Truly the best thing to come out of Slow Boring. A completely unrelated post about an issue that's intriguing, provocative and fun. Never knew this was an issue but I love the proposal.
Given how she likes sports, I suggested to Maya that she should do a weekly sports thread on the weekends. Seems like she's fully focused on research here and is using her writing skills for other platforms, though. So it's nice to see Ben write this up for today.
Hot take?: Joel Embiid is an American. Therefore the most recent NBA MVP was an American.
1) He is literally an American citizen
2) he has committed to play for team USA
3) he has been in the USA since high school and played at Kansas. As such he is a product of the American basketball development system, such as it is.
Sorry, but I'm not buying it. Someone who comes to the US at 16 for prep school after being seen at an international tryout camp cannot be considered a product of the American development system, at least by any widely-accepted definition of that system. The whole basis for American amateur basketball being so fucked is that the AAU/summer camp circuit starts ranking kids way too early, is pay-for-play, focuses on individual star-making rather than skill- or team-building, and funnels players to certain colleges through coach shoe contracts. Embiid skipped every step of that, and to say that he's a successful product of the American basketball development system is like saying a Nigerian doctor that moved to the US at 35 and lives an upper-middle class life has successfully navigated the Black prison-industrial complex.
I covered the Sixers at the beginning of Hinkie's tenure, moved back to Philly two years ago, and would bet that I've watched more of Joel Embiid's NBA minutes than any other Slow Boring subscriber - I also think it's worth noting that he considers himself Cameroonian first and foremost even if he's now an American citizen and wants to play Olympic basketball at the highest level.
I think Joel is quintessentially American: an immigrant that came to the US and has done incredible things. It also doesn’t hurt that he plays for the sixers and I’m a Philly homer
Sorry, but we already have a program that focuses on training future professionals at the expense of winning. It's called the University of Kentucky and I run it.
But seriously, this proposal misses two reasons why Europe's system can't work here.
1. The combination of population density and promotion/relegation means almost everyone lives within commuting distance of a pro team. Under Ben's system, I, a hoops prodigy in Cincinnati, would have to join the Pacers' academy, which means moving to Indianapolis. But if I have to move anyway, who cares if it's to Indy or Memphis or LA?
2. The draft ruins the incentives. Why should I spend a lot of time and money training someone who's going to play against me? My lukewarm take: get rid of the draft and teams will solve this problem themselves.
I changed it after their loss in honor of outstanding achievement in white male mediocrity. Since signing a lifetime contract five years ago, he has one tournament win. That's two extra weeks of vacation a year and the best job security this side of Clarence Thomas. He is truly an inspiration to us all.
I'd talk more trash, but we lost five players to the execrable transfer portal this week, including at least one who was chumming it up to the local paper a few weeks ago about how important it was to keep the nucleus together and how special they could be next season.
The very best thing about American sports is that, in theory or in principle, every prospect (no matter how talented) has access to and receives the same level of academic instruction as their peers. No pipelining thirteen year olds into a forced life of carnival acts for our amusement (and tough shit if you tear something!).
Youth sports used to be that you just joined and committed a few hours a week to the sport for a few months a year, and maybe 2 sports. Now it seems every sport is a full on year round commitment for the entire family, involving travel every weekend, camps, off season scrimmages, etc. it doesn't seem healthy.
I think this misunderstands that 80% of people may want what Jonnymac describes, but the 20% are going to do something more so that should be designed to be effective.
Perhaps you'll deem my take bad as well, but I'm increasingly coming to the opinion that high school should provide more outlets for vocational skills. If students are showing skills and an appeal for a certain profession, they should get the ability to get a head start on the training in order to learn toward entering that profession.
And with specific regard to sports, high schools themselves have long run them for the purpose of amusement, where students can get injured in them.
No, I absolutely support that. My high school had a metal shop and an auto shop, regrettably lost as those instructors retired. Many moons ago, there was a course that built a house every semester, then sold the house on the open market to fund the course. But you still have to take math and english, and you're still interacting in a normal way normally with all of your fellow students.
As I understand it, the European-model sports academies make barely even a pretext of having a regular school with regular students bolted onto the side.
At least on the auto shop side, I lament it but it arguably was a sign of the times. Now*, you don't enter the automotive mechanic world as a generalist. You specialize as a Ford or GM technician, learning all of the ins and outs of that family of vehicles. And to their credit, the OEMs do a great job of setting up financially-viable apprenticeship programs to get kids up to speed without saddling them with dire for-profit-school debt loads and all of that.
I'm less sure about the metal fabrication side. CNC is a major complicating factor. Job shops operate differently than they used to, and I'm guessing major manufacturers just don't have the same need for cohorts of skilled handwheel-turners.
What I'm trying to formulate in my mind is where I'd place the balance between those two. I'm guessing it would be less academic content than currently taught, particularly on subjects that some students well never use or remember in adulthood, but somewhere more than just letting them go apprentice all day long.
“As I understand it, the European-model sports academies make barely even a pretext of having a regular school with regular students bolted onto the side.”
I wonder how different the current system is for top prospects in high school.
Depends on the school. Manchester United just spent a ton of money on academics because all the kids here are choosing City for the better sporting prospects. They're trying to appeal to the parents by offering a decent education as well.
Basketball is not a vocational skill, though. “You should aspire to play professional sports” is *terrible* life advice for at least 99.999 % of kids. Creating a higher rather than lower-profile form of intensive club systems rather than a meaningful academic track is basically one step away from having a club system teaching kids to buy lottery tickets.
I'm not super high on the quality of academic instruction that super-athletic American kids currently receive, but I do think one weakness in the European system (not just for sports but for everything) is that it makes it extremely difficult for anyone to be a late bloomer, whereas in the US it's common.
I think it’s increasingly hard for kids to be late bloomers. Manchester City just signed a 14 year old American who is already in the Philadelphia Union’s academy.
You see this across all sports with competitive tryouts and camps and clubs for elementary school kids.
Truly hard now to just play and have fun at a sport without it being a big competitive commitment.
I guess my concern is that from what I've seen, a lot of D1 atheletes aren't exactly getting great educations either and in practice are semi-pro athletes while in college. See John Oliver's episode on the NCAA. But the problem isn't as big in college as it would be for kids still in high school.
I TA'd a few Big Ten scholarship athletes, although none in sports where anybody realistically makes it their career. They were diligent, hard-working, and productive, although not really top-flight.
I agree that the "semipro in practice" aspect of revenue-sport college athletics is troubling, and I think the NIL/transfer portal explosion has rapidly made everything much worse.
Are you limiting this take to basketball only? As I understand it, many Dominican baseball players come up through the system Ben has described and you have decried. Ben’s way offers a method of avoiding (or even just limiting) the carnival act possibility.
My problem isn't that it can't be successful--obviously it can be. My problem is that you're expecting kids, real actual kids, to identify their plan A and strive toward it almost exclusively. Their plans B, C, and D get pretty hopeless pretty quickly.
That’s a good point. In light of it I’d modify the Krauss idea by building up more of a supportive ecosystem. Why not make this sort of thing more of a norm across the sports world? Colleges could do it, other sports could do it too. My own holy grail would be to get US high schools out of the revenue sports business and push the people who want to do that down a different track!
First Ben take I'm not really on board with. (But one of the many of Bill Simmons and the execrable Chuck Klosterman!).
How many of the world's top 100 basketball players were Americans forty years ago? Ninety percent maybe? We weren't much more than 5% of the planet's population at that point. Now we're barely 4%. That "best basketballers" percentage was bound to decrease for our country, given the sport's huge popularity. I'm ok with that. We give the world a lot of cool shit. One of them was basketball. (Sorry, Canada, Naismith invented the game after immigrating to the States; he also became a US citizen and died on US soil). It's a good thing, not a bad thing, that the world has taken up one of our games with such gusto.
It's true we seem to be in an era when a good number of the world's foremost players are non-Americans. But so what? Non-Americans outnumber us 24-1. Once you get out of the top 5, and certainly out of the top 10, the numbers looks pretty good for Uncle Sam. And we're still completely dominant if we take the top, say, 100 players in the game. No other country approaches America's depth of basketball talent. And let's not even get into the world's top woman players. I might share Ben's sentiments if we were comparing the United States of America as a basketball power with any other single nation state. But we're not. The comparison is the USA vs. the other 96% of the world. Frankly, the fact that the debate is framed this way *underscores* American hoops dominance.
There are loads of great, young American basketball players in today's game. This is a non problem in search of a solution. To me what matters is not bragging rights about whether the US or the other 96% produces more top flight basketball talent (we do, for what it's worth, and it's not particularly close). What matters is Olympic gold— that should be ours most olympiads into the far future provided enough of our top stars participate. Who's going to beat us, Serbia? Slovenia? Greece? I doubt it.
PS—Where do these awesome foreign hoops talents ply their trade? That's right, a basketball league headquartered in New York City.
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.
Trump needs to institute a basketball tariff to prevent all these evil foreigners from coming in and stealing our basketball jobs. Dikembe Mutombo took my job, and I'm mad about it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-kgb1QtSnU
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.)
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.
USA Hockey has actually done something in this vein to better develop American players - the National Team Development Program (NTDP). It is a bit different than what is proposed here, but I think it does prove the feasibility. USA Hockey is the governing body that organizes and supports teams that play in all international competitions, as well as providing support for the majority of youth hockey leagues throughout the US. While they are separate from the NHL, they do receive financial support from them. The NTDP has two teams (18U, 17U) made up of the top American born hockey players. They live and train in a single location in Michigan pretty much year-round. Players that come through the program normally go on to play college hockey, with the best players moving on to the professional ranks of the NHL. This program has been very successful, winning international competitions and annually producing multiple 1st round NHL draft picks.
As long as we continue stealing enough of Canada’s best players to keep Lord Stanley’s Cup in the US, I’m happy. Imagine if we got to a point where American teams couldn’t win a basketball championship because all of our best players were playing for Canadian teams. Poor, pathetic Canada.
I kid Canada, cruelly and perversely enjoy keeping the Cup from them. It’s insane that they’ve won sn NBA title since the last time they won an NHL title. Hockey is to them what basketball is to us, and then some, and they haven’t won a title in 30 years.
Random note: people who are interested in this topic (basketball not hockey) might enjoy Jonathan Abrams’ Boys Among Men.
Yes. I probably know more than most on this board as my sons played hockey, but I am by no means an expert on Juniors. In general "Juniors" is just hockey for 16 to 20 year olds. There is no governing body that determines what qualifies as "Junior" hockey - if you wanted to start a league tomorrow and call it Junior hockey there is nothing to stop you. As a result, there are many Junior leagues throughout the US and Canada (note: in Europe hockey is just like soccer, with the top youth players playing on pro-teams starting at 17 or 18). One of the main reasons that the NTDP was formed was to try and provide a better development program for the top young American players. In a sense Juniors is kinda like AAU basketball. There are certainly Junior teams that do a great job of developing their players the proper way (whatever that is), but with so many teams and no common objective you're bound to see disparate quality of player development.
The #1 hurdle that any minor league proposal has to cross is how it's going to be paid for. Are enough people going to watch the NBDA? If not, then you're asking the NBA to take this on as an expense, and the owners are always going to be dubious of that when they can get training for free via college basketball, the AAU, or what have you, as flawed as any of them might be.
I've dreamed several times of a minor league for the NFL, but it won't happen because they can just free ride off CFB, and they enforce that free riding by (wrongly) forcing all prospects to be out of high school for three years. I'm guessing that the NBA's minimum age of 19 functions the same way.
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 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.
Truly the best thing to come out of Slow Boring. A completely unrelated post about an issue that's intriguing, provocative and fun. Never knew this was an issue but I love the proposal.
Given how she likes sports, I suggested to Maya that she should do a weekly sports thread on the weekends. Seems like she's fully focused on research here and is using her writing skills for other platforms, though. So it's nice to see Ben write this up for today.
More sports content please! A couple a month wouldn't be too much to ask, I think.
Is liking basketball a requirement for employment at Slow Boring?
Completely agree!! What a fantastic article.
Hot take?: Joel Embiid is an American. Therefore the most recent NBA MVP was an American.
1) He is literally an American citizen
2) he has committed to play for team USA
3) he has been in the USA since high school and played at Kansas. As such he is a product of the American basketball development system, such as it is.
Though I do agree with gist of article*
Sorry, but I'm not buying it. Someone who comes to the US at 16 for prep school after being seen at an international tryout camp cannot be considered a product of the American development system, at least by any widely-accepted definition of that system. The whole basis for American amateur basketball being so fucked is that the AAU/summer camp circuit starts ranking kids way too early, is pay-for-play, focuses on individual star-making rather than skill- or team-building, and funnels players to certain colleges through coach shoe contracts. Embiid skipped every step of that, and to say that he's a successful product of the American basketball development system is like saying a Nigerian doctor that moved to the US at 35 and lives an upper-middle class life has successfully navigated the Black prison-industrial complex.
I covered the Sixers at the beginning of Hinkie's tenure, moved back to Philly two years ago, and would bet that I've watched more of Joel Embiid's NBA minutes than any other Slow Boring subscriber - I also think it's worth noting that he considers himself Cameroonian first and foremost even if he's now an American citizen and wants to play Olympic basketball at the highest level.
I think Joel is quintessentially American: an immigrant that came to the US and has done incredible things. It also doesn’t hurt that he plays for the sixers and I’m a Philly homer
Sorry, but we already have a program that focuses on training future professionals at the expense of winning. It's called the University of Kentucky and I run it.
But seriously, this proposal misses two reasons why Europe's system can't work here.
1. The combination of population density and promotion/relegation means almost everyone lives within commuting distance of a pro team. Under Ben's system, I, a hoops prodigy in Cincinnati, would have to join the Pacers' academy, which means moving to Indianapolis. But if I have to move anyway, who cares if it's to Indy or Memphis or LA?
2. The draft ruins the incentives. Why should I spend a lot of time and money training someone who's going to play against me? My lukewarm take: get rid of the draft and teams will solve this problem themselves.
May Kentucky forever lose
This take on the UK-Oakland game is perfect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77KWNj5iwj0&ab_channel=AwfulCoaching
Did you change your user image to Cal just for this post, or did I simply never notice?
10/10 no notes
I changed it after their loss in honor of outstanding achievement in white male mediocrity. Since signing a lifetime contract five years ago, he has one tournament win. That's two extra weeks of vacation a year and the best job security this side of Clarence Thomas. He is truly an inspiration to us all.
Y’all deserve what you get with Cal
I'd talk more trash, but we lost five players to the execrable transfer portal this week, including at least one who was chumming it up to the local paper a few weeks ago about how important it was to keep the nucleus together and how special they could be next season.
Alas, to hell with it all.
The very best thing about American sports is that, in theory or in principle, every prospect (no matter how talented) has access to and receives the same level of academic instruction as their peers. No pipelining thirteen year olds into a forced life of carnival acts for our amusement (and tough shit if you tear something!).
Bad take.
Youth sports used to be that you just joined and committed a few hours a week to the sport for a few months a year, and maybe 2 sports. Now it seems every sport is a full on year round commitment for the entire family, involving travel every weekend, camps, off season scrimmages, etc. it doesn't seem healthy.
This. And Ben's proposal would only makes this worse.
It's like he looked at women's gymnastics and said "that's the upbringing athletic kids should have!".
I think this misunderstands that 80% of people may want what Jonnymac describes, but the 20% are going to do something more so that should be designed to be effective.
Perhaps you'll deem my take bad as well, but I'm increasingly coming to the opinion that high school should provide more outlets for vocational skills. If students are showing skills and an appeal for a certain profession, they should get the ability to get a head start on the training in order to learn toward entering that profession.
And with specific regard to sports, high schools themselves have long run them for the purpose of amusement, where students can get injured in them.
No, I absolutely support that. My high school had a metal shop and an auto shop, regrettably lost as those instructors retired. Many moons ago, there was a course that built a house every semester, then sold the house on the open market to fund the course. But you still have to take math and english, and you're still interacting in a normal way normally with all of your fellow students.
As I understand it, the European-model sports academies make barely even a pretext of having a regular school with regular students bolted onto the side.
That’s how it should be. It’s a shame those programs died with the teachers
At least on the auto shop side, I lament it but it arguably was a sign of the times. Now*, you don't enter the automotive mechanic world as a generalist. You specialize as a Ford or GM technician, learning all of the ins and outs of that family of vehicles. And to their credit, the OEMs do a great job of setting up financially-viable apprenticeship programs to get kids up to speed without saddling them with dire for-profit-school debt loads and all of that.
I'm less sure about the metal fabrication side. CNC is a major complicating factor. Job shops operate differently than they used to, and I'm guessing major manufacturers just don't have the same need for cohorts of skilled handwheel-turners.
* twenty years ago
I imagine the construction shop died with NIMBY?
Last I was in town, the wood shop is still around. Much easier to find instructors.
*edit* No idea about the home construction, it was way before my time. If I had to guess, it was more of an insurance thing.
What I'm trying to formulate in my mind is where I'd place the balance between those two. I'm guessing it would be less academic content than currently taught, particularly on subjects that some students well never use or remember in adulthood, but somewhere more than just letting them go apprentice all day long.
1/4 of my senior year, by wall clock time, was advanced auto (humblebrag, by then I'd used up all the math and science that they offered).
“As I understand it, the European-model sports academies make barely even a pretext of having a regular school with regular students bolted onto the side.”
I wonder how different the current system is for top prospects in high school.
Depends on the school. Manchester United just spent a ton of money on academics because all the kids here are choosing City for the better sporting prospects. They're trying to appeal to the parents by offering a decent education as well.
Basketball is not a vocational skill, though. “You should aspire to play professional sports” is *terrible* life advice for at least 99.999 % of kids. Creating a higher rather than lower-profile form of intensive club systems rather than a meaningful academic track is basically one step away from having a club system teaching kids to buy lottery tickets.
I'm not super high on the quality of academic instruction that super-athletic American kids currently receive, but I do think one weakness in the European system (not just for sports but for everything) is that it makes it extremely difficult for anyone to be a late bloomer, whereas in the US it's common.
I think it’s increasingly hard for kids to be late bloomers. Manchester City just signed a 14 year old American who is already in the Philadelphia Union’s academy.
You see this across all sports with competitive tryouts and camps and clubs for elementary school kids.
Truly hard now to just play and have fun at a sport without it being a big competitive commitment.
I guess my concern is that from what I've seen, a lot of D1 atheletes aren't exactly getting great educations either and in practice are semi-pro athletes while in college. See John Oliver's episode on the NCAA. But the problem isn't as big in college as it would be for kids still in high school.
I TA'd a few Big Ten scholarship athletes, although none in sports where anybody realistically makes it their career. They were diligent, hard-working, and productive, although not really top-flight.
I agree that the "semipro in practice" aspect of revenue-sport college athletics is troubling, and I think the NIL/transfer portal explosion has rapidly made everything much worse.
This suggests you understand very little about how the existing AAU system works currently. It does the exact thing you say you don't want.
I think the appropriate remedy to AAU is a flamethrower.
Precisely. The solution to the AAU is abolition rather than “the AAU, but more so.”
Are you limiting this take to basketball only? As I understand it, many Dominican baseball players come up through the system Ben has described and you have decried. Ben’s way offers a method of avoiding (or even just limiting) the carnival act possibility.
My problem isn't that it can't be successful--obviously it can be. My problem is that you're expecting kids, real actual kids, to identify their plan A and strive toward it almost exclusively. Their plans B, C, and D get pretty hopeless pretty quickly.
That’s a good point. In light of it I’d modify the Krauss idea by building up more of a supportive ecosystem. Why not make this sort of thing more of a norm across the sports world? Colleges could do it, other sports could do it too. My own holy grail would be to get US high schools out of the revenue sports business and push the people who want to do that down a different track!
Sort of, although they can sign with any team, and not until they're 16.
First Ben take I'm not really on board with. (But one of the many of Bill Simmons and the execrable Chuck Klosterman!).
How many of the world's top 100 basketball players were Americans forty years ago? Ninety percent maybe? We weren't much more than 5% of the planet's population at that point. Now we're barely 4%. That "best basketballers" percentage was bound to decrease for our country, given the sport's huge popularity. I'm ok with that. We give the world a lot of cool shit. One of them was basketball. (Sorry, Canada, Naismith invented the game after immigrating to the States; he also became a US citizen and died on US soil). It's a good thing, not a bad thing, that the world has taken up one of our games with such gusto.
It's true we seem to be in an era when a good number of the world's foremost players are non-Americans. But so what? Non-Americans outnumber us 24-1. Once you get out of the top 5, and certainly out of the top 10, the numbers looks pretty good for Uncle Sam. And we're still completely dominant if we take the top, say, 100 players in the game. No other country approaches America's depth of basketball talent. And let's not even get into the world's top woman players. I might share Ben's sentiments if we were comparing the United States of America as a basketball power with any other single nation state. But we're not. The comparison is the USA vs. the other 96% of the world. Frankly, the fact that the debate is framed this way *underscores* American hoops dominance.
There are loads of great, young American basketball players in today's game. This is a non problem in search of a solution. To me what matters is not bragging rights about whether the US or the other 96% produces more top flight basketball talent (we do, for what it's worth, and it's not particularly close). What matters is Olympic gold— that should be ours most olympiads into the far future provided enough of our top stars participate. Who's going to beat us, Serbia? Slovenia? Greece? I doubt it.
PS—Where do these awesome foreign hoops talents ply their trade? That's right, a basketball league headquartered in New York City.
No! America First!!!!!!1
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
Ben Krauss, welcome to the #ProRelforUSA and open development fight.
Trump needs to institute a basketball tariff to prevent all these evil foreigners from coming in and stealing our basketball jobs. Dikembe Mutombo took my job, and I'm mad about it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-kgb1QtSnU
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.)
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.
All this and nothing about college basketball, which produced all the best players before the one and done era?
Why would the NBA pay for something it currently gets for free?
USA Hockey has actually done something in this vein to better develop American players - the National Team Development Program (NTDP). It is a bit different than what is proposed here, but I think it does prove the feasibility. USA Hockey is the governing body that organizes and supports teams that play in all international competitions, as well as providing support for the majority of youth hockey leagues throughout the US. While they are separate from the NHL, they do receive financial support from them. The NTDP has two teams (18U, 17U) made up of the top American born hockey players. They live and train in a single location in Michigan pretty much year-round. Players that come through the program normally go on to play college hockey, with the best players moving on to the professional ranks of the NHL. This program has been very successful, winning international competitions and annually producing multiple 1st round NHL draft picks.
As long as we continue stealing enough of Canada’s best players to keep Lord Stanley’s Cup in the US, I’m happy. Imagine if we got to a point where American teams couldn’t win a basketball championship because all of our best players were playing for Canadian teams. Poor, pathetic Canada.
I kid Canada, cruelly and perversely enjoy keeping the Cup from them. It’s insane that they’ve won sn NBA title since the last time they won an NHL title. Hockey is to them what basketball is to us, and then some, and they haven’t won a title in 30 years.
Random note: people who are interested in this topic (basketball not hockey) might enjoy Jonathan Abrams’ Boys Among Men.
You've also got major juniors somewhere in there, a system I do not profess to understand.
Yes. I probably know more than most on this board as my sons played hockey, but I am by no means an expert on Juniors. In general "Juniors" is just hockey for 16 to 20 year olds. There is no governing body that determines what qualifies as "Junior" hockey - if you wanted to start a league tomorrow and call it Junior hockey there is nothing to stop you. As a result, there are many Junior leagues throughout the US and Canada (note: in Europe hockey is just like soccer, with the top youth players playing on pro-teams starting at 17 or 18). One of the main reasons that the NTDP was formed was to try and provide a better development program for the top young American players. In a sense Juniors is kinda like AAU basketball. There are certainly Junior teams that do a great job of developing their players the proper way (whatever that is), but with so many teams and no common objective you're bound to see disparate quality of player development.
Also Iowa is involved. Always a troubling indicator.
And it's my understanding that Canada has a very robust youth hockey league, but I need to read up more on that.
The #1 hurdle that any minor league proposal has to cross is how it's going to be paid for. Are enough people going to watch the NBDA? If not, then you're asking the NBA to take this on as an expense, and the owners are always going to be dubious of that when they can get training for free via college basketball, the AAU, or what have you, as flawed as any of them might be.
I've dreamed several times of a minor league for the NFL, but it won't happen because they can just free ride off CFB, and they enforce that free riding by (wrongly) forcing all prospects to be out of high school for three years. I'm guessing that the NBA's minimum age of 19 functions the same way.
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 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.