NBA academies are a crucial step to grow basketball globally
By Kyle Neubeck
Increased access to player footage has changed the push-pull effect for professional and amateur scouts. Anyone with the wherewithal can watch extensive tape on prospects around the world, but that comes at a cost. With access to seeing so many players around the world, it’s a daunting task to make best use of your time. Talent still slips through the cracks in spite of our advances.
The NBA is hoping to help curb that with a new project. In a report yesterday by Adrian Wojnarowski and Jonathan Givony, The Vertical revealed the NBA will push to open basketball academies overseas sometime in the near future, with initial bases planned for Africa, China, India and Australia.
According to Givony, the league currently has no plans to use this as a marketing venture:
Important to note the NBA has "no marketing partners" in this venture. Strictly concerned with helping the game, developing proof of concept https://t.co/UGnfL4uQHq
— Jonathan Givony (@DraftExpress) September 21, 2016
No. NBA is the only one sponsoring this right now. No business element involved at this stage to cover costs. May come down the line though. https://t.co/shjx4a6Kh4
— Jonathan Givony (@DraftExpress) September 21, 2016
Commissioner Adam Silver continually harps on the idea of turning basketball (and the NBA) into a global sport, and this is proof the league is willing to continue exploring what it will take to make that a reality. Planning for and staffing these sort of projects is an enormous undertaking, and that doesn’t seem to concern the league (for now).
So what’s the purpose?
It’s fitting for this initiative to come down in the year Yao Ming got inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Yao is an icon in his country who helped draw more attention to the sport in his homeland, but he is an outlier. Spotting the 7-6 guy with deft touch is easy no matter where you play.
Academies build a road for talents below the exceptional tier. To date, both sides of the equation have been stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle. Because there are limited opportunities for average players in far-flung corners of the world to prove themselves to scouts, strong athletes stay within the culturally relevant sports of their region. In turn, with the talent pool diluted, the NBA, NCAA and others have decreased incentive to hound for overseas talent.
Committing to building and maintaining the academies alters that dynamic. In the spirit of programs like Basketball Without Borders — a camp with alumni such as Marc Gasol, Nikola Mirotic and Joel Embiid — the NBA is extending an olive branch to players around the world. There is a greater hope to be discovered, and thus greater hope for a career, or at least an education.
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The latter part is important, because the NCAA might be the chief beneficiary from this arrangement. Academies will focus on players ages 14-18, with the logical next step aimed toward American colleges. The NCAA’s one-and-done stars will still largely be American, but the decrease in talent could be mitigated over the long-term with an infusion of the best other countries have to offer.
Even if their best is several notches below American standards, it will force prospects from the States to prove that outright. For now, college coaches and their recruiting machines are limited in scope. Because such a large percentage of players are on home soil, it doesn’t make sense to do much due diligence on drawing overseas talent. The NBA appears to be solving that problem by serving as a sort of liaison between American schools and young basketball players.
If and when the talent level rises at the college level, the American prospects will improve from having to clear a higher bar of competition. A common complaint about one-and-done entrants is how raw they are when they enter the league, and while that concern won’t evaporate, stiffer tests from deeper opponents will force them to sink or swim.
The scope of this project alone is worth getting excited about. Almost 40 percent of the world’s population is concentrated in China and India, a number that rises to over half when continental Africa is thrown into the mix. Allocating resources to regions like Southeast Asia is a numbers play; scouts will end up finding a few talented kids even if it’s just a product of volume.
You don’t have to be an All-Star like Yao Ming to inspire hoopers. In June 2015, Satnam Singh Bhamra was selected in the second round of the NBA Draft, becoming the first Indian-born player to get drafted. Singh’s path to the States was aided by — you guessed it — an academy, with IMG and the Basketball Federation of India teaming up to build a bridge for Indian ballplayers.
Those are the type of stories the NBA will hope to duplicate in other countries, particularly in areas where basketball doesn’t reign supreme. It starts with finding just one impactful figure, and the process snowballs from there.
NBA basketball academies birth another goal for young players to aspire to. For raw talents in need of polishing, and kids who have their future in front of them, it helps turn a career in basketball into a more tangible idea.
If the timeline of America’s soccer academies are any indication, it’ll likely be some time before we see real results from this endeavor. Still, it’s hard not to get excited about the prospect of basketball’s talent pool expanding, as the dreams of young ballers merge with real life opportunity.