Commentary: European invasion shows American basketball is fundamentally flawed

ORLANDO, Fla. — If you watched the presidential debate last week, then you know immigration has become a major issue in American politics.

Likewise, if you watched the NBA draft last week, then you know immigration has also become a major issue in American basketball.

Specifically, because of the foreign invasion, the National Basketball Association may soon have to change its name to the International Basketball Alliance.

“Basketball is more than just American players dominating the game,” says Orlando Magic first-round draft pick Tristan da Silva, who grew up in Germany. “… The NBA is now an international business on a global scale.”

And make no mistake about it, there is major concern in this country that international players, specifically Europeans, are going about their business in a much more productive way than American players. The problem isn’t that the NBA is drafting more and more international players; the problem is that fewer and fewer American players have the fundamental skills to play in the NBA.

It’s not just a coincidence that the last six NBA MVPs are international players. It’s not just a coincidence that two French players — Zaccharie Risacher and Alex Sarr — were the first two players taken in this year’s NBA draft. It’s not just a coincidence that this is the first time in history that the draft has gone consecutive years without the No. 1 pick being someone who played at an American college.

In all, three of the top six draft picks were from France alone and a full one-third of the players drafted (20 of 60) came from outside of America’s borders. That’s double the amount of international players drafted in 1998 when Dirk Nowitzki, commonly recognized as the greatest European NBA player of all time, was chosen in the first round by the Dallas Mavericks. If this trend continues, you’ll soon see half of the NBA made up of international players.

Former Magic coach and current TNT analyst Stan Van Gundy could see this coming 20 years ago. Tim Reynolds, the national basketball writer for the Associated Press, recently resurrected one of Van Gundy’s quotes from when he was coaching the Miami Heat in 2004.

“Quite frankly, if you look around, we’re failing pretty badly in this country as a whole in teaching people basketball skills,” Van Gundy said then. “You all notice it if you watch the NBA because there’s a huge difference in just the skill level of the players coming from Europe and what we have here in terms of their ability to pass the ball and shoot the ball. We can’t even produce enough people who can do those things here that we’ve got to go across and try to find people who can do them. We’re not developing skills here.”

When Kobe Bryant was alive, he famously railed against the AAU travel-ball system in this country, calling it “horrible and terrible.” Kobe said he “got lucky” that he grew up in Europe where kids “are taught the game the right way at an early age.”

“Over here, kids don’t know the fundamentals of the game,” Kobe said. “It’s a disservice to our kids. It’s something we really have to fix. We have to teach our kids to play the right way.”

Here we are years later and the problems still exist. It starts with youth development, continues through a flawed AAU/travel-ball system and is exacerbated with most top players only playing a year in college before attempting to make the leap to the NBA.

“We think there’s definitely ways to improve the system,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver told the Associated Press.

Jeff Weltman, the Magic’s president of basketball operations, admitted during his pre-draft press conference that NBA officials are having discussions about how to improve the American model of player development.

“You are kind of scratching at something that is a conversation a lot of NBA people are having right now,” Weltman said when answering a reporter’s question about European players having the reputation for being more fundamentally skilled than American players. “I think everybody is looking at youth basketball right now. There are very different models that you can pursue. It is something we need to continue to analyze and measure as we go forward. The league is changing. And how do we recalibrate that toward the youth programs?”

Seemingly, the biggest issue facing youth basketball development is the travel-ball system, which essentially consists of the best young players in the country joining all-star teams and traveling to places like Las Vegas to play in weekend tournaments. In fairness, some of these teams do a great job of player development, but most don’t.

On many of these teams, a lot of games are being played but very little basketball is being taught. It’s not uncommon to be at these tournaments and hear a player’s personal handler in the stands yelling at his guy to, “Take over! Take over!” Translation: Forget about playing within the team concept and instead show off your individual skill set for the college recruiters in the stands. Very few set plays are run by most travel-ball teams and many of the games devolve into dunk contests and 3-point shootouts.

And you don’t have to have any credentials whatsoever to coach these teams. For instance, you might have Slick Rick, the owner of the local pawn shop, coaching one travel-ball team while Greasy Pete, the strip-bar bouncer, is coaching the other.

In Europe, youth coaches must take courses and become certified to teach basketball. They stress fundamental skills like footwork, shooting mechanics, court spacing, passing skills, dribbling and rebounding positioning.

“There’s a lot of detail-oriented work,” da Silva says of the European model. “It’s a process of slow, incremental development.”

It’s time to make some changes in how we teach basketball in this country.

If the international invasion continues and we don’t start addressing these developmental disparities soon, the NBA will need to start issuing domestic visas so U.S. citizens can enter the league.

Don’t look now, but the American dream is at risk of getting benched.