AEnigma wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:Hey y'all,
I've updated the spreadsheet adding 3 new tabs:
1. Trajectory Trends - graphs up to 5 players rankings from project to project (players editable)
2. Common Origins (California, France, etc.)
3. Common Colleges (North Carolina, UCLA, etc.)
Please take a look and share thoughts.
This is a lot of fun to peruse.
Starting with origins, while I do not have much comment on patterns, the high proportions for North Carolina and D.C. are interesting given their size (and is definitely a blow for how Kentucky and Indiana see themselves
). Also of note how there was a historical skew to New York and Illinois (Chicago) which has declined in a way not true of California and North Carolina.
Lots of good thoughts that are worth further discussion, but I thought I'd hit the deep history origins stuff on its own to start.
So, Indiana & Kentucky do make some sense to mention together, but I'm going to address them separately.
With Indiana, first and foremost what you have is the birth of super basketball fever among fans with their state high school basketball tournament, and a radiating out of passion across the country from there. I wouldn't say there was ever a time where the relatively small state of Indiana was actually producing the most tippy, top tier adult players. Professionally, the heyday was the Zollner Pistons in Fort Wayne, but even there, their star - Bobby McDermott - was not only from New York, but was a New York pro before Zollner offered him enough money to come to the Midwest.
I'll add that the lack of population density in Indiana, while it obviously made them less likely to produce all the best players, contributed to basketball popularity. You had a whole bunch of towns that realistically couldn't have built competitive high school teams for sports that required larger teams, but basketball only required 5 players, and even small towns tended to have at least 5 boys graduating every year...and the townsfolk would cheer out their boys like religious zealots.
With Kentucky, I think the starting point to understand is that Kentucky is adjacent to Indiana, and to some extent could be seen to grow out for Indiana - more accurately to say that Kentucky grew out of midwestern basketball which had its heart in Indiana and its brain in Kansas with James Naismith & Phog Allen. The University of Kentucky becomes the top college basketball program in the country with coach Adolph Rupp who came out of Kansas.
Now, I'd note that this also wasn't the same thing as Kentucky being the place where all the top players were coming from. I'd say the two most celebrated players of that early UK era were Leroy Edwards and Alex Groza, but neither of them were Kentuckian.
Still, given Kentucky's place as the greatest college program of the pre-Wooden-at-UCLA era, it's noteworthy that Wildcats don't have much of a place on this list. And if we're going to point to one reason that's an elephant in the room it's this:
UK became known as the capital of White Basketball, in a sport that would become dominated by Blacks. As an example of how stark this was, Wes Unseld was one of the first Black players that Rupp recruited (after Rupp had been coaching at UK for over 30 years), and Unseld turned him down to go to Louisville instead. While Unseld being from the city of Louisville implies a general "stay close to home" factor, Unseld has said he specifically didn't think he'd be a good fit at the White mecca that UK was.
This makes it all the more ironic, and noteworthy, that the only UK player to make the 100 this time is Black (Anthony Davis). Obviously that's coming from a much later era where the UK had long since stopped being known as a place for White basketball.
Last note: While think all of that answers what was going on with Indiana & Kentucky, some thoughts on other deep history, as well as the states dominating this list:
- In early basketball history, I think it's clear that elite basketball was dominated specifically by the Eastern Seaboard which could be said broadly to be from Massachusetts down to DC, but I'd say was truly most dominated by the inner part of that - New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania - which was probably the most densely populated part of the country.
- As basketball blossomed nationwide this didn't mean that the Midwest was producing more elite players than the East, but it did mean that the distribution of elite basketball players got spread out across the country, and while New York remained the mecca of elite basketball for a very long time, eventually, as with many other things, California came to dominate. The combination of it becoming the most popular state and its sunny weather was just too much for anywhere else to match, and while it's noteworthy, it's not really surprising.
But what about North Carolina?
- First thing, is that NC also has deep basketball roots at the youth level. Indiana may have been the most rabid basketball state along these lines, but basketball became a major hit basically everywhere it was brought, and NC got it earlier than most.
- Second thing, NC was in the South, and thus had a sizable Black population.
- Third thing, the University of North Carolina had Dean Smith as their coach in the time period where basketball became dominated by Black players, and Smith was a civil rights activist. Smith, like Rupp, would also come out of Kansas, and under his tenure, he would lead UNC to become the great college basketball program of the South (until eventually being surpassed by Duke, UNC's local rival).
- Finally, I just think a state like NC can't be this high on the list without some luck. For just one example: Michael Jordan was born in Brooklyn and I don't think there's any reason to think that he had to move away from NYC in order to turn into Air Jordan...but his family moved to NC when he was young and the rest is history.