bb22 wrote:I'm sorry but saying that our development system generally sucks is absurd. The talent/maturity/physicality gap between American middle/highschoolers and the European kids is still enormous. The developmental programs and techniques used in Europe/US are all based on the same core principles. We just like to cater more towards the talent rich/athletically gifted end of the spectrum as the kids get older, because it has proven to be a recipe for success in every single league.
And to the person that said NBA players have zero fundamentals, that is absolutely laughable. Please define what you mean by fundamentals. The Aussies and Serbians have two very cohesive groups that played patiently and moved the ball well. This is more of a coaching (and player selection + chemistry) issue than an example of a gap in fundamentals.
What does this have to do with development? I'd put that down to raw talent, of which we obviously have loads.
You can't denigrate all AAU/HS coaches, which is why I said "generally." I'm sure lots of them are great. LeBron, for example, obviously got some great coaching at a young age. I've read some great stuff about an AAU coach in Seattle as well who has cranked out loads of NBA players. I'm sure you can find lots more.
At the same time, you don't have to do any research whatsoever to realize what an inefficient, and often times crooked, system it is, loaded with sneaker pimps who have no business teaching elementary school kids, let alone high-level prospects. And with the sham that is the amateur student-athlete, college isn't a whole lot better.
This article basically sums it up:
Buford had lived much of what he read. With two sons who recently played college basketball and rose through the AAU scene, Buford has had a floor seat to the yawning divide in how the game is taught in America and overseas. In AAU, anyone who pays a $16 fee and finishes a background check and an online clinic can coach. In the FIBA club system in Europe, although requirements vary from country to country, coaches must earn various licenses, which often require them to complete intensive training, covering everything from X's and O's to nutrition. The U.S. has the NCAA serving as a conflicted arbiter of both the players' time and money; there is no pretense of amateurism overseas, and for better or worse, practices often last hours longer than our regulated college ones.
The Spurs, of course, are not in the business of worrying about the demands on a student-athlete's time and saw it as a plus that guys like Ginobili and Parker had been playing club basketball since they were teenagers, schooled by accredited coaches, the 10,000-hour rule brought to the hardwood. Consider Pop's brutal assessment that foreign players are "fundamentally harder working than most American kids," and it's no wonder the Spurs want to avoid the fate of so many NBA teams, which are, as Buford says, "the end of the road for the developmental habits that are built in the less-structured environment in the U.S."
The way the Spurs see it, though, the biggest divide isn't structural but cultural. Something has happened to basketball in the country that invented it, as well-documented as it as irrevocable, driven by money and fame and a generation of players who've learned from watching sharks succeed by imposing their will upon the game rather than by allowing it to come to them. It used to be that a team needed a transcendent talent to execute a star system; now, it needs a transcendent talent -- LeBron James or Duncan -- to show that it's permissible to be unselfish. Consider that the U.S. has won only two of the major world junior championships in the past 26 years -- not even in 2007, with Stephen Curry and Michael Beasley on the roster -- and the root rot of the U.S. system is all the more clear.
"That's a statement about where we are," Buford says. "When we put our best players together, we aren't playing well."
http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/9364989/san-antonio-spurs-doing-right-drafting-international-athletes-espn-magazine
Now, the Spurs also have one of the hardest working and most fundamentally sound players on the planet in Kawhi Leonard, an American. So, again, you can't paint everything with a broad, definitive brush. I don't have any problem with emphasizing athleticsm like we do, because it's a massively effective weapon. As Pop himself has said, the Spurs developed their recent "FIBA style" because they had to, which is the same reason why Eurpoean teams do -- they almost never have players like LeBron or Kobe or KD or Melo or insert any number of other players who can dominate games.
But I've read way, way too many horror stories about AAU, and generally have little respect for how colleges operate, to think we have a good youth development system.
