer revenue streams available to English clubs, has become a magnet for the best players in the world, attracted by the highest pay-scales in all of football). These fans complain that, by not stocking their team(s) with English players, Arsenal's French manager and others in the EPL are damaging any chance England has of ever winning the World Cup or the European Championship again. To Englishmen, who consider England the birthplace of football (and even called Arsenal's old home ground the Home of Football), this is hard to swallow.
My question is, as fans of basketball, invented in Springfield, Mass, by James Naismith (a Canadian, ironically, IIRC), are you concerned, disturbed, or upset that non-US-born players are gradually taking an ever larger role in the NBA (and to a lesser extent, college basketball)? Would you have been angry, had Dirk Nowitzki led N. Carolina to several ACC championships, instead of going directly to the NBA (because he would have been a 20-year old German freshman, not because it was UNC, I mean)?
For myself, I am very glad that the US is attracting ever more foreign-born players to America to play the game, as it is raising the quality of play here. This is the same thing that is happening in English football, where most English players don't begin to exhibit the levels of technique or ball skills that Brazilian players do. The foreign-born basketball players tend to be sounder fundamentally than the US players, just as the Brazilian footballers are sounder than the English. However, there is a certain backlash, not only among the English fans, but also some English players, denigrating the foreign imports.
I saw Canada go through the same thing in hockey (their national sport), when the foreign (mostly Scandinavian and Slavic) players started coming into the NHL. Think about Canada's Don Cherry, for years using his bully pulpit on Hockey Night in Canada, to deride foreign players who just wanted to out-skate and out-stickhandle the Canadian players, rather than fight them. This same sequence is being played out in England, where the English will say that the foreigners "don't like it up 'em", when talking about English rough-house tactics, used to make up for a deficit in skill.
In the NBA, you occasionally see evidence of black American players mocking foreign players for being less athletic than them, even as the top NBA teams are led by foreigners such as Steve Nash, Tim Duncan/Tony Parker/Manu Ginobli, Dirk Nowitzki, Andrie Kirilenko, etc. One would think black American NBA players would respect the combination of high skill and reasonable athleticism that players like Nowitzki encompass, but I detect a hint of derision in many American players' attitudes.
If you are in favor of the foreign influx, the next question becomes: doesn't this argue in favor of moving all top-level competitive sports out of the academic environment? One of the main reasons US mens soccer is not competitive internationally is that the training limitations on HS and collegiate sports are simply incompatible with top-level regimens practiced by the rest of the world... most Europeans find our system (and its practice and playing limits) to be laughable, if we ever hope to produce top-flight soccer players. Pretty much all top-flight European athletes practice and compete in their sports in organizations completely separate from their academic schools... in many cases, they forgo further academic schooling at a fairly young age (typically 15-16 years old for soccer) to become full-time professionals.
This is as true in basketball as it is in soccer, as it is in gymnastics or ice-skating. It is only in these traditionally individualized, "Olympic" sports that the US follows competitive training regimens (with young girls moving to Texas to train with Bela Karolyi or California to train with Michele Kwan's former coach); let anyone propose that we dispense with the charade of LeBron James or Kevin Durant going to HS or college, in favor of playing basketball virtually full-time, in a year-round version of AAU basketball, and Americans get their back up-- but isn't this exactly what is allowing foreigners like Dirk Novitzki and Pau Gasol to become sounder, fundamental players, and overcome their lesser athletic gifts to excel over more physically gifted American players? Why shouldn't Dwight Howard have been concentrating, from the age of 12-13, on honing his skills in basketball, rather than relying simply on his greater athletic gifts to allow him to match up with his opponents when he entered the NBA? He could have pursued basketball full-time from that age, and would have been better prepared when he entered the NBA; but, had he attempted that, it would have been difficult for him to play against any other elite US players, as they are mostly in school, as well. He would have been better served by moving to Europe and playing club basketball from a young age.
While I hope that Coach K is able to help the US win a gold medal in Beijing, I am not interested in seeing American college and NBA players' lack of focus on (and refinement in) fundamentals be rewarded. I want to see better-skilled foreigners come to the US and show our better athletes how it should be done.
My question is, as fans of basketball, invented in Springfield, Mass, by James Naismith (a Canadian, ironically, IIRC), are you concerned, disturbed, or upset that non-US-born players are gradually taking an ever larger role in the NBA (and to a lesser extent, college basketball)? Would you have been angry, had Dirk Nowitzki led N. Carolina to several ACC championships, instead of going directly to the NBA (because he would have been a 20-year old German freshman, not because it was UNC, I mean)?
For myself, I am very glad that the US is attracting ever more foreign-born players to America to play the game, as it is raising the quality of play here. This is the same thing that is happening in English football, where most English players don't begin to exhibit the levels of technique or ball skills that Brazilian players do. The foreign-born basketball players tend to be sounder fundamentally than the US players, just as the Brazilian footballers are sounder than the English. However, there is a certain backlash, not only among the English fans, but also some English players, denigrating the foreign imports.
I saw Canada go through the same thing in hockey (their national sport), when the foreign (mostly Scandinavian and Slavic) players started coming into the NHL. Think about Canada's Don Cherry, for years using his bully pulpit on Hockey Night in Canada, to deride foreign players who just wanted to out-skate and out-stickhandle the Canadian players, rather than fight them. This same sequence is being played out in England, where the English will say that the foreigners "don't like it up 'em", when talking about English rough-house tactics, used to make up for a deficit in skill.
In the NBA, you occasionally see evidence of black American players mocking foreign players for being less athletic than them, even as the top NBA teams are led by foreigners such as Steve Nash, Tim Duncan/Tony Parker/Manu Ginobli, Dirk Nowitzki, Andrie Kirilenko, etc. One would think black American NBA players would respect the combination of high skill and reasonable athleticism that players like Nowitzki encompass, but I detect a hint of derision in many American players' attitudes.
If you are in favor of the foreign influx, the next question becomes: doesn't this argue in favor of moving all top-level competitive sports out of the academic environment? One of the main reasons US mens soccer is not competitive internationally is that the training limitations on HS and collegiate sports are simply incompatible with top-level regimens practiced by the rest of the world... most Europeans find our system (and its practice and playing limits) to be laughable, if we ever hope to produce top-flight soccer players. Pretty much all top-flight European athletes practice and compete in their sports in organizations completely separate from their academic schools... in many cases, they forgo further academic schooling at a fairly young age (typically 15-16 years old for soccer) to become full-time professionals.
This is as true in basketball as it is in soccer, as it is in gymnastics or ice-skating. It is only in these traditionally individualized, "Olympic" sports that the US follows competitive training regimens (with young girls moving to Texas to train with Bela Karolyi or California to train with Michele Kwan's former coach); let anyone propose that we dispense with the charade of LeBron James or Kevin Durant going to HS or college, in favor of playing basketball virtually full-time, in a year-round version of AAU basketball, and Americans get their back up-- but isn't this exactly what is allowing foreigners like Dirk Novitzki and Pau Gasol to become sounder, fundamental players, and overcome their lesser athletic gifts to excel over more physically gifted American players? Why shouldn't Dwight Howard have been concentrating, from the age of 12-13, on honing his skills in basketball, rather than relying simply on his greater athletic gifts to allow him to match up with his opponents when he entered the NBA? He could have pursued basketball full-time from that age, and would have been better prepared when he entered the NBA; but, had he attempted that, it would have been difficult for him to play against any other elite US players, as they are mostly in school, as well. He would have been better served by moving to Europe and playing club basketball from a young age.
While I hope that Coach K is able to help the US win a gold medal in Beijing, I am not interested in seeing American college and NBA players' lack of focus on (and refinement in) fundamentals be rewarded. I want to see better-skilled foreigners come to the US and show our better athletes how it should be done.