What are your answers to the question Matthew Yglesias has declared too "unseemly" to ask: Are Balkans good at basketball for the same reasons blacks are?
could have something to do with the relative popularity of the sports in different eras. My impression is that boxing was one of the top prestige sports in the middle of the 20th century. Muhammad Ali was as world famous as Michael Jordan for example. Corruption and the emergence of MMA drained some of the prestige. Concerns about traumatic head injury too?
I don't know if that's it but I do believe some sports are so prestigious that we can be confident the best people are in them. In the early days of a new sport or the decline of an old sport, it's tougher to compare eras.
You're talking about the middleweight and heavier. The lighter weight categories are the most diverse of all with a relatively high number of Latin boxers too.
good example. I wonder too if boxing is more a lower class sport. Junior probably grew up in a nice neighborhood. Didn't bother to google so for all I know senior was born with a silver spoon too...looks like he grew up in small town Illinois, was an amazing all around athlete who just happened to become the best boxer in the Marine corps (while doing Morse code)...so with all the sports to choose from, in 1967 boxing then his son chose to spare his brain with pro football.
Boxing was a top five sport in 1950 and baseball was number one. That's no longer so. Horse racing has declined a lot since 1950. And NASCAR is busily on the way to wrecking stock car racing with their political correctness. I wouldn't be surprised if stock car racing is as popular as roller derby in 2050.
The three most popular sports in 1950 were baseball, horse racing, and boxing, and 75 years later the latter two are de facto dead. Having said that, I think you underestimate how popular NASCAR is in most of the country and I'm saying that as someone who lives in New Jersey where we have no NASCAR events (although the Pocono 400 with its triangular track isn't far)
Shai, pronounced like the stadium, not like the actor.
Anyway, I think nurture is being discounted here; the former Yugoslavian nations have decided that basketball is the ticket for their athletes just like the Baltic states did. Throw some nature in the mix and Bob's your uncle
Whites in America have been discouraged for decades now from basketball and track.
The 3-point shot was disdained in the NBA and for years after it was introduced in 1979.:
The three-point field goal was slow to be adopted by teams in the NBA. In the 1980 NBA Finals, Julius Erving made the only three of the series (and first in Finals history) in Game 3, and in Game 4, neither team attempted a single shot beyond the arc. Per Wiki.
The 76ers leading three-point shooter that year was Henry Bibby, who Steve may remember from UCLA. Bibby went 11-for-52 for the ENTIRE SEASON; meanwhile Damian Lillard of the Portland Trailblazers went 12-for-17 in a SINGLE GAME against the Denver Nuggets in the 2021 playoffs. Anyway Bibby was 5-for-9 in the 1980 playoffs before the finals but went 0-for-4 against the Lakers in the finals.
The stereotype about European basketball is that the players there have always been smarter than their American counterparts. That feeds into the better passing (assist stats). Even their big players have a reputation for being very good passers.
Balkan athletes dominate many ball sports aside from tennis, soccer and basketball. Consider water polo and handball.
It's worth asking: Would Jokic have been as dominant if he had grown up in North Carolina? Maybe. It's also possible that a teenage Jokic would've been intimidated and more likely to be overlooked due to the jumping ability and athleticism of the African-American youths he would've competed against. You could argue that Nikola benefited from developing his game against less athletic basketball players. It's also worth noting that the best white American prospect in a generation (Cooper Flagg) is from Maine.
European soccer is increasingly dominated by super-fast athletes from London and Paris. Yet, Argentina, Uruguay and the Balkan nations can hold their own partly because they have unique soccer cultures where speed isn't quite everything.
Top-level soccer is becoming like a track meet. One of the top players in the world, Jude Bellingham is built like and has the athleticism of an All-Pro Wide Receiver. He uses his superior speed and jumping ability to dominate.
He has to run almost 10km every game, so he needs to be lean. He could bulk up another 20 pounds of muscle easily enough. My point is that he has the physique of a pro football player.
I spent hours of my youth playing hoops with my friends. One on one mainly. 5’10” white guy. No aspirations of success but developed into a decent passer. I was often the point guard in military gyms that were populated by very athletic tall black men. Their problem, no one to pass them the ball. I got a lot of playing time and a lot of assists, like Luca or John Stockton who played to their strengths, it would seem that those Baltic giants learned that lesson and modeled their game after Larry Bird. Nature, yes, but a lot of nurture in the mix.
Your story was the case and such players have always been appreciated. Now, coaching in all sports is getting so good that many coaches only look at the fastest, tallest, and strongest players. They might be right - to a degree. Whereas the vision, timing, and touch required to make a great passer used to be considered innate, coaches are now confident that they can train players to be almost as good as the passers with the innate ability.
I'm worried that players like Luka, Bird, and Stockton will become even rarer.
I so agree. The players who always made me a better coach were the ones who could guide the game, see the entire field and find the opening for the star to score. They are more rare than the superstar in the pros but less likely to be the most recognized by the fans and the media. The players know.
Youth basketball is currently dominated by the AAU circuit. No college recruiter bothers to go to a high school game to watch a potential D1er play against maybe a D3er and 8 done after HS guys when he can watch 10 D1 hopefuls going at it.
A 32 team big time AAU tournament is one of the most eye-opening and depressing things a suburban or rural white teen will ever experience. Black nonsense on steroids that they are forced to smile through and pretend that it’s normal.
There’s no doubt in my mind that the emergence of AAU by the early 2000s as an integral part of recruiting has been encouraging white athletes to look for a different outlet for next level play.
It’s also biased towards playing lots of games and generating highlight clips of athletic players rather than skill development. Chris Broussard has commented negatively on the AAU system and believes Euro players as well as some American whites have relevance in the NBA from superior skill that a lot of athletically gifted blacks don’t develop to the same degree.
Similarly, American kids play a ton of soccer games, while Dutch kids drill one-on-one. I kind of like the American approach more for the kids, but as we saw in the last World Cup, the Dutch are so much better at soccer than the Americans.
And thus giant America is less likely than little Netherlands to win the World Cup.
On the other hand, American youth soccer culture is actually pretty good for American youth. They get a lot of fun and exercise playing a lot of games, even if their very best 23 tend go on to lose 3-1 to Netherlands in the octo-final round of the World Cup.
I worked at a modestly famous corporation in 1993 where the new American-born CEO had been a goalie during the brief rise of the North American Soccer League in the 1970s and had stopped shots by Pele and Beckenbauer. He hadn't been a world class goalie, but then again, he was now the CEO of a modestly famous company.
I can only imagine - travel basketball, baseball and soccer in the US even at the middle school level is a massive drain on time, and that's just for boys who are hoping to play for their high school team. My youngest is in middle school and last year played in over 40 basketball games and about 30 baseball games and it was only that low for baseball because we opted for him not to play up in a travel club so he could play his last year of Little League eligibility.
He really enjoys both sports so I'm not pushing him into anything he doesn't want to do, but at the end of each season he was definitely burned out and just wanted more free time.
For someone who finds ascribing human differences to Nature unseemly, Yglesias offers nothing in the way of a Nurture explanation. Tacit admission of defeat of Blank Slate by "negative pregnant," a lawyer might say. Hell, even though I lean toward Nature I could come up with some argument.
My only sustained attempt at varsity sport was high school wrestling. I noticed that, even at JV level I was stuck at, wrestling kids from Eastern Montana farm communities was significantly harder. Same weight class, but they all felt denser, stouter, just harder to move. Could poorer, rural environments in former Yugoslavia create bigger boned guys that are tougher to block out? (For that matter, I've often wondered about whether the greater durability of old HOF pitchers had to do with blue collar/farm upbringing.)
I saw it in China. I paid a couple peasants to move a very heavy "guizi" dresser up six storeys and they didn't put it down once. These were not big guys, either. Urban Chinese are complete wimps compared to country folk.
I treasure my memories of helping my Granddad on his middle west Tennessee farm when I was a boy and getting a couple of "attaboys" for doing good work. And the homemade cold smokehouse he had built would produce bacon and ham that found its way to the breakfast table. Yum!
As someone who was 6'2" and 130 lbs in college, I agree that not spindly is a factor, in self-confidence if nothing else. Escaping the Balkans and relative poverty could be big, too.
Slightly OT, but that story Steve posted a couple weeks ago about the white high school football player getting stabbed to death by a black kid from another school is gaining in potential cultural impact.
The latest development is that a judge has dropped the killer's bail from 1M to a quarter of that after his family complained that they couldn't use all that donated money to bail him out, because they needed to use it to protect themselves from racism, or something along those lines. He's now out of jail.
You can learn more about the judge at this Daily Mail story:
She (hint 1) -- that is, the judge -- is now also claiming she's a victim of racism (hint 2), just like the killer's family are claiming about their son. They say he was 'bullied' by the dead boy and subsequently got stabby strictly within the confines of legally-approved self-defense.
I've got a bad feeling this case is developing an OJ vibe.
The locale of the trial will be important. In 1995, I knew OJ Simpson was going to get off even though there was a mountain of evidence proving his guilt. The jury was a south Los Angeles jury and had nine black members. I knew Derek Chauvin would be convicted when his trial occurred in Minneapolis. He might not have been convicted in International Falls.
Good point about Derek Chauvin, but I don't think there's a thinking soul in the country who thought he might be found not-guilty of murder. He wasn't guilty of it, not even manslaughter, his act of putting a knee on Saint George's neck didn't cause that drugged-out thug's death, as the original Medical Examiner found to be the case.
Another useful question: "Why is basketball POPULAR in the Balkans"? Yes, that may be a version of the ancient chicken-and-egg riddle, but it may be a useful re-framing.
Null hypothesis: "Scandinavians and Balkan-ians having equal innate talent at basketball." If basketball has had an average of 60 units of popularity in the Balkans over the past seventy-five years and 20 units of popularity in Scandinavia in the same period (on a 0-100 scale), we'd assume many more people in the Balkans have gone onto a basketball track. Self-reinforcing feedback loops would set in.
There are Reddit threads asking variants of this question. One, from r/AskBalkans:
"[Basketball is popular in the Balkans] because it's more accessible than football. It doesn't require anywhere near as big and extensive infrastructure as football to play. The playing field is smaller, equipment relatively cheap, and you can even play it more or less "properly" it in an empty concrete lot with a makeshift hoop, which the Balkans have plenty of."
Another:
"I think Yugoslav basketball might be the biggest reason. Yugoslav basketball was at a good level, which had an impact on neighboring countries. Many Yugoslav coaches, Yugoslav immigrant athletes and Yugoslav basketball players played in Turkey."
.
---- When and why did Yugoslavia start promoting basketball?
Yugoslavia begins placing highly in basketball tournaments in the early 1960s. (also, first Olympic medal in basketball: 1968; regular medals thereafter).
In the "Rise of Yugoslavia" section of that article, we see this: In the 1960s-1980s, there was a major rivalry in basketball between the USSR and Yugoslavia. Naturally there are geopolitical implications there: The leader of the Warsaw Pact vs the independent-socialist, non-Warsaw-Pact Yugoslavia.
Given this apparent 1960s-1980s Yugoslavia-Soviet basketball rivalry, it makes sense that Yugoslavia -- and its successor states (and, to some extent, some of its socialist-bloc neighbors) -- would have seen a big push towards basketball. This push could have maximized their potential, in a way that others didn't do as much.
Not sure about the premise here..... there aren't really than many Balkan basketball players in the NBA and the few guards haven't really done much of note. Jokic is in his own category ..... it is interesting that he played water polo apparently and you can see that style in his passing.
Some points:
1. Not sure if anyone else has mentioned that blacks have shorter torsos, less torso depth and relatively longer limbs than whites. At a given height their waists are around 3cm higher. These are all serious advantages in basketball. White basketball stars often have relatively longer arms and legs and are not barrel chested, but these are outlier builds for whites and much less so for blacks.
The average white has a wingspan equal to height. You can see for all NBA players that wingspans are on average 3-4 inches greater. What % of American whites have this kind of build? Do slavs have relatively longer arms and legs?
2. @tony below noted that the culture of AUU ball is essentially "black nonsense on steroids" and it's hard to argue otherwise. Combine this with black pre-teens maturing faster physically that white kids and the end result is most white potential NBA players likely getting washed out before they have a chance to catch up physically. Steve noted this over a decade ago and I haven't heard a better explanation.
3. A lot of American white players seem to simply accept getting bullied as the price of admission for playing a black sport. You see this MUCH less with the Balkan, Spanish, Argentinian and Australian players who generally dont seem to have the ingrained US cultural baggage of learning to treat blacks with kid gloves. A few years back there was a hilarious Australian role player Greg Ingles who would punk star American black players (and white players) for a laugh -- look up "Greg Ingles Paul George" if curious. Or even better "Jokic Markieff Morris". Cooper Flagg is cocky/confident etc, but something tells me you wont see him acting like Ingles or Jokic for uniquely American reasons.
4. Before Jokic was winning NBA MVP awards he was essentially being benched despite putting up insane per/36 numbers. He was drafted 41st overall. It took Denver 2.5 years to realize not that they happened to be rostering potentially the best player in the NBA, but even just that they had a guy who deserved to have the ball in his hands and play starters minutes.
Steve Nash also barely got D1 scholarship (one school offered) and later won NBA MVP playing a pretty unique style of Point Guard.
The obvious question raised by this is whether the NBA's style of black athletic basketball becomes a self fulfilling prophecy? Like how much is the archetype of a 6'8 hyper athletic Vince Carter type is baked into the image of a "star" basketball player in the minds of coaches and scouts? How many of these guys actually turn into winning basketball players?
5. American black players are themselves in danger of being replaced, but not by Slavs. In the same way that American black players have on average physical advantages that at the extreme end of the spectrum manifest in an overwhelmingly black NBA, there seem to be quite a few African players coming across that have the same traits, but more so.
A team of unknowns from SOUTH SUDAN nearly beat the dream team last olympics. If the NBA stays on its current path of play style I think we are in for a lot more African players, and potentially soon.
Similar question: Why did boxing go from being black dominated, to more racially mixed as Russians and Ukrainians boxers do well ?
could have something to do with the relative popularity of the sports in different eras. My impression is that boxing was one of the top prestige sports in the middle of the 20th century. Muhammad Ali was as world famous as Michael Jordan for example. Corruption and the emergence of MMA drained some of the prestige. Concerns about traumatic head injury too?
I don't know if that's it but I do believe some sports are so prestigious that we can be confident the best people are in them. In the early days of a new sport or the decline of an old sport, it's tougher to compare eras.
You're talking about the middleweight and heavier. The lighter weight categories are the most diverse of all with a relatively high number of Latin boxers too.
Ken Norton Sr. fought Muhammad Ali three times, winning once. Ken Norton Jr. played linebacker on three Super Bowl winning teams.
I remember watching the fight where Norton broke Ali's jaw. But Ali kept fighting, a true champ who I hated at the time.
good example. I wonder too if boxing is more a lower class sport. Junior probably grew up in a nice neighborhood. Didn't bother to google so for all I know senior was born with a silver spoon too...looks like he grew up in small town Illinois, was an amazing all around athlete who just happened to become the best boxer in the Marine corps (while doing Morse code)...so with all the sports to choose from, in 1967 boxing then his son chose to spare his brain with pro football.
Boxing was a top five sport in 1950 and baseball was number one. That's no longer so. Horse racing has declined a lot since 1950. And NASCAR is busily on the way to wrecking stock car racing with their political correctness. I wouldn't be surprised if stock car racing is as popular as roller derby in 2050.
Yep, these days all the best horses and cars are probably staying home playing video games.
The three most popular sports in 1950 were baseball, horse racing, and boxing, and 75 years later the latter two are de facto dead. Having said that, I think you underestimate how popular NASCAR is in most of the country and I'm saying that as someone who lives in New Jersey where we have no NASCAR events (although the Pocono 400 with its triangular track isn't far)
> Shia Gilgeous-Alexander
Shai, pronounced like the stadium, not like the actor.
Anyway, I think nurture is being discounted here; the former Yugoslavian nations have decided that basketball is the ticket for their athletes just like the Baltic states did. Throw some nature in the mix and Bob's your uncle
Whites in America have been discouraged for decades now from basketball and track.
The 3-point shot was disdained in the NBA and for years after it was introduced in 1979.:
The three-point field goal was slow to be adopted by teams in the NBA. In the 1980 NBA Finals, Julius Erving made the only three of the series (and first in Finals history) in Game 3, and in Game 4, neither team attempted a single shot beyond the arc. Per Wiki.
I'll take a healthy Bill Walton.
The 76ers leading three-point shooter that year was Henry Bibby, who Steve may remember from UCLA. Bibby went 11-for-52 for the ENTIRE SEASON; meanwhile Damian Lillard of the Portland Trailblazers went 12-for-17 in a SINGLE GAME against the Denver Nuggets in the 2021 playoffs. Anyway Bibby was 5-for-9 in the 1980 playoffs before the finals but went 0-for-4 against the Lakers in the finals.
The stereotype about European basketball is that the players there have always been smarter than their American counterparts. That feeds into the better passing (assist stats). Even their big players have a reputation for being very good passers.
Walton in the 1973 championship game against Memphis State is the most brilliant basketball performance ever
New Jersey residents would argue Bill Bradley's performance in the 1965 national consolation game against Wichita State tops it
Balkan athletes dominate many ball sports aside from tennis, soccer and basketball. Consider water polo and handball.
It's worth asking: Would Jokic have been as dominant if he had grown up in North Carolina? Maybe. It's also possible that a teenage Jokic would've been intimidated and more likely to be overlooked due to the jumping ability and athleticism of the African-American youths he would've competed against. You could argue that Nikola benefited from developing his game against less athletic basketball players. It's also worth noting that the best white American prospect in a generation (Cooper Flagg) is from Maine.
European soccer is increasingly dominated by super-fast athletes from London and Paris. Yet, Argentina, Uruguay and the Balkan nations can hold their own partly because they have unique soccer cultures where speed isn't quite everything.
Top-level soccer is becoming like a track meet. One of the top players in the world, Jude Bellingham is built like and has the athleticism of an All-Pro Wide Receiver. He uses his superior speed and jumping ability to dominate.
He's a bit more slight than the average wide receiver
He has to run almost 10km every game, so he needs to be lean. He could bulk up another 20 pounds of muscle easily enough. My point is that he has the physique of a pro football player.
I spent hours of my youth playing hoops with my friends. One on one mainly. 5’10” white guy. No aspirations of success but developed into a decent passer. I was often the point guard in military gyms that were populated by very athletic tall black men. Their problem, no one to pass them the ball. I got a lot of playing time and a lot of assists, like Luca or John Stockton who played to their strengths, it would seem that those Baltic giants learned that lesson and modeled their game after Larry Bird. Nature, yes, but a lot of nurture in the mix.
Your story was the case and such players have always been appreciated. Now, coaching in all sports is getting so good that many coaches only look at the fastest, tallest, and strongest players. They might be right - to a degree. Whereas the vision, timing, and touch required to make a great passer used to be considered innate, coaches are now confident that they can train players to be almost as good as the passers with the innate ability.
I'm worried that players like Luka, Bird, and Stockton will become even rarer.
I so agree. The players who always made me a better coach were the ones who could guide the game, see the entire field and find the opening for the star to score. They are more rare than the superstar in the pros but less likely to be the most recognized by the fans and the media. The players know.
Youth basketball is currently dominated by the AAU circuit. No college recruiter bothers to go to a high school game to watch a potential D1er play against maybe a D3er and 8 done after HS guys when he can watch 10 D1 hopefuls going at it.
A 32 team big time AAU tournament is one of the most eye-opening and depressing things a suburban or rural white teen will ever experience. Black nonsense on steroids that they are forced to smile through and pretend that it’s normal.
There’s no doubt in my mind that the emergence of AAU by the early 2000s as an integral part of recruiting has been encouraging white athletes to look for a different outlet for next level play.
It’s also biased towards playing lots of games and generating highlight clips of athletic players rather than skill development. Chris Broussard has commented negatively on the AAU system and believes Euro players as well as some American whites have relevance in the NBA from superior skill that a lot of athletically gifted blacks don’t develop to the same degree.
Similarly, American kids play a ton of soccer games, while Dutch kids drill one-on-one. I kind of like the American approach more for the kids, but as we saw in the last World Cup, the Dutch are so much better at soccer than the Americans.
Top European clubs have kids in their academies as young as 5.
The US approach - imagining that talent will be nurtured between the varsity ages of 18 and 22 - is incredibly late.
And thus giant America is less likely than little Netherlands to win the World Cup.
On the other hand, American youth soccer culture is actually pretty good for American youth. They get a lot of fun and exercise playing a lot of games, even if their very best 23 tend go on to lose 3-1 to Netherlands in the octo-final round of the World Cup.
I worked at a modestly famous corporation in 1993 where the new American-born CEO had been a goalie during the brief rise of the North American Soccer League in the 1970s and had stopped shots by Pele and Beckenbauer. He hadn't been a world class goalie, but then again, he was now the CEO of a modestly famous company.
Yeah my son plays soccer at sub-elite level in Europe. It’s pretty intense at schoolboy level.
I can only imagine - travel basketball, baseball and soccer in the US even at the middle school level is a massive drain on time, and that's just for boys who are hoping to play for their high school team. My youngest is in middle school and last year played in over 40 basketball games and about 30 baseball games and it was only that low for baseball because we opted for him not to play up in a travel club so he could play his last year of Little League eligibility.
He really enjoys both sports so I'm not pushing him into anything he doesn't want to do, but at the end of each season he was definitely burned out and just wanted more free time.
The AAU has been around since 1888 although their influence has ebbed and flowed over the years
R.I.P. Wink Martindale (91.4)
Jusuf Nurkic's discovery is one of my favorite stories.... https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/s/yUAmeFaIyg
If an American kid looked like Jokic, he would be steered towards left tackle.
"If an American kid looked like Jokic, he would be steered towards left tackle."
Probably not -- Jokic is (at least) 6' 11", which is pretty much too tall for football. I think he'd have ended up as a DII or maybe even DIII player.
Maybe 6'11" is too tall for left tackle but if you stood Joe Alt and Jokic next to each other they'd look pretty damn similar https://www.nfl.com/prospects/joe-alt/3200414c-5413-8430-67ff-edafc240dc72
6'6"-6'8" big body good feet can't jump out of the gym screams elite tackle.
For someone who finds ascribing human differences to Nature unseemly, Yglesias offers nothing in the way of a Nurture explanation. Tacit admission of defeat of Blank Slate by "negative pregnant," a lawyer might say. Hell, even though I lean toward Nature I could come up with some argument.
My only sustained attempt at varsity sport was high school wrestling. I noticed that, even at JV level I was stuck at, wrestling kids from Eastern Montana farm communities was significantly harder. Same weight class, but they all felt denser, stouter, just harder to move. Could poorer, rural environments in former Yugoslavia create bigger boned guys that are tougher to block out? (For that matter, I've often wondered about whether the greater durability of old HOF pitchers had to do with blue collar/farm upbringing.)
I grew up in rural Iowa, and being 'farm kid strong' is definitely a local cultural thing. I've seen plenty of evidence that it's real.
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith said, "Unless you've done farm work, you've never done real work."
I saw it in China. I paid a couple peasants to move a very heavy "guizi" dresser up six storeys and they didn't put it down once. These were not big guys, either. Urban Chinese are complete wimps compared to country folk.
I treasure my memories of helping my Granddad on his middle west Tennessee farm when I was a boy and getting a couple of "attaboys" for doing good work. And the homemade cold smokehouse he had built would produce bacon and ham that found its way to the breakfast table. Yum!
As someone who was 6'2" and 130 lbs in college, I agree that not spindly is a factor, in self-confidence if nothing else. Escaping the Balkans and relative poverty could be big, too.
Slightly OT, but that story Steve posted a couple weeks ago about the white high school football player getting stabbed to death by a black kid from another school is gaining in potential cultural impact.
The families of both the killer and the dead boy have been raising money online. At the moment, the victim's family have raised $363,000 (https://www.gofundme.com/f/honoring-austin-metcalf-help-his-family-heal) -- but the killer's family have exceeded that with $440,000 (https://www.givesendgo.com/HelpKarmelo).
The latest development is that a judge has dropped the killer's bail from 1M to a quarter of that after his family complained that they couldn't use all that donated money to bail him out, because they needed to use it to protect themselves from racism, or something along those lines. He's now out of jail.
You can learn more about the judge at this Daily Mail story:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14614161/karmelo-anthony-judge-angela-tucker-blasted-reducing-bond.html
She (hint 1) -- that is, the judge -- is now also claiming she's a victim of racism (hint 2), just like the killer's family are claiming about their son. They say he was 'bullied' by the dead boy and subsequently got stabby strictly within the confines of legally-approved self-defense.
I've got a bad feeling this case is developing an OJ vibe.
The locale of the trial will be important. In 1995, I knew OJ Simpson was going to get off even though there was a mountain of evidence proving his guilt. The jury was a south Los Angeles jury and had nine black members. I knew Derek Chauvin would be convicted when his trial occurred in Minneapolis. He might not have been convicted in International Falls.
Good point about Derek Chauvin, but I don't think there's a thinking soul in the country who thought he might be found not-guilty of murder. He wasn't guilty of it, not even manslaughter, his act of putting a knee on Saint George's neck didn't cause that drugged-out thug's death, as the original Medical Examiner found to be the case.
Another useful question: "Why is basketball POPULAR in the Balkans"? Yes, that may be a version of the ancient chicken-and-egg riddle, but it may be a useful re-framing.
Null hypothesis: "Scandinavians and Balkan-ians having equal innate talent at basketball." If basketball has had an average of 60 units of popularity in the Balkans over the past seventy-five years and 20 units of popularity in Scandinavia in the same period (on a 0-100 scale), we'd assume many more people in the Balkans have gone onto a basketball track. Self-reinforcing feedback loops would set in.
There are Reddit threads asking variants of this question. One, from r/AskBalkans:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskBalkans/comments/12rnl2o/why_is_basketball_so_popular_in_balkans/
One typical response:
"[Basketball is popular in the Balkans] because it's more accessible than football. It doesn't require anywhere near as big and extensive infrastructure as football to play. The playing field is smaller, equipment relatively cheap, and you can even play it more or less "properly" it in an empty concrete lot with a makeshift hoop, which the Balkans have plenty of."
Another:
"I think Yugoslav basketball might be the biggest reason. Yugoslav basketball was at a good level, which had an impact on neighboring countries. Many Yugoslav coaches, Yugoslav immigrant athletes and Yugoslav basketball players played in Turkey."
.
---- When and why did Yugoslavia start promoting basketball?
This article has some clues:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EuroBasket#Results
Yugoslavia begins placing highly in basketball tournaments in the early 1960s. (also, first Olympic medal in basketball: 1968; regular medals thereafter).
In the "Rise of Yugoslavia" section of that article, we see this: In the 1960s-1980s, there was a major rivalry in basketball between the USSR and Yugoslavia. Naturally there are geopolitical implications there: The leader of the Warsaw Pact vs the independent-socialist, non-Warsaw-Pact Yugoslavia.
Given this apparent 1960s-1980s Yugoslavia-Soviet basketball rivalry, it makes sense that Yugoslavia -- and its successor states (and, to some extent, some of its socialist-bloc neighbors) -- would have seen a big push towards basketball. This push could have maximized their potential, in a way that others didn't do as much.
Yugoslavia won the basketball gold medal at the 1980 Moscow Olympics (with the US boycotting).
Yugoslavia medaled in four consecutive Olympics in Men's basketball (76-88) and they or one of their successor states medaled in the next two as well
Not sure about the premise here..... there aren't really than many Balkan basketball players in the NBA and the few guards haven't really done much of note. Jokic is in his own category ..... it is interesting that he played water polo apparently and you can see that style in his passing.
Some points:
1. Not sure if anyone else has mentioned that blacks have shorter torsos, less torso depth and relatively longer limbs than whites. At a given height their waists are around 3cm higher. These are all serious advantages in basketball. White basketball stars often have relatively longer arms and legs and are not barrel chested, but these are outlier builds for whites and much less so for blacks.
https://www.draftexpress.com/average-measurements-by-position/all/NBA+Draft+Combine/all/60/
The average white has a wingspan equal to height. You can see for all NBA players that wingspans are on average 3-4 inches greater. What % of American whites have this kind of build? Do slavs have relatively longer arms and legs?
2. @tony below noted that the culture of AUU ball is essentially "black nonsense on steroids" and it's hard to argue otherwise. Combine this with black pre-teens maturing faster physically that white kids and the end result is most white potential NBA players likely getting washed out before they have a chance to catch up physically. Steve noted this over a decade ago and I haven't heard a better explanation.
3. A lot of American white players seem to simply accept getting bullied as the price of admission for playing a black sport. You see this MUCH less with the Balkan, Spanish, Argentinian and Australian players who generally dont seem to have the ingrained US cultural baggage of learning to treat blacks with kid gloves. A few years back there was a hilarious Australian role player Greg Ingles who would punk star American black players (and white players) for a laugh -- look up "Greg Ingles Paul George" if curious. Or even better "Jokic Markieff Morris". Cooper Flagg is cocky/confident etc, but something tells me you wont see him acting like Ingles or Jokic for uniquely American reasons.
4. Before Jokic was winning NBA MVP awards he was essentially being benched despite putting up insane per/36 numbers. He was drafted 41st overall. It took Denver 2.5 years to realize not that they happened to be rostering potentially the best player in the NBA, but even just that they had a guy who deserved to have the ball in his hands and play starters minutes.
Steve Nash also barely got D1 scholarship (one school offered) and later won NBA MVP playing a pretty unique style of Point Guard.
The obvious question raised by this is whether the NBA's style of black athletic basketball becomes a self fulfilling prophecy? Like how much is the archetype of a 6'8 hyper athletic Vince Carter type is baked into the image of a "star" basketball player in the minds of coaches and scouts? How many of these guys actually turn into winning basketball players?
5. American black players are themselves in danger of being replaced, but not by Slavs. In the same way that American black players have on average physical advantages that at the extreme end of the spectrum manifest in an overwhelmingly black NBA, there seem to be quite a few African players coming across that have the same traits, but more so.
A team of unknowns from SOUTH SUDAN nearly beat the dream team last olympics. If the NBA stays on its current path of play style I think we are in for a lot more African players, and potentially soon.
Nearly twenty years ago, the Watson affair raised the same issues. My attempt to address them in an op-ed, below, never saw the light of day:
THOUGHTS ON WATSON'S EGREGIOUSNESS
Whenever we open our mouth, we can say the expected, acceptable,
polite thing or we can say what we really think.
Both graciousness and candor are virtues, but they seldom walk hand in
hand. Nor are they equally appreciated. Candor, in particular, is
always praised except when it's put into practice.
Neither is a guarantee of truth. Many banal remarks are false; so are
many shockers. And lots of people very sincerely believe all sorts of
absolute poppycock.
James Watson, who shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 for the discovery of
DNA's structure, said recently apropos of Africans: "All our social
policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as
ours -- whereas all the testing says not really."
Watson certainly knew what had happened to Lawrence Summers, once
president of Harvard, merely for musing aloud on women's capacity for
higher mathematics. Still, we know Watson meant what he said, because
in his new book, "Avoid Boring People," he wrote: "There is no firm
reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples
geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have
evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as
some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."
Watson was widely criticized for his remarks. His speeches were
cancelled, he was suspended from his job as chancellor of Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory, and soon thereafter he apologized and resigned.
We may not be so presumptuous as to disagree with a Nobel scientist,
but on the other hand we aren't suicidal enough to agree with him. Yet
there must be something one can say.
Let's start with this: Language serves more than one purpose.
Sometimes it's a tool for sharpening our understanding of the world;
at others, it's a sort of social music, used to assure others of our
peaceful intentions and so forth. A good way to distinguish situations
where people are seeking the truth from those where they are seeking
comity is to ask: what would happen if someone asserted the opposite?
or some other position in the middle?
For instance, if Watson had said that Africans are as smart as anybody
else, would there have been an uproar? Of course not. No one would
have been offended, and few would have been so impertinent as to
demand his reasoning and evidence.
Or suppose that he had said something positive. Suppose he had said
that Africans are particularly hard-working or creative. Would there
have been an uproar? Again, of course not.
One hears statements like these, about various ethnic groups, all the
time. Yet such statements are just like what he said, except they're
not negative. But if only positive statements are acceptable, then
clearly the speech is not serving a truth-seeking function. If one is
free to assert something but not free to assert its opposite, then one
isn't free at all.
Secondly, was the point of Watson's denouncers that all men are
created equally intelligent, Einstein and I for example? Of course
not. Was it their point that there are differences between groups but
that specifically Watson's black vs. white comparison was erroneous?
Doubtful. It seems that what is left, then, is a position which
admits that individuals have widely different capacities but holds
that in any large group these differences somehow even out and
disappear. Perhaps that can be proved, but on its face it doesn't
seem necessarily so.
Third and last point: People almost never get into hot arguments over
easily demonstrable facts. Announce that the sun rises in the west
and you'll be laughed at, perhaps, but no one is likely to condemn
you. Today, like it or not, the intellectual accomplishments of some
groups are relatively scarce -- try counting Nobel Prizes, for example
-- so that their equality with other groups is not easily
demonstrable. The very fact that Watson was condemned, rather than
simply rebutted or laughed off, suggests this.
Many people passionately believe that the causes of ethnic
discrepancies are historic -- social, political, economic -- and not
innate. But there is only one way to bury the issue once and for all:
conspicuous, incontestable achievement.
Ottoman sultans liked Balkanoids for his Jannisaries. Worked out well until it didn't. Thus the Glorious Incident.