yeah, stir my custard.
FIBA Stuff
- Thread starter Saint Cy of JFC
- Start date
yeah, stir my custard.
FrenchJazzFa
Well-Known Member
Great entrance from Kessler, Play few min, score , rebound, block....seems to have a lot of energy and power.
GVC
Well-Known Member
We'll see. Assuming they beat Brazil on Friday, they might be in a weird position against Spain on Sunday, where a loss helps them avoid Spain, USA and Australia until the finals.
Step-Back Hook
Well-Known Member
FrenchJazzFa
Well-Known Member
Looking at the game too. I agree, great performance from Lauri.
Step-Back Hook
Well-Known Member
This game was equivalent to games like he had against Houston. No defense at all. As Finland has no one else that can create advantage against top 5 teams like Germany an Australia those were just in for too easy of a task to shut him and Finland down.
Funny to be with 4 Chinese and and me, an American cheering for Japan in Tokyo. Great comeback! People laughed a bit at me calling him Utah.
God I love Yuta.
How is Japan so much better at ball than China?
Japan's basketball popularity boom has already passed. I think basketball kind of peaked when Slam Dunk came out (popular Japanese basketball manga, think it was 90's in the Jordan era). China is basketball obsessed but they dont seem to be producing any talent outside of the occasional giant center (that 18 year old Jokic clone does look promising).
Guess this is a question best suited for @Ron Mexico
Japan's basketball popularity boom has already passed. I think basketball kind of peaked when Slam Dunk came out (popular Japanese basketball manga, think it was 90's in the Jordan era). China is basketball obsessed but they dont seem to be producing any talent outside of the occasional giant center (that 18 year old Jokic clone does look promising).
Guess this is a question best suited for @Ron Mexico
JimLes
Well-Known Member
It's because of China's approach to sports. The government invests in sports as a form of "sports-washing," but it never does it at a grassroots level. It simply picks sports that aren't as popular to invest in because that's the easiest path to success. Look at the last summer Olympics. China won 38 gold medals, but of those 7 were in weightlifting, 7 in diving, and four each in table tennis and shooting. That's 22 all together in sports that I'm not sure exist at a professional level around the world. I mean, we've all played table tennis at some point(there was a table in the rec room of my frat house), but I'm not aware of existence of any kind of competitive leagues in North America.
It's actually fairly cheap for China to invest in these kinds of sports, and the money is more likely to go a longer way. Plus, you only need to produce a couple of phenoms and you're good. Team sports are very different. You need grassroots investment and broad popularity of the sport. You need a large pool of potential pros so that eventually, you can send the best to international competitions. You need a youth system of some kind(academies, or like in States, colleges and high schools) to produce talent and to separate the wheat from the chaff.
And the giant centers are an obvious corollary of this. There is a very small pool of 7-footers between the ages of 18 and 35 in the world, so it's easier for countries without a strong basketball culture to produce those than it is to produce world class 6-footers. It also has to do with skillsets being more complex and needing a different environment to develop. Like in (association) football where countries with weaker systems will produce forwards and strikers who may be world class, but producing a world class defender or goalkeeper is a whole other thing.
There's a reason why so many early Euros(and Aussies, actually) in the NBA were bigs and why even today, there's an imbalance among international players in the NBA as far as size goes. And the ones who are guards tend to be from countries who have strong basketball programs. There have been 6 players from Republic of Georgia in the NBA and she shortest one was 6'9. Three Poles and the shortest was 6'11. Meanwhile the French, the Slovenes, the Germans, the Serbs, the Canadians and the like come in all sizes because those countries basketball programs are elite. As you can see at the current FIBA world cup.
I think they will, it's just delayed. China is one generation away from extreme poverty and Japan has been a super power country for awhile. Even now only the rich want to pay money for their kids to actually train and not just focus on school 24/7. Athletes have generally been pulled from the very poorest areas and live with the team and learn the sport. That method doesn't create good athletes. But things are changing. I could talk for hours about the methodology and other issues but this is really the main thing. Poor countries rarely produce high level athletes consistently.
The first part of this seems made up. China is constantly great at sports that are more skill based where you can just do it over and over to perfection. But they have struggled with sports that need athleticism but that's due to poverty and their approach. China has dumped massive money into developing athletes for the last two Olympics held in China and the more popular sports got more money. Ping pong is very popular in China and has been for multiple generations. It's not an obscure sport they are trying to sneak into.
HermanG
Well-Known Member
JimLes
Well-Known Member
Ping pong is definitely an obscure sport. Again, outside of East Asia, I'm not sure it's played at a professional level anywhere. It's not about skill versus athleticism, it's about where you can get the medals. Producing 2-3 world class ping pong players(whether or not ping pong is popular in China is immaterial here) is much easier than producing 12 world class basketball players or 23 footballers. Especially when the rest of the world seems to not care about ping pong.
China played the US in the final of the 1999 women's World Cup but women's football was in its infancy back then. It was easier to invest some money and have results. Now that the women's game has finally gotten some respect in Europe and there's actual investment, China's not even among the top 10 countries in the world. Hell, they even failed to qualify for a World Cup 2 cycles ago.
I suppose I don't know the details, but if China is investing into men's football and men's basketball, I'm not seeing the results. The Chinese Superleague is chock full of foreigners, and that especially goes for key players on teams. Last year, there were two Chinese players among the top 10 scorers. 5 Brazilians, though, and not Brazilians who are of any real quality. Meanwhile, the men's national team is as far from qualifying for a World Cup as they've been this millennium.
One Chinese player in the top 10 in scoring in Chinese Basketball Association this year. Same with rebounding. A few more in assists. China lost all 3 of its group games at the current FIBA WC, and by a lot.