Mark Cuban Blasts NCAA Basketball

[Pantherdreams]

Originally Posted by JRutledge

And not sure how any of the players are hurting from what the United States does. Not only do the players in this country dominate world competition, by far most of the best players come from the United States. LeBron James is the best player in the world and he did not go to high school with a shot clock. This tells me that the NBA does not know how to develop players properly and think a shot clock is going to help a player shoot or dribble better.

Peace

I agree that the best players in the world come from the US. THe method for creating them though is to create a massive base of players from a massive population base, then put them in competitive situations and the ones with the best combination of genetic advantages, socials advantages, opportunities, coaching etc end up as your elite. Very best in the world are created through a pyramid of competion that just filters off massive numbers of athletes along the way until you get to the top. The USA has a huge system, huge dollars and a massive population so this works.

If you look at the next three best countires in the world of basketball (Spain, Argentina, LIthuania) Spain and Argentina have slightly more people then California and Lituania has a smaller population then Conneticut. These countires clearly do not have the resources (genetically or population density wise) to get to this point following that model. So they've got different rule sets, different clubs etc. That have created a high level of basketball plaeyr skill wise but clearly without the athletic advantages of the USA so they can compete but often not get over the top.

I can't speak for Geno or Cuban or any of the the people who want to make changes to the basic basketball landscape or culture. Though the premise seems to be if you've got a model (rules set, developing athletes, coaching) etc that is creating athletes skilled enough to compete with the USA. That if the USA took its advantages and adopted some of those models or aspects you would end up with an even better result.

I don't think that Geno or Cuban is saying that USA isn't making the worlds best players, IMO they have a unique perspective to look out and over the entire system and see areas where you could be making more better players.

We all agree that is not the sole purpose of high school sport or college sport but just looking at developing basketball players they see various models and rule sets and probably like what they see so would see it as an improvement to the game. We as officials routinely comment on this board about rules and rule changes that we feel would make improvements and our perspective is often from that of officials or game management, not so often as stakeholders in improving the game as a whole.