Joker wrote:If someone like Fred Van Vleet can make it, so can Bronny --- as long as he has the passion and work ethic for the game, and resilience and focus to stay the course through injuries, setbacks, and personal/life issues. With that level of privilege and wealth though, maintaining the passion, work ethic and mental resilience/focus can be challenging. Someone like Fred Van Vleet felt like it was the NBA or nothing else to fall back on; Bronny won't be in that situation.
I get what you're saying but this type of talk always seems so far off reality and also kinda disrespectful to 95% of NBA prospects. Almost all of the D1 athletes I worked with over the years (I worked for about a decade at a big 10 school) had unbelievable passion and dedication to their sports, their entire lives were set up around it. And most of them weren't even real pro prospects. From what I can tell NBA prospects are almost all totally disciplined and spend most of their time focusing on their game; there are some exceptions for sure but they're by far the exception.
Fred VanVleet didn't succeed through grit and determination or whatever, he succeeded because he was able to discipline his body to perform extraordinarily difficult things at extraordinarily specific NBA speeds. If you honestly think that there haven't been literally hundreds of 6'0 guards who worked as hard at their jumpers, mindset, BBIQ, etc as VanVleet did from ages 14-22, I don't know what to tell you. Spend some more time around the game, there are so many mega-super-gym rats who are really talented and still never can close to sniffing the NBA. It just comes down to if you can ultimately perform when it comes down to it, most guys need to work really hard to have a chance at that but only a few are blessed with the talent and ability to adapt that allows the rare VanVleets of the world to exist.
