Bozo the kKklown

September 14, 2019

September 12, 2019

1 hour ago, stevemcqueen1 said:

According to the article about Ajax's transfer fee system, they still lose ground to richer clubs and can't really compete with them despite their excellence at teaching players because they have to continuously sell their players off for funding.

Yeah, they aren’t a rich club. They found their lane and develop players for richer clubs to buy, thus funding a new generation.

1 hour ago, stevemcqueen1 said:

I'm not crazy about that model and question whether it would be good for the NBA. What would be the point of being a fan of the Wizards or Hornets or Timberwolves, etc. if every time we got a player that could help us win we had to sell him to a rich team? When you don't honestly compete, you're never going to be able to build a fanbase and then you just become increasingly reliant on being a productive farm system for the real competitors. That is a bad cycle too.

I would much rather have dynamic, balanced competition with a diffusion of strong franchises.

There has to be a balance of teaching + prestigious competition that can generate its own revenue.

You are reading the article too literal.

The point is they are producing professional players. Players that are helping their team. The conversation started with how youth coaching is failing American basketball players. American sports will not allow for a European scheme that involves transfer fees and promotion/relegation. But we can implement youth basketball players being coached by a skilled professional coach instead of the ninth grade algebra teacher or a drug dealer in AAU.

September 12, 2019

16 minutes ago, stevemcqueen1 said:

It was the other way around for me. I didn't enjoy doing drills and most of practice but loved scrimmages and games. There can be pleasure in mastering new skills, but the performance with stakes is what was the most fun for me and it's what motivated me to slog through practice.

But a coach may not allow you to master the new skill because they need to win. A coach who is only into developing professionals will let you work out the kinks and try new things. That’s what we see.

But beyond that, players aren’t learning the game well here.

And I didn’t love drills either. I said I liked to just play the game.

September 12, 2019

22 minutes ago, stevemcqueen1 said:

I don't think taking the competitive element out of youth basketball is the right path. It's what makes the game fun to play.

I’m going to disagree here. Basketball is a fun sport to play. Some of my favorite games were just me and my brehs taking shots and doing whatever without a thought of the score. You are supposed to enjoy it first. Then you get competitive.

2 minutes ago, stevemcqueen1 said:

How do the coaches get players into their systems/teams? Is it a regional thing where everyone from a certain area automatically ends up in your program?

By being good and getting promoted.

And the younger players are mostly in an area around the club.

September 12, 2019

14 minutes ago, stevemcqueen1 said:

How do their youth coaches get their jobs and distinguish themselves though? How do they fund their programs? How do they innovate the game if not through competition? And wouldn't the development of proper skills in basketball lead directly to winning competitions?

I don't think taking the competitive element out of youth basketball is the right path. It's what makes the game fun to play.

It’s about producing professionals. If you produce pros, especially for your team, then you are doing a good job.

If you incentivize winning, you are going to do your best to win and ignore player development.

Player transfers fund training. If one player produces a fee for the club, it can pay for the program for a while.

This is about Ajax’s youth development program

https://www.fourfourtwo.com/features/inside-ajax-how-become-worlds-greatest-talent-factory

Another one about revenues

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/13/football/ajax-youth-academy-spt-intl/index.html

September 12, 2019

48 minutes ago, Destino said:

If the US wants help their home grown talent I think they have to let their pro teams scout and develop youth. Like a kids DLeague. AAU and NCAA are too concerned with winning and promoting their own programs. Developing a kid into a professional is a secondary consideration. Top talent would be better served with professional level coaches that don't really care about winning tournaments as much as they do turning raw athletes into well rounded and highly skilled basketball players.

This is what they do around the world.

The NBA will never do it because of the cost and the NCAA.

37 minutes ago, stevemcqueen1 said:

I would imagine winning is highly incentivized in European youth basketball too

I’m going to assume they follow the same template as soccer in Europe. They don’t care about winning in youth soccer either. They only care about coaching proper technique.

The other thing is the best coaches work with the youth.

September 12, 2019

39 minutes ago, stevemcqueen1 said:

Bad coaching and high levels of participation go hand in hand though. I can't see how you can facilitate very high levels of participation in a country like ours without very low standards of professionalism in youth coaching.

We need a new system of youth basketball, but we're not going to be able to copy European models because our country is too big and decentralized. We're going to have to figure out something novel.

We get away with it, or got away with it, because no other nation can produce elite athletes like the US.

But in 2019, many of the best young players in the NBA are not American.

September 12, 2019

16 minutes ago, stevemcqueen1 said:

I 100% agree with this. The incentive structures for coaches and players at the youth and college levels are all screwed up to the point where honest to god development is a very low priority.

I also think our system puts far too much wear and tear on players in their tween and early teens to the point where too many are developing terrible legs, backs, and feet by the time they're grown.

And I think the NBA is eventually going to start feeling a talent crunch that can't be made up in the short term by international expansion. Too many of our best American players have been getting career-altering injuries too young, and not enough top end American talent has come through the pipeline to replace them.

The parallel is the way soccer is structure in our country. Youth coaching is the big problem but basketball has larger participation levels so we don’t see as big of an issue.

Youth coaching has always been bad but the Europeans have surpassed us in coaching and have innovated the sport more than Americans the last 20 years.

September 12, 2019

1 hour ago, TryTheBeal! said:

Didn’t Paul George almost lose his career doing this FIBA deal? That’s a pretty big deal for players of similar stature.

Bottom line, we made the Olympic field and that’s all that really matters.

Paul George played in the 2016 Olympics.

No one is going to talk about this in the media but US basketball youth coaching is poor and that’s why other nations have caught up. European youth coaches are much better than US youth coaches. I include college too.

September 12, 2019

September 12, 2019

“Founded on Judeo-Christian principles...”

13 hours ago, Mr. Sinister said:

I don't feel anything anymore, and thats even with thinking I lost my dad that day (he worked at the Pentagon but was away from his office dropping off a rental. His office was one of the areas that was hit).

Nearly every rotten thing going on in this country today can be traced back to that day. I hate even thinking about it anymore. I would probably start to feel sick.

12 hours ago, Renegade7 said:

The 10 year anniversary felt kinda like an "everything we've been through" moment, especially since we had finally killed Bin Laden a few months earlier. The 20 year anniversary, it will be a real look back at everything we've done since that day, and it won't be pretty.

Quote

In the decades since 911, we have become a nation where, as an American, you must put aside your freedom a dozen times a day. You must show your papers. You must submit to naked body scanners and you must allow unsmiling uniformed men with the force of secret laws behind them to grope the most intimate areas of your children and yourselves. Such has become the price of freedom in America.

We have become a nation where you – as an American – can be detained for a glance or a gesture or a careless word or for checking out the wrong book from the library or for worshipping the wrong God. We have become a nation where the only acceptable response to uniformed authority is immediate and total submission. Talk back, question, stand pat on the rights of previous generations and you’ll be branded an enemy.

We have become a nation that claims to revere liberty and justice, but believes those things can only be had when secret agencies monitor our every email and our every communication without warrant or probable cause.

We have become a nation where parents buy bulletproof backpacks for their children as part of their school supplies.

We have become a nation that turns away the desperate and the needy, a nation that puts children in cages and lets women sit in their own menstrual blood because we don’t even have the minimum empathy to provide sanitary napkins or even flu shots to sick children.

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