This is pretty convincing. A counterpoint would be why the US is still at or near the top in international play - and if we had our best players on the court, we would generally win most of the time. Whatever success individual international players have seen in the NBA, the US is still the overall best (probably) in international tournament play.
I love this idea, in fact I would take it a step further.
If the NBA is going to do an in season tournament I think they should separate the teams by region of origin. Make the regular season be every team plays every other team twice. Then do a cup thing with club teams (like the in season tournament) then do another cup thing where players create new teams to play for their region of origin.
It might be tricky if the math doesn't work out exactly but you could do two or three teams from California if that is what the supply required - or you could fiddle with the numbers so extra califonian players end up on teams from the pacific northwest if there are not enough players from that region.
I would love to see what a team from Europe would look like vs the best team Texas or Florida could put together.
How about we just let colleges fucking pay players. I can't imagine that the fact that most aspiring basketball players in the US essentially have to endure a 4 year unpaid internship during which they are most likely going to get injured or weeded out doesn't affect the incentivizes here.
If you make the basketball career path artificially less desirable you get less people pursuing it no? And that's especially true when you decrease the near term payouts.
I like the article and everything I have heard about AAU corroborates the claims made in this article. So I’m on board for more club based solutions, noting that many MLB clubs follow the same approach. OTOH, in my limited experience, youth baseball tends to reek of politics and the same has been said of the Ace and RBI programs here in Chicago.
But I do question some of the premise of the argument. there are roughly 550 nba players on roster, and only 125 of those players are ‘international’, so including guys that played here in the US since HS. Also the number one non US country contributing players to the NBA? Canada. Does that really count? If not, then we are down to 99 international players.
If anything given the global nature of the sport, I’d say the international contribution is less than expected and far less than the distribution by population.
So do we really have a problem, other than AAU is objectively bad? I’d posit that a bigger issue may be college coaching. Here’s a very funny but accurate rant against John Calipari for essentially giving up on Xs and Os based coaching..
Glad this was AAU focused, I think the NCAA really does develop players well and with NIL they, players, have more money available for 1 on 1 or other pay for development during the summer. I dunno if the answer is regional NBAD summer camps for 15, 16, 17 yr olds that suck prestige away from AAU and therefore the talent.
Respectfully, I object to the premise. As stated, rarefied few NCAA basketball players become NBA players not only because of their genetically exceptional phenotypes but also only a select few NBA positions are available. For that reason, progression to the NBA from NCAA is inescapably inefficient and also a poor measure of the success of an NCAA career. Most of these players are going to graduate from or attend college for free and that is great. Full stop.
I buy that the AAU sucks and this NBDA would be better.
But I don’t buy the lede, that these elite NBA players aren’t American. They live here, they work here, they raise their families here, they invest in their communities. Sure they keep some connection to their birthplace — that’s normal and healthy — but they stay here when they’re done playing in the NBA. That’s as American as apple pie.
It's probably worth reforming Alcoholics Anonymous University league anyway, the same way most of our pipeline youth sports infrastructure in the USA is terrible...both from a professional development standpoint, and also from the standpoint of the kids themselves and their parents. Wouldn't it be nice if American schoolkids could compete in structured sports at a level somewhat above neighborhood pickup game, without going down the time-and-$ rabbit hole of extensive travel, gear, sports medicine, etc? My high school was regionally regarded for producing a variety of athletic talent, so I grew up knowing several has-potential athletes...some even set youth sports records! But, man, going through the AAU or its equivalent messed so many of them up. All they have as adults is bittersweet memories and debilitating long-term injuries. That's a lose-lose situation for everyone.
(Of course, the true SB take would be to argue for precocious sports talent as a new category of high-skilled immigraton visas...the best players would still be Americans! Make it one leg of a three-legged bipartisan immigration reform bill, maybe that'd finally pass Republican gamesmanship. Good opportunity to call it the WALL-BALL Act or something.)
1. You didn't really explain how the AAU works. How are the kids picked? How much do they travel? Are the games year-round?
2. I consider a great strength of the American system that kids are encouraged and enabled to go hard at whichever sport they like, without ever being boxed-in into the system, with no skills to fall back on.. One can get into college on a sports scholarship and launch a tech startup. With your changes, how would kids handle school? What happens to the kid who gets picked by his home-team at 17, but is injured out at 19?
For those who want to know how poor AAU development is, Kentucky this year had a bunch for former AAU players and future NBA draft lottery picks, and none of them could identify a oncoming screen while on defense in the Round of 64 in the NCAA Tournament. Thus, a 24-year-old grad student was able to drain 10 3s on them while taking all of three dribbles the entire game.
Where does NCAA basketball fit into this? With NIL money, there are now far more American players that could be making significant money from NCAA basketball than players who could be making significant money from the NBA. Obviously there’s more money in the NBA but it doesn’t seem like we should plan to abandon the NCAA.
Stylistically elite foreign players can play in a way the is not intuitive to American players and create advantage.
Jokic and Luka was prime examples but even Embid plays in a way today that those who guard him are unaccustomed too. He has a Patrick Ewing type game with a little more girth to him.
Kobe is right that skill is not being developed properly in the US. Not enough basketball players and too many specialists. 3&D. There has always been specialists but the best players don’t let their best abilities limit their growth in other areas.
Steph is the best shooter ever but he’s an all-time great because he’s more than Ray Allen.
Look at last year's NBA All-Rookie team. Four of the five first-teamers are American born; Bennedict Mathurin grew up and played in Canada (not exactly a hothouse of youth development). Four of the five players on the second team were born and grew up in America; Jeremy Sochan was born in the US but grew up playing in England (again, not exactly a hothouse of youth development).
In the 2021-22 All-Rookie first team, four of the five were born and grew up in America (except for Franz Wagner).
On the 2020-21 All Rookie first team, all five players grew up playing in the US.
I'm not going to say I like this proposal per se, but I will say that the "hometown rule" is inconsistent with the spirit of the rest of the proposal and should be dumped. It could also cause serious harm for a kid who happens to be from a city with a poor developmental program or with a coaching staff he doesn't connect with.
This article doesn't actually provide data to support the case that player development is a problem in the US. I did learn that the author does not like AAU.
The ideal data would be counterfactual: how many more American kids would now be leading NBA players had they had Ben’s suggested training? Of course that data doesn’t exist and I’m suspicious how good of an approximation is possible. The fact that many basketball experts consider the AAU much worse than the European system, that Europeans and other international players are visibly rapidly increasing their rates of success in the NBA, and that there are simple objective facts about the AAU—rando amateur coaches and a schedule heavy both in travel and games—that could obviously be improved on are all “data” in the sense of “highly relevant information”, which is what determines whether an argument is correct.
Hometown rule seems questionable. A serious advantage to big population areas and a strong incentive to game the other stuff. I feel like the problem with a lot of these take bakeries is that the author likes making complicated rules more than solving the problem.
This is pretty convincing. A counterpoint would be why the US is still at or near the top in international play - and if we had our best players on the court, we would generally win most of the time. Whatever success individual international players have seen in the NBA, the US is still the overall best (probably) in international tournament play.
Overall, the US is obviously still the team to beat. But it's kind of crazy that there is just no American incumbent to be the face of the league.
I love this idea, in fact I would take it a step further.
If the NBA is going to do an in season tournament I think they should separate the teams by region of origin. Make the regular season be every team plays every other team twice. Then do a cup thing with club teams (like the in season tournament) then do another cup thing where players create new teams to play for their region of origin.
It might be tricky if the math doesn't work out exactly but you could do two or three teams from California if that is what the supply required - or you could fiddle with the numbers so extra califonian players end up on teams from the pacific northwest if there are not enough players from that region.
I would love to see what a team from Europe would look like vs the best team Texas or Florida could put together.
How about we just let colleges fucking pay players. I can't imagine that the fact that most aspiring basketball players in the US essentially have to endure a 4 year unpaid internship during which they are most likely going to get injured or weeded out doesn't affect the incentivizes here.
If you make the basketball career path artificially less desirable you get less people pursuing it no? And that's especially true when you decrease the near term payouts.
I think that at some point some college is going to pay them, and dare the NCAA to sue them and get benchslapped in the courts once again.
I like the article and everything I have heard about AAU corroborates the claims made in this article. So I’m on board for more club based solutions, noting that many MLB clubs follow the same approach. OTOH, in my limited experience, youth baseball tends to reek of politics and the same has been said of the Ace and RBI programs here in Chicago.
But I do question some of the premise of the argument. there are roughly 550 nba players on roster, and only 125 of those players are ‘international’, so including guys that played here in the US since HS. Also the number one non US country contributing players to the NBA? Canada. Does that really count? If not, then we are down to 99 international players.
If anything given the global nature of the sport, I’d say the international contribution is less than expected and far less than the distribution by population.
So do we really have a problem, other than AAU is objectively bad? I’d posit that a bigger issue may be college coaching. Here’s a very funny but accurate rant against John Calipari for essentially giving up on Xs and Os based coaching..
https://youtu.be/NAOv3b_hh5Q?si=KMCEwUyxthIJMnNb
Glad this was AAU focused, I think the NCAA really does develop players well and with NIL they, players, have more money available for 1 on 1 or other pay for development during the summer. I dunno if the answer is regional NBAD summer camps for 15, 16, 17 yr olds that suck prestige away from AAU and therefore the talent.
Respectfully, I object to the premise. As stated, rarefied few NCAA basketball players become NBA players not only because of their genetically exceptional phenotypes but also only a select few NBA positions are available. For that reason, progression to the NBA from NCAA is inescapably inefficient and also a poor measure of the success of an NCAA career. Most of these players are going to graduate from or attend college for free and that is great. Full stop.
I buy that the AAU sucks and this NBDA would be better.
But I don’t buy the lede, that these elite NBA players aren’t American. They live here, they work here, they raise their families here, they invest in their communities. Sure they keep some connection to their birthplace — that’s normal and healthy — but they stay here when they’re done playing in the NBA. That’s as American as apple pie.
It's probably worth reforming Alcoholics Anonymous University league anyway, the same way most of our pipeline youth sports infrastructure in the USA is terrible...both from a professional development standpoint, and also from the standpoint of the kids themselves and their parents. Wouldn't it be nice if American schoolkids could compete in structured sports at a level somewhat above neighborhood pickup game, without going down the time-and-$ rabbit hole of extensive travel, gear, sports medicine, etc? My high school was regionally regarded for producing a variety of athletic talent, so I grew up knowing several has-potential athletes...some even set youth sports records! But, man, going through the AAU or its equivalent messed so many of them up. All they have as adults is bittersweet memories and debilitating long-term injuries. That's a lose-lose situation for everyone.
(Of course, the true SB take would be to argue for precocious sports talent as a new category of high-skilled immigraton visas...the best players would still be Americans! Make it one leg of a three-legged bipartisan immigration reform bill, maybe that'd finally pass Republican gamesmanship. Good opportunity to call it the WALL-BALL Act or something.)
1. You didn't really explain how the AAU works. How are the kids picked? How much do they travel? Are the games year-round?
2. I consider a great strength of the American system that kids are encouraged and enabled to go hard at whichever sport they like, without ever being boxed-in into the system, with no skills to fall back on.. One can get into college on a sports scholarship and launch a tech startup. With your changes, how would kids handle school? What happens to the kid who gets picked by his home-team at 17, but is injured out at 19?
For those who want to know how poor AAU development is, Kentucky this year had a bunch for former AAU players and future NBA draft lottery picks, and none of them could identify a oncoming screen while on defense in the Round of 64 in the NCAA Tournament. Thus, a 24-year-old grad student was able to drain 10 3s on them while taking all of three dribbles the entire game.
You will appreciate this. It is an epic takedown of Calipari's Wildcats versus Oakland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77KWNj5iwj0&ab_channel=AwfulCoaching
Where does NCAA basketball fit into this? With NIL money, there are now far more American players that could be making significant money from NCAA basketball than players who could be making significant money from the NBA. Obviously there’s more money in the NBA but it doesn’t seem like we should plan to abandon the NCAA.
Stylistically elite foreign players can play in a way the is not intuitive to American players and create advantage.
Jokic and Luka was prime examples but even Embid plays in a way today that those who guard him are unaccustomed too. He has a Patrick Ewing type game with a little more girth to him.
Kobe is right that skill is not being developed properly in the US. Not enough basketball players and too many specialists. 3&D. There has always been specialists but the best players don’t let their best abilities limit their growth in other areas.
Steph is the best shooter ever but he’s an all-time great because he’s more than Ray Allen.
Not buying it, Ben.
Look at last year's NBA All-Rookie team. Four of the five first-teamers are American born; Bennedict Mathurin grew up and played in Canada (not exactly a hothouse of youth development). Four of the five players on the second team were born and grew up in America; Jeremy Sochan was born in the US but grew up playing in England (again, not exactly a hothouse of youth development).
In the 2021-22 All-Rookie first team, four of the five were born and grew up in America (except for Franz Wagner).
On the 2020-21 All Rookie first team, all five players grew up playing in the US.
I'm not going to say I like this proposal per se, but I will say that the "hometown rule" is inconsistent with the spirit of the rest of the proposal and should be dumped. It could also cause serious harm for a kid who happens to be from a city with a poor developmental program or with a coaching staff he doesn't connect with.
This article doesn't actually provide data to support the case that player development is a problem in the US. I did learn that the author does not like AAU.
The ideal data would be counterfactual: how many more American kids would now be leading NBA players had they had Ben’s suggested training? Of course that data doesn’t exist and I’m suspicious how good of an approximation is possible. The fact that many basketball experts consider the AAU much worse than the European system, that Europeans and other international players are visibly rapidly increasing their rates of success in the NBA, and that there are simple objective facts about the AAU—rando amateur coaches and a schedule heavy both in travel and games—that could obviously be improved on are all “data” in the sense of “highly relevant information”, which is what determines whether an argument is correct.
Hometown rule seems questionable. A serious advantage to big population areas and a strong incentive to game the other stuff. I feel like the problem with a lot of these take bakeries is that the author likes making complicated rules more than solving the problem.