Nothing is propagated to me,I'm doing draft staff for years and it's clearly more talent in the league now than before and it will be even better in a few years with Chet,Wemby and others in the league.Difference between your average player now and even 10 years ago is significant,let alone 20 years ago.Also more talent at the top of the league etc.
Not sure about that. The draft talent seems weaker to me as time goes by. The players are less skilled and there's like 2-3 skills that you need to excel at and you can be really bad at everything else, but you can still get an NBA job and even be considered elite. You couldn't walk outside an arena 25 years ago if you weren't at least good at everything.
Blame the US sporting culture for this, which pretty much apart from the [social] media is due to the AAU and NCAA. Kids aren't taught to play the sport, they're taught how to chase contracts. The NBA enables this culture.
You are talking about some other things here and this has nothing to do with level of talent in the league but with the style of basketball.I can understand why someone maybe don't like this kind of basketball.I also full understand that's it's impossible to argue about this thing with someone who is nostalgic about old times.I have been through this kind of conversations too many times.
Nope, as I said above, this is clearly a basketball issue and not a style. It's not a matter of style if players CANNOT do certain things. They can only play a specific brand of basketball and that's pick and roll and jacking up shots. That's just a tiny level ahead of street hoops. The NBA always had isolation possessions and was mostly a man-to-man defensive setup, but at least it wasn't easy. Now it's just too easy. The level of coaching is pathetic and the level of refereeing (either due to the rules or incompetence) is just laughable. Not a matter of style, but a matter of taking a wrong turn.
It's not nostalgia either. Until the early 2010s, before the economic crisis hit every European country/league, the Euroleague arguably had a better brand of basketball than the NBA. What changed now is that all these young European stars go to the NBA as their main choice. For 10-15 years, the NBA wasn't even an option for the best European players because they had it good in Europe. Same applied in the 80s where the contracts in the NBA were really shit for European stars due to the rookie scales, who were getting paid more than the main NBA players. This changed in the 90s, and more Europeans switched to the NBA at a relatively advanced age.
The players that tried their luck at the NBA were those who didn't have an option to play in Europe at a high level, like Nowitzki (German league was poor) or made the jump after they had some success already in Europe (Sarunas Jasikevicius, Pau Gasol etc) but some of the best Europeans from the last 20 years haven't even considered the move (Dejan Bodiroga, Dimitris Diamantidis, Matias Smodis, Felipe Reyes), or hated it (Juan Navarro, Antonis Fotsis, Vasilis Spanoulis etc). The scouting from the NBA wasn't that great back then, but there also wasn't that much of a gap in quality. Most NBA teams did not need those guys. Now, they would love to have them. Obviously the NBA was a 'dream' move, but all knew that it's a different experience if you play for the Pacers or the Knicks or the Spurs or the Wizards etc. Teams don't adjust to every player's styles, they adjust to their best player's style. So it all had to work very well if you were to be lucky there. Put Ginobili on the Knicks for example instead of the Spurs and he's on the first flight back to Italy instead of becoming an NBA legend.
Today you see "scrubs" from Europe fill up NBA roster spots. Rewind 20 years and that was a spectacle itself!
There are over 100 players from 40 countries or so in the NBA today, most of which from Europe. Yet, European basketball is at its worst period since the 70s. The Euroleague is shite in the last 3-4 years, every talented kid goes to the USA early on. Yet we still see the main NBA players from their lousiest generation (mid 2000s) against the pinnacle of European basketball still dominate the league for years. We also saw the 'secondary' USA teams in the 90s and early 2000s World Championships really struggle against top level European teams, one of which was at home. The 2006 team was supposed to be a 'redeem' team after the 2004 failure at the Olympics, so it wasn't secondary but it included Lebron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul, Carmelo Anthony, Dwight Howard, Joe Johnson, Shane Battier, Kirk Hinrich, Chris Bosh, Antwan Jamison, Elton Brand... Future MVPs, All-Star players, All-NBA players, championship winners, big time playoff performers. The only players that didn't seem out of the water there was Melo and Hinrich actually, with Wade coming a distant 3rd and Battier following him. Why? Because they were the only fundamentally sound players. Everyone else just had a "barge in with the ball" attitude. And it failed. It would have failed in 2008 as well, but Kobe Bryant, one of the most fundamentally sound players of his era, bailed them out against Spain.
The reality is that we can see that the level has dropped significantly. All the evidence has been in front of us but some people just refuse to process it.
The 2019 US team wasn't on the level of that 2002 team. Those also included all-star players and were set up to win it, the 2019 team was set up just to gain international exposure, so it's rather unfair to pin them failure, but they did fail. If you look at the roster, there's nothing impressive. Then you look at the 2002 roster and you're astounded that they didn't win, as an NBA fan at least. But once you realize who they were up against, some top international sides, you can understand why they didn't have much of a shot. The 2000 Olympics almost proven that when Lithuania was this close to eliminating them. The 1998 roster was shit, no contest. But the 2002 one was set up to win it at home, featuring players that were dominant during that period or even the decade: Paul Pierce, Michael Finley, Reggie Miller, Ben Wallace, Shawn Marion, Jermaine O'Neal, Andre Miller, Baron Davis, Elton Brand. That was a really solid roster, with future NBA champions, great playoff performers and record holders but they didn't realize how great international basketball was. They ended up 6th in this competition....
Do you honestly think that if the NBA sends out a team with 8 all-stars now they cannot win any competition out there? I cannot name a national team that can beat them. Up until 2012 I could name several and the US team needed a lot of refereeing help to overcome some of the competition.
Results don't disagree with this either. The gap widened significantly in the mid 2010s and now the US team struggles to have top sides because the very best players in the league aren't as much American anymore as it used to be. Apart from a handful of elite superstars, the rest of the great players in the league are international, and this will show on the national side. They almost lost the gold to a France team last summer, for example, whereas their 2016 gold medal was a 30 point win against Serbia, who were runners up of the forthcoming Eurobasket.
We haven't had another Eurobasket contest to match up the level of European national sides since this talent drop off, but from the qualifiers we notice how some teams gain significant momentum from a couple of strong players. Slovenia with Doncic for example, it feels like something we never had before, the side who beat Serbia in 2017. Unfortunately we didn't have a 2019 edition as they changed the setup and we had the world's instead that's rather low on priority from most sides.
Talent pool is deeper than ever and that's a fact.That's also why we will probably get expansion soon with 2 more teams.NBA knows this and expansion seems closer than ever.Maybe in 5 years,who knows.Some of the drafts ahead of us are sick.
The talent pool is deeper but the rotations are shorter, no?
What we have is deeper top sides than before since players join with rival superstars at teams and the salary cap can be manipulated with more ease than in the 2000s or earlier.
Draft class being classified as great is something I hear very often. I remember the 2010 draft class was supposed to be amazing and I was arguing that the 2011 class was better (before the actual draft) which was met with ironic remarks from my US friends. Looking back at the list, I strongly feel that the 2011 class was far deeper and stronger overall.
I don't disagree that there might be a good draft class out there, but the level is deteriorating. The only way it keeps getting better is if they start recruiting more international kids. The 2022 draft class is mostly college freshmen once again, they're too raw for basketball because they carry that AAU mindset of "me, me, me" and they don't stick to college enough to learn how to play the sport properly. And college programs even stopped caring about this as they know with the 'one & done' system all they can do is milk whatever they can, so the NCAA level is much poorer than it was just 5 years ago.
I'm more with
@Conan the Barbarian here, but I didn't really stop watching. I just stopped caring, mostly watched some playoff games because those were the few that felt like competitive matches and not friendlies (exhibition games as they like to call them). So I focused more on college basketball because that seemed more genuine basketball and more competitive. I can assure you that I've change my opinion on that in the past 5 years.
I'm not sure between the NCAA and the Euroleague which one is having the steepest decline in quality over the last decade.
10 years of FIF
Nostradamus
Most Passionate Member
), but the aftermath... It also created this false myth about "GOATs", as it made the game much easier offensively, so stat padding followed over the next 15 years. Just look at the increase of FT attempts between those seasons and the PPG from the players. And then look at how much jacking up threes we have today...