SuperDeluxe wrote:Bleeding Green wrote:SuperDeluxe wrote:Not that it matters much, but the world's population in 1960 was about half of what it is today. The talent pool couldn't have gone from 50 million to several billion humans.
Name one non-US born player that was in the NBA in 1960. This isn't a knock against Russell, but the game is so much bigger now. Players are on the path to the NBA by middle-school and every nation is basically scouted and developed to some degree. in 50 years I'm sure you'll be able to say the same of LeBron, "Oh he never had to play when the league was entirely made up of 7'2" guys who could shoot threes at a 50% average and eurostep from near halfcourt."
You mentioned that the talent pool in 1960 was 50 million. Since the whole US population in 1960 was 180 million, it's only natural to assume that you were talking about the whole world.
But, like I said, it doesn't matter much.
Edit: Now that I look at your original post again, all the numbers look off regardless of what you may have been referring to.
Yeah I'm exaggerating slightly. Ok 1960, there were 93 NBA players. All aged 22-34. US Census that year says there were 14,307,722 US citizens in the US in that age range, of which 49.085 percent were men, which leaves us with a total pool of 7,022,945 men to choose from. I'm too lazy to figure out the world population right now for men aged 19-36 or whatever the curent NBA is like, but there are 463 NBA players, so as long as the overall global pool is higher than 34,963,695 (463/93*7022945) adult men, then I think we can safely say that it's a less diluted pool in 2018. I'm just using numbers from basketball-reference and census.gov, so please check my numbers if you think the game is more diluted today.
