Complaints About US Basketball & The Celtics

[Way Of The Ray <wayray@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

U.S. watches Blab become Nowitzki


By Tom Knott
THE WASHINGTON TIMES



    America is no longer the big, bad wolf in basketball.
    The rest of the world has invested itself in the game since the
global celebration of the Dream Team in 1992, embraced the essential
elements of it and is now turning out an impressive number of
fundamentally sound players.
    The fundamentally sound player is the fundamental distinction
between them and us.
    The rest of the world is turning out basketball players. America is
turning out too many halftime entertainment performers.
    The rest of the world emphasizes the various skills of the game.
America emphasizes the highlight clips, the fancy dunks and stupid
dribbling tricks.
    The rest of the world is producing a back-to-the-future player,
America a player who can appear on television in a shoe commercial.
    The back-to-the-future player can dribble the ball, shoot the ball,
rebound the ball, see the floor, box out on defense, set a pick, run the
offense, provide help on defense and assimilate the notion that he is
only as competent as the other four players on the court. He is apt to
be playing a version of the American game from the '60s, '70s and '80s.
    America's game today is to designate one principal scorer, encourage
him to massage the ball and instruct the other four players to stand in
place or go to the concession stand and have a hot dog.
    Can anyone really enjoy what the Celtics have become, from the
poetry of Bird, McHale, Parish, Ainge and D.J. in the '80s to the
motionless, no-brain, one-dimensional 3-point launchings of Paul Pierce
and Antoine Walker today?
    The 3-point shot functions best as a measured weapon instead of the
basis of an offense.
    Ding, ding, ding. Is anyone home in Boston?
    The 3-point shot appears to go with the obsessive-compulsive
dribbling.
    Too many American players have become serial dribblers. They
dribble, dribble, dribble, and then they dribble some more. They don't
need a coach. They need professional help.
    These poor souls probably can't leave home without pulling on their
front door knob several hundred times to make certain it is locked. It
is sad, so sad.
    If being able to dribble the ball with your nose hair resulted in
points, America would be unbeatable.
    We lead the world in players who can dribble with their ears and
toenails, who can juggle four basketballs at once while pretending to be
the toughest man ever.
    Alas, striking a pose has become essential to the American cause,
even if most basketball players fight like sorority sisters.
    It must be the Eminem dynamic. The rest of the world obviously
missed this memo.
    The rest of the world comes to play basketball. We come to jump real
high, dunk the ball and then beat on our chest.
    We fall in love with Darius Miles and DeShawn Stevenson because of
their jumping ability, which would be wonderful if they were competing
in the high jump instead of clanking another 15-footer off the rim.
    This is just the way it is.
    America's long run at the top in basketball is in its concluding
stages, about to be relegated to the dustbin of history with the peach
basket. There is no sense debating it. There is no sense crying about
it, although crying is an acceptable response in basketball.
    Crying is universal.
    You have Vlade Divac's scrunched-up mug as proof.
    He is an old Serbian, the precursor to the flood of immigrants
coming to the NBA.
    If you recall, Divac's Yugoslavian basketball team won the World
Championship in Indianapolis last summer.
    We were there, George Karl and the NBA guys, with home-country
advantage. You remember? The U.S. finished in sixth place after dropping
a nail-biter to Spain in the consolation round.
    Just think: If we had not gone cold from the floor in the fourth
quarter against Spain, we could have taken fifth place
    Well, right. Shaq did not play. Kobe did not play. Jason Kidd did
not play. You are missing the point.
    We whined in 1988, too, following the disappointment of John
Thompson's collegiate team at the Seoul Games. We whined about who
wasn't there, notably the best of the best from the NBA.
    So Magic, Bird and Jordan restored our basketball honor in 1992, the
rest of the world took notes, we fell in love with track and field
athletes impersonating basketball players, and the gap between them and
us has been closed in incremental fashion, to the point that the gap, if
there is one, is imperceptible.
    We're no sure thing to claim the gold medal in Athens next year. We
barely completed the assignment in Sydney in 2000 after Lithuania pushed
us to the brink. That's right. Little old Lithuania nearly punctured our
illusion in a way the 2002 World Championship could not.
    We pay attention to the Olympics. Let's be honest: We do not really
get too worked up over FIBA, which sounds more like the name of a poodle
than a governing body.
    But no matter.
    Perhaps it is impolite to notice that the foreigners are coming, the
foreigners are coming.
    The Russians, too.
    Twenty-one of the 58 selections in the NBA Draft last week need a
green card. A cursory offseason check of the 29 NBA rosters finds the
foreign element to be around 15 percent, a steady upward climb that is
only going to increase in the years ahead.
    The European pro leagues are the new training ground of the NBA,
becoming a far more reliable source of talent than the leftovers filling
the NCAA ranks.
    On one level, it is about simple numbers. There are so many more of
them than us, 6 billion-plus vs. the 283 million on these shores.
    On another level, it is about the NCAA suits who patrol the
sidelines in college. They take the easy recruiting way out: size and
athleticism, athleticism and size. You can spot that one player in an
instant. Finding the one basketball player in a gymnasium is
considerably more difficult.
    The colleges don't pay the cutting-edge suits to find basketball
players, or even to develop the talent in their midst. The new
generation is there, in effect, to sell cars, to look good, to sound
good, to be a mini-Rick Pitino. It is all about the hair gel and sound
bite these days.
    If it were possible to clone the 41-year-old John Stockton of
diminishing returns and stick his 18-year-old version in a high school
gym today, the slick-haired types possibly would see a Division III
prospect. Stockton might not even rate a look from Gonzaga.
    The rest of the world, in being relatively new to all this
high-stakes stuff, is not burdened with these preconceived notions or
working from a tired how-to manual.
    Dirk Nowitzki is one result. The blond-haired German is as unique as
Magic Johnson once was.
    Nowitzki is the 7-footer with unthinkable perimeter skills, the same
as Johnson was an unthinkable 6-9 point guard.
    Nowitzki's emergence is emblematic of the global march.
    In 20 years, Germany has evolved from Uwe Blab to Detlef Schrempf to
Nowitzki.
    It is a good thing Nowitzki did not come up in America. He probably
would be just a better version of Greg Ostertag instead of one of the
top five players in the NBA.
    That is the thing about the rest of the world. The rest of the world
sees the game differently, plays it differently and thinks it
differently. The rest of the word is challenging our basketball
conventions.
    It just so happens that Don Nelson, a smart but unconventional coach
by American standards, has shown himself to be adaptable to the United
Nations quality of his roster.
    There is no stopping the foreign invasion now, the outcome as
predictable as it was with Major League Baseball, only more so because
of basketball's greater penetration around the globe.
    Look around to see who's treading on the turf of Shaq and Kobe, the
No. 1 and No. 1A players, respectively, in the NBA.
    Yao Ming, who has some Hakeem Olajuwon in him, is perhaps the
future.
    Go, Yao.
    This is no time to be provincial.
    We're No. 6 anyway.
    Everyone, now: We're No. 6. We're No. 6. We're No. 6.