The decline of superstar level development in US Basketball - How Fortnite and Minecraft killed US superstars

[jasonxxx102]

That's also exactly what I mentioned in the post

If this is true, it contradicts everything you’ve said.

If talent is innate, then video games vs street ball vs aau has nothing to do with it

Of course it has. Or do you think that someone with talent naturally and automtaically becomes a pro? Like I said in the intial post, these things determine whether somebody becomes a pro or not

1) Physical traits – Will they have NBA level body and athleticism later on?
2) Work ethic – Do they have the necessary work ethic and drive to work on their game
3) Natural talent – Not everyone is born with the same talent, some learn faster, adapt quicker and so on
4) Quality of development – How good is the coaching, the youth development program, how are they developing their skills


You need talent, but talent that is not properly honed and developed and coached will not reach its full potential. Or to put it in NBA 2k terms: If somebody has potential and natural talent level of 99, this does not mean they will automatically become a level 99 player. There are other factors that determine the end level of a player. Factors that the player itself is controlling (work ethic) and outside factors like how the development is done, how he is coached, how he is trained. That's the entire reason and point of why european clubs spend millions in their youth departments, so that they can maximize the natural talent of the kids. That's the reason why certain countries are better at producing talent, even when all other factors are the same. Because they are better at a) recognizing and discovering talent and b) developing and and forming and maximizing this talent.

I think the main problem in these discussions is that there's no baseline for what any of these terms means and people use them interchangeably...

Talent, skill, potential.

I'm saying that talent is innate and you either have it or you don't. If you have NBA talent, you'll be in the NBA. If you have superstar talent, barring some unforeseen life events, you'll be a superstar. For me, talent is mostly a mixture of your intellect and personality. 2 things that again, you don't really change over time. Maybe you have some refinement of those things around the edges but for the most part you are what you are in that sense

Seems like what you are talking about is 2-fold. Skill and style.

Like the guy above saying that Ant and Tatum aren't as talented as Kobe and Duncan which just isn't true. Stylistically they're quite different and you prefer 1 style over the other.

That's why I said romanticizing the 90s because whenever people compare cross era that's what they end up doing. They overrate their favorite era of basketball because of nostalgia or style preference or whatever.

[Uncle Mxy]

AK47 would laugh at this thread, if he wasn't busy playing WoW.

[og15]

The US is producing tons or extremely good players, and that's the system.
To have someone reach tier 1 level is mostly about luck.
See Italy and tennis, nowadays. The system improved and they have now Berrettini, Sonego, Musetti, Cobolli... you can control that, creatong the right conditions. But to find a Sinner it's primarily luck.

If I look at the current top tier, I see
- physical freaks --> Giannis and Wemby
- absolute geniuses --> Luka and Jokic
- mix of the two --> Shai

If I look at the last 10 years, the physical freak (Zion) got lost (for now). Not sure about the other categories.

Your point mostly tracks, but what physical freak attribute does Shai have though?

[Ryoga Hibiki]

The US is producing tons or extremely good players, and that's the system.
To have someone reach tier 1 level is mostly about luck.
See Italy and tennis, nowadays. The system improved and they have now Berrettini, Sonego, Musetti, Cobolli... you can control that, creatong the right conditions. But to find a Sinner it's primarily luck.

If I look at the current top tier, I see
- physical freaks --> Giannis and Wemby
- absolute geniuses --> Luka and Jokic
- mix of the two --> Shai

If I look at the last 10 years, the physical freak (Zion) got lost (for now). Not sure about the other categories.

Your point mostly tracks, but what physical freak attribute does Shai have though?

I think it's a cambination of balance and quickness. I was not sure how to define him because he's not the kind of savant Luka and Jokic are, but not a monster like Wemby.
If you can better define his greatness vs other NA guys, happy to hear!

[UcanUwill]

I’ll have to sit down and read the whole thing in a bit to see if there’s any nuance but I completely disagree with the premise.

Kids who are in the top 1% of athletic talent who end up making the league aren’t trading playing time for video games.

Some people do both. We had AK47 who was obsessed with World of Warcraft, was it? Luka is top 500 Overwatch player in the world or smth, one of the best guards in Europe, Sylvain Francisco says he used to be one of the best NBA 2k players in the world (maybe hes lying).

That said, Euros have Fortnite and Minecraft too, but they produced more talent than ever before. Video games were already been popular when Kobe was a child.

When I was in school, playing Soccer or Basketball video games always put me in mood to play those sports in real life, it had similar effect as just watching tournament of said sports. I really dismiss idea that video games ruin generations.

[PlatinumState]

But kids do go outside. Even if they didnt, every elementary and high school has a gym and basketball team. Also, video games have been around for 40+ years and yet many US superstars appeared during that time

[UcanUwill]

AK47 would laugh at this thread, if he wasn't busy playing WoW.

Is WoW still around? I never jumped on that bandwagon, but I never really played online multiplayer games, it was never my thing, I tried Lineage 2 since it was huge around my friends like 20 years ago.

[james vincent]

Covid set back the development of players across all sports for years; coupled with the isolation and lacking access to physical facilities. The effects remain to be seen but it’ll take a number of years to equalize the playing field once again.

[Stan]

I ain't reading all that.

[JinKaz69]

you're comparing entire careers of prior players against guys who are just entering their prime lol.

Tatum is already 4x 1st team all-nba, Ant has 2 2nd team all nba and looks like he could be an MVP caliber player at 24.

Basketball is different now, the top players are just as talented as they were in any era.

Tatum and Ant for as good or talented as they are, aren’t anywhere near the level of players like Duncan, Kobe and etc in my perspective at same ages.

You can think otherwise… but it is a hard sell for people who have watched them throughout their career.

If you would have said SGA and Luka… yeah I can buy that.

Well Shai is Canadian, which I think is close enough to consider the US but it was American stars only.

I absolutely believe Tatum and Ant are as talented as Kobe.

Tatum and Ant are more closer with Paul George's level than Kobe's.

Both are good players but talent and ceiling speaking compared to wings superstars from past eras, they are weak.

[peZt]

ALso I asked ChatGPT whether there are studies and research that shows whether kids actually play less outside, or if its just my imagination

----

In the U.S., kids spend significantly less time playing outside than in the past.
Data from the Outdoor Foundation shows that while overall participation in outdoor activities has grown slightly, the average number of outdoor outings per person has dropped about 25% over the last decade (from ~84 per year around 2012 to ~62 in 2023). Studies also show that unstructured outdoor play—like playing sports on the street—has steadily declined since the 1980s, replaced by organized sports, indoor recreation, and screen time. In short, American kids today go outside less often, play more under supervision, and spend less time in spontaneous physical play than previous generations.

----

So yes, research supports my claim that kids play less outside and on the street and participate more in organised sports instead. But when this development in the organised sport sucks (the how and why I mentioned my post) than this will lead to a worse result than in the past.
You cant play until the sunlight goes off at school. You have set practice times. So this endless hours and hours of outside play, street ball is missing. Obviously this will have a negative effect.

But kids do go outside. Even if they didnt, every elementary and high school has a gym and basketball team. Also, video games have been around for 40+ years and yet many US superstars appeared during that time

Yes, video games have always existed. But we are seeing an unprecedented move indoors and fewer and fewer kids actually playing outside. This will lead to worse development over the years. Again, Im not saying video games are at fault, just that video games are one of the symptoms of this. Kids are playing less outside, which might lead to them playing more video games but its not the reason, and the playing less outside fact leads to fewer accumulated hours over the years where in the past these kids honed and developed their skills playing 1v1 and pickup ball all day long for years.

And I mean this is not something I make up. I know that in Football there have been analysis on this and federations have actually concluded that this is the reason for declining quality of player development and have changed their entire training programs around this fact.
In the past and when I played organised soccer this was not the case. I started playing soccer in the U10. I think I had my first technical exercise in the U14. Before that they trained us for marathon it seemed like

The training methods were extremely ineffective when it came to actually developing ball ability of the players. We had practice 3 times a week. Often for the first half hour each practice most exercises were centered around conditioning: so youre already wasting 1,5 hours every week not developing any skills. Then 1 hour every week on tactics and you’re basically wasting 50% of your practice time on non-technical things. Kids need to play, not train for a marathon or learn how to adapt tactically to the u13 of your neighbor village team

Then the next half hour would be wasted in ineffective training methods and exercises where you get maybe 3 touches every minute.

And then the same for the training match at the end. Played on big pitches where most players spent more time running around and waiting for the ball then actually doing something with the ball. You can have a full back who gets a touch on the ball maybe 2 times per minute. And then it’s maybe only to pass the ball to the person next to him. How are you supposed to improve like that? But we still improved because I played outside all day long every day. I still had good technique because of this. If I hadnt done that, and these 2 hours of actual playing time per week at my club were my only contact with soccer, **** hell I would've sucked. I needed those streetball hours to develop my skills.

But this was taken for granted, nobody realised that the reason for good players was this and not necessarily the professional training at the clubs. Only when the shift began towards less outside play, teams and federations started to notice "Wtf is happening, our players are getting worse". And they realised that the reason was the decline of "Bolzplatz" as we say in Germany.


And now everything is different, its crazy when I look at how different youth football is compared to when I played. What was decided was to put focus on actually developing footballing skills. This means maximizing the amount each player gets with the ball, designing exercises that aim to actually improve skills and especially maximizing the frequency each player gets the ball. Exercises are designed to be high intensity with the ball and training matches are now done on small pitches of 5v5. No positions, everybody plays a free roaming position, there is basically 0 waiting time for the Ball, everybody gets dozens of touches per minute and so on

Basically it’s about mixing street ball with organised ball.

So in european football it was proven that the decline of street ball was leading to a worse quality and counter measures were taken to counter this trend. I dont think this realization has arrived for US Basketball yet.

[badpotato]

Some toughts:
- You get to see the best of the best when it comes to international talent in the NBA.
- rest of the world has simply closed the gap and raised its game, so their homegrown talent is afforded similar opportunities to those that U.S. players have.
- best talents are still exceptional, but standards have risen, so they tend to stand out less - it was easy to be amazed by Barkley’s talent when more than half of his contemporaries playing forwad position couldn’t even dribble.

[peZt]

I also asked ChatGPT whether there are any articles that touch on simliar points and thoughts:

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/30/heir-ball-how-the-cost-of-youth-sports-is-changing-the-nba?utm_source=chatgpt.com

In another recent piece, also in The New Yorker, by Jay Caspian Kang titled “Heir Ball: How the Cost of Youth Sports Is Changing the NBA”, the author speaks to how former stars like LeBron James credit their early pickup/street games (“21”, etc) as formative — and contrasts that with today’s more structured, coached, indoor youth-sport environment. “I didn’t have a basketball trainer … my basketball training was just being on the court,

Even LeBron agrees with me lol. He says development is more structured now, kids play more indoor organised ball. And my argument is that this indoor organised ball is of high quality in Europe --> Therefore barely any negative effect of missing street ball. But it is of clearly negative quality in the US --> Clear negative effect cause the high school with the random coaches can not offer the kind of development that would be needed



https://akjournals.com/view/journals/1020/1/1/article-p45.xml?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Seems like this research paper is touching on the exact same point and thought

The decline of outdoor activity among Gen-Z has led to a loss of participation in street sports, impacting community building, underground art, career opportunities, and personal growth.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-city-game-basketball-new-york?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Article from 2015. Even then already this was starting to become more evident

In an article for The New Yorker titled “The City Game?”, journalist Thomas Beller reflects on how New York’s playground courts once produced top-level talent — and notes that they’re “looking emptier in recent years.” He links this decline of street-level play with the changing nature of how players are developed

[Ice Man]

I dunno. When I see Coop, Dylan, VJ, and Kon, I see 4 teenagers who are extraordinarily well prepared for the NBA. Outside shooting, finishing at the rim, vision, positioning, handle, the works. I don't see European players being better trained than that. I mean, Luka (at least now) is in another category, but that's BB genius, not development. You can have the best training possible but you still need a unicorn to play at that level.

[LockoutSeason]

Foreign players are handled with kid gloves. If an an American had as many playoff failures as Jokic you’d be all over him.

[Capn'O]

I guess my question is who should have become a superstar that didn't from the US system? There's Zion, unfortunately. But other than that from the top recent US stars:

Brunson
Mitchell
Tatum
Haliburton
Booker
Towns
Ant
Cade

Towns, Cade, and Ant were #1s but none of them were expected to be generational. Just perennial all star types and they became that. The others massively overachieved their expectations in the league. USA is still putting out a lot of great talent and I hardly think the failure of one guy defines the US system as a failure.

With basketball becoming a global sport it's not surprising that the extreme outlier athletes are coming from all over. But we're still far and away developing the most star talent.

[sikma42]

I guess my question is who should have become a superstar that didn't from the US system? There's Zion, unfortunately. But other than that from the top recent US stars:

Brunson
Mitchell
Tatum
Haliburton
Booker
Towns
Ant
Cade

Towns, Cade, and Ant were #1s but none of them were expected to be generational. Just perennial all star types and they became that. The others massively overachieved their expectations in the league. USA is still putting out a lot of great talent and I hardly think the failure of one guy defines the US system as a failure.

100% agree with this. The only person that missed was Zion. Maybe we are just having a cold spell rn for US superstar talent.

[Capn'O]

Also, even though they're not US born, SGA and Embiid played HS ball in the USA. No, we don't claim them but they clearly weren't somehow ruined by the US system.

[TheGeneral99]

The simple answer is that basketball has grown exponentially outside of the US since the 1990s and now parts of the world have caught up.

20 years ago there were only 3 Canadians in the NBA and now there are 24 Canadians.

20 years ago there were only 2 French players in the NBA and now there are 19 French.

Australia now has 18 NBA players, Germany has 7 NBA players, Serbia has 5 NBA players...etc.

23% of NBA players today are foreign whereas in 2000 it was only 8%.

OP has to recognize that in the 1980s basketball, while popular, was primarily based in the US and not yet a true global sport...now it's a real global sport like soccer. That means that America, while still dominant, won't be invincible anymore, just like America is not invincible in most global sports.

[peZt]

I guess my question is who should have become a superstar that didn't from the US system? There's Zion, unfortunately. But other than that from the top recent US stars:

Brunson
Mitchell
Tatum
Haliburton
Booker
Towns
Ant
Cade

Towns, Cade, and Ant were #1s but none of them were expected to be generational. Just perennial all star types and they became that. The others massively overachieved their expectations in the league. USA is still putting out a lot of great talent and I hardly think the failure of one guy defines the US system as a failure.

My point is that all of these players would be better if they did not go through the US school system but through the european club system.

Now imagine Jayson Tatum

In one universe he grows up in the US. He starts playing school Basketball at his local primary school. His coach is the father of one the players with no proper coaching education and background. Therefore the coach isnt up to date with proper development programs, techniques etc. And this goes on until he reaches a top level prep or high school.

In the other universe Tatum grows up in France. He joins the local team and immediately moves up a regional power house that has professional youth coaches, nutritionists and trainers. From the age of 10 he plays here, with coaches that go to regular seminars to get up to date on new training methods etc. They simply bet better development by the coaching and youth program.

Tatums talent and physical requirements is the same in both universes. But in one universe he gets grade A level of develpoment and coaching starting from age 8. And in the other he gets grade D level coaching in primary school. Grade B level in middle school and only Grade A level coaching once he joins a top prep/high school. Obviously this lower quality of development will accumulate over time.

That's the exact reason why european sports clubs are spending MILLIONS into their youth departments. Bayern Munich spent 100!!! million € on creating their youth campus and youth development program. They are doing this because it is known and obvious that the better the development kids get the better they will become at the end. And obviously a random school in the US can not offer the same level and quality of development as these clubs that are spending millions into their youth programs.


Is the US still producing the most pro players? Yes, becuase of the sheer number of the player pool. If you have Grade B level coaching, but 2,000,000 kids that player basketball regularly in school and participate in school sports, you will still develop a huge number of pro players.

In Europe, even with A level coaching and development, you can not make up for that due to the lower numbers. So the ones that do play Basketball are developed much better in Europe, but there are just way way fewer of those.


And my point is that this Grade C-B level coaching school system did not have such a negative effect in the development of superstars int he past because they accumulated thousnads of hours playing street ball until they reached age 18. They dont do that anymore, so the mediocre coachign at the school has to make up for this. But it can't.



Also youre not accounting for the kids that got lost due to the point I made and that we dont know today. Again, it is proven by studies that kids play less and less outside and spent less and less time playing street ball. Even LeBron said that it changed and street ball was a major factor in his development, and this doent happen anymore. So you also have to think about this:
Is there a alternative universe where kids still play outside until its dark, that there is a kid that starts picking up a basketball (because everybody does) and then discovers his talent and desire for Basketball, develops his skills etc. And because of this, he reaches star level some day.
In our universe, this kid never picks up a basketball properly because nobody plays outside anymore, he doesnt discover his love for Basketball, he doesnt develop his skills etc., maybe he doesnt join the school basketball team, his talent gets lost.

I mean we are talking about thousands of hours that kids in the past were spending on the street courts. This will undeniably lead to a reality where a lot of kids developed less skills thatn they would have otherwise if they did spend those thousands of hours there. So we dont know how good these and other players would have become in an alternative universe. But we definitely know that spending thousands of hours playing something until you are 18, will make you better at it