When
people tell me they don’t enjoy watching National Basketball Association games
I have to scratch my head. What’s not to like? I think. As a group and
individually the players are the world’s best athletes, easily. The stuff they
do astounds nightly.
One of
the best things about having a press pass was that I often got to watch NBA
games from floor level. What’s impressive on TV is downright marvelous when
viewed straight on. A 6-foot-8-inch man causes heads to turn when one passes on
the street, but that’s about the average height of the players in the league.
Their sheer size makes their speed and agility especially remarkable. Indeed,
more than any others their games can be seen as performance art, like ballet,
enjoyable no matter what’s on the scoreboard.
Yeah, I
know, all NBA games aren’t thrilling. The 82-game season is too long so the
players take occasional vacations, sometimes on the court. In recent years some
of the best players have connived to combine on “super teams,” which are fine
if your fave is one of them but not so fine otherwise. That’s because the
practice creates talent gaps that all but predetermine some outcomes.
Super teams require super players,
which are hard to come by. The usual way a team gets one is to be both bad enough
and lucky enough to come out on top in the league’s annual draft lottery. The
New Orleans Pelicans, laggards over their 16-year history, accomplished this
last season and got to draft the otherworldly Zion Williamson, who has
performed as hoped once over a preseason injury. If young Zion makes the right
kind of friends he could bring a dynasty to the Big Easy. But that’s if a
friend elsewhere doesn’t lure him away first.
The teams that suffer most in what
has become the NBA oligarchy are those that perennially finish around the
middle in the standings, not good enough to contend for titles but too good to land
low-number lottery spots. That’s pretty
much been true of the Milwaukee Bucks, Dallas Mavericks and Denver Nuggets.
Together they have only two NBA titles to show for a total of 132 seasons in
the league—one for the Bucks (in 1971), one for the Mavs (in 2011) and none for
the Nuggets. That they now are bidding fair to break out of their boxes attests
to their thinking a bit outside the box. Their putative salvation has come from
looking east for help-- way east, to Europe.
Exhibit A in this group are the
Bucks, currently sporting the league’s best won-lost record (51-8) and the likely
Eastern Conference top seed in the coming playoffs. For that they can thank
whoever did their drafting in 2013. Their first choice that year was an 18-year-old
kid from Greece with Nigerian parents and an unpronounceable (and even hard to
type) last name. That would be Giannis
Antetokounmpo, whose last name remains unpronounceable but who at age 25 has
become either the first- or second-best player in the game, depending on where
one ranks LeBron James.
That Giannis was even the 15th
player chosen in the ’13 draft was a cause for pause. He’d taken up basketball
late—at age 12 or 13 depending on the account—and the year before had been a
reserve on an unexceptional Greek club-league team. At a skinny 6-feet-8 he was
undermuscled for the NBA as well as inexperienced. As a rookie Buck he was
played sparingly, averaging just under seven points a game.
From there, though, all the lines
on his chart have moved straight up. Today he stands 6-11, packs about 240
pounds, has the wingspan of a 747 and can seemingly run the court in a
half-dozen bounds. If he stays healthy
and the Bucks can keep him (he could become a free agent after next season)
they’ll be a threat in the NBA East for years to come.
The player who might do the same
thing for the Mavericks is 21-year-old Luca Doncic, from Slovenia. He was
highly touted coming into the NBA, so his success has been no Giannis-like
surprise, but three teams (the Phoenix Suns, Sacramento Kings and Atlanta
Hawks) managed to bypass him in the 2018 draft before he was acquired by the
Mavs. He was the league’s rookie of the year for 2018-19 and was second only to
James in voting for this year’s All-Star Game.
Doncic is listed as a shooting
guard on the Mav’s roster but at 6-feet-7 and about 225 pounds can play any
position at any time; it’s no stretch to call him the present-day Magic
Johnson. The Mavs won 24 games the season before Doncic arrived, then 33 last
season and 36 already in this one, and is on a pace to approach 50. With
Kristaps Porzingis, 24, from Latvia, playing the role of Robin, the team has
the sort of dynamic duo that could dominate once it grows up.
The most surprising of the young Euro
stars is the Nugget’s Nikola Jokic, a 24-year-old Serbian. He was a second-round choice in the 2014
draft, the 41st player chosen. Now as then he looks stocky despite
his 7-foot stature, can’t run fast and might have trouble jumping a street curb.
As a game goes on his nose takes on a Rudolph-like red. Nonetheless, his moves
around the hoop are stellar, he has a killer fade-away jump shot and is a glib
passer. Interestingly, his coach in Serbia, Dejan Milojevic, attributes Jokic’s
NBA success in part to his limitations.
“Everything that is not typical basketball gives some kind of
advantage,” he’s said.
In 2015-16, Jokic’s rookie year,
the Nuggets won 33 games. That climbed to 40 the next year, 46 the next and 54
the next. They are 40-18 now and would be the No. 2 seed in the West if the playoffs
were to begin today. Their beating the
probable-top-seed L.A. Lakers in the post-season would be an upset, but maybe
not a major one. The Lakers hold a 2-1 edge in their head-to-head meetings this
season, but one of their wins was in overtime.
It’s no news that Europeans, and
foreign players generally, have become an NBA force, accounting for between 20%
and 25% of the league’s roster spots in recent seasons, but their roles as
difference-makers is indisputably on the rise. One edge they might hold over
Americans is that their countries’ youth-sports systems are centered around vertically
organized clubs instead of schools. Those clubs enroll athletes from tots to
adults and advance players by their ability rather than age; the prodigy
Doncic, for instance, was competing against 12-year-olds at 8. Another is that
the best European basketball prospects typically turn pro at age 16 or 17
instead of our 19 and have the experience—and lumps—to show for the difference.
Still another could be that
promising kid jocks abroad aren’t spoiled the way they are here. That’s just me
sayin’, though.
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