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You’ve heard it a few times, I’m sure.
You’ve heard about how the European model is supposedly so much better at developing basketball players with ball movement and defense and fundamentals and whatever other nonsense is out there.
You’ve heard about the toxic AAU model in the United States and how it breeds selfishness and narcissism and iso ball.
You’ve heard about the international takeover of the game, an idea the NBA likes to push because more nations intrigued by the sport means more potential revenue.
Yet here we are in 2024 — over three decades since the original Dream Team — and the global sport of basketball, second to only soccer in worldwide popularity, remains utterly dominated by the U.S.
There’s nothing like it in major team sports. Between our women and men’s teams, USA Basketball has swept gold at the last four Olympics. To compare, four different teams won the last five Olympic titles in hockey; six different nations won the last six FIFA World Cups; three different teams won the last five World Baseball Classics.
“The whole thing about the system is crap,” Jim Boeheim, the legendary Syracuse coach and former Team USA assistant, told The Post. “Our kids get developed. Criticize it or not, AAU develops players. You have to play good or get your [butt] kicked in AAU. The cream comes to the top.”
Boeheim provided a caveat, both true and relevant, that the U.S. isn’t totally indestructible. Stuff happens. The three-time Olympic champion as an assistant noted that his 2008 Redeem Team, led by Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, edged Spain by only two points in the Olympic final.
But there’s a reason Team USA is 26.5-point favorites in Tuesday’s quarterfinal against Brazil. I’m already penciling in the Americans for the gold medal game despite our supposedly inferior development system. Group C was so easy that coach Steve Kerr allowed himself to massage egos by playing a balanced 10-man rotation. Nobody logged more than 27 minutes in the opening three contests.
And almost all of Kerr’s players, with a couple exceptions, followed the familiar U.S. pipeline of AAU to prep school to NCAA to pros. It is proven at identifying and fostering the very best talents.
This subject prompted a phone call to Sonny Vaccaro, now 85 and always eager to discuss basketball. If you don’t recall, Vaccaro was the Nike executive who founded ABCD Camp, the longtime be-all, end-all of summer basketball exposure and recruiting. Vaccaro was the first to mold grassroots basketball with big sneaker corporation money, attracting, among many others, LeBron, Kobe, Tracy McGrady, Carmelo Anthony, Kevin Garnett, Jason Kidd and Derrick Rose.
To truly open a nation’s talent pool, the sport has to be available to everybody, regardless of income level. Vaccaro understood the pay-to-play model was too exclusive.
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So he found a way to build Nike’s brand — then later the brands of Adidas and Reebok, which both also sponsored the A.B.C.D. Camp — while providing free exposure and perks for youth players. It’s a model now mimicked, escalated, legitimized and celebrated, most notably with NIL payments but also in leagues such as Overtime Elite.
In his heyday, Vaccaro was ostracized as seedy and a stain on the integrity of amateur basketball, much like the NIL system today.
“There was a stigma to doing it,” Vaccaro told The Post. “Because some people — specifically the NCAA — criticized.”
Regardless of the reputation, the system worked. Basketball potential rarely slips through the cracks in the U.S. And that’s evident every four years at the Olympics.
“Today, we’re identifying players when they’re 10 years old,” former USA Basketball director Jerry Colangelo told The Post. “It’s a pretty sophisticated system here. There’s a whole bunch of people on the street corners, in the gym, the Summer League stuff is over the top. So there’s a plethora of players. And they keep coming.”
As Colangelo noted, there are natural advantages for the U.S. The pool of players is much larger than the European or South American nations. Our speed and athleticism tend to overwhelm international competition.
It’s a recipe for dominance that Boeheim only sees really threatened by an emerging underdog.
“When it comes to developing players, we’ve done the best. We have the best players,” Boeheim said. “I will say that athletically and size-wise, Africa is the next frontier. It’s already going that way. That’s where I see something big happening. The NBA is developing academies over there. Kids still don’t have sneakers in some of these countries. But they’re getting them. And I think that will be the change — it may take 20 years probably, but I think it will come.”
