Great NBA Insight on Cowherd

[FreeDawg]

9 of the 15 players on the Spurs roster are foreign born and foreign raised. The international FIBA leagues are much more organized and better coached yielding a better basketball player. The American AAU circuit coaching is atrocious and breeds a selfish, me first type player that Greg Popovich has no interest in coaching.


Im a Lebron fan but it certainly seems that Cowherd has a great point. Elite team ball seams to trump a couple elite players at this point. Which takes me to another thought: Why is Phil Jackson the only coach who can get American players to buy in to team ball??

 

[mstateglfr]

http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/9...drafting-international-athletes-espn-magazine

Its as if your recap of what was Cowherd discussed was ripped off directly from this ESPN article from last week and The Mag.

I agree with it all in general, just noting that maybe Cowherd's points werent exactly all his...unless it was the article's writer discussing the issue on Cowherd's show?



Doc Rivers sure seems to have had success getting American players to play team ball. The old Big3 plus Rondo and Perkins had just a bit of sustained success. I think that '08 Finals team actually had only US players on it.
The same can be said in the '10 Finals for Boston.

 

[FreeDawg]

Your right on Rivers

And it does appear Cowherd took his talking points from the mag. I just listened so I didn't know but being that its ESPN radio and Espn mag, I'm not surprised they share ideas

 

[patdog]

Wow. Who knew ESPN still had a magazine? Didn't read that article (too damn long and I really don't care), but I did see another similar article last week where Popovich was quoted as saying that he preferred foreign players because, as a general rule, they were more fundamentally sound and played harder than American players. Have to say I agree with him.