Earth to Bill: basketball never had a crossroads

[From our new guest blogger, Stephen B. Snyde. Every Friday, we plan to have Stevie B. take us through the week that was in the hoop world. One blog post per thought. We'll still have our longer stories every now and then, but who wants to sit there and read 10,000 words from Bill Simmons to cap off the work week? Oh, what a coinkeydink. Stevie B.'s talking about Bill to lead off...]

ESPN.com's Bill Simmons was grossed out by O.J. Mayo's performance at the McDonald's All-America game the other night. He said that "basketball is headed for a crossroads", referencing the score-at-all-costs attitudes of today's star players, starting with Kobe Bryant's 50-point streak last week.

Hey Bill, I guess you missed that dossier called Sole Influence (Wetzel/Yaeger, Warner Books, 2000). Basketball isn't heading for a crossroads, it already had one almost 10 years ago, when adidas landed Kobe and Phil Knight vowed never again to let that happen to Nike. Only problem is, nobody had a choice of roads. Knight was so powerful, even he could not have imagined the dominoes that would later fall because of his decision. Three letters: A-A-U. It was like the Road Runner painting a fake alternate route for us Wile E. Coyotes.

Crossroads? Meep-meep!!

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Walt "Clyde" Frazier, my new hero

The SportsBusiness Journal (subscription needed) came out with a great interview with Walt "Clyde" Frazier today, with respect to his new book "Game Within The Game". He's pretty much on point with everything and the timing of this interview is impeccable given our blog entry on Saturday about the European vs. American system.

Here are some of the more profound excerpts and notes from which a lot of us can learn...

• First off, he was the first player to sign a sneaker deal (with Puma in 1971) -- much respect, let us "ballaz" and "sneakerheads" alike tip our hat and listen to what he has to say...

Read the rest of the story

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European vs American system

Sarunas Jasikevicius took an increasingly more common (better?) route to the NBA.

Among other blog entries and articles we've wanted to share with dreamleaguers, here's an interesting look at differences in the basketball "systems" between America and the rest of the world...

Three Basketball Powers (Russia, Serbia and Lithuania's relationship with basketball and how its most talented children get to the sport's biggest stage) by Michael Lee, Washington Post. Lee and fellow Post writers have some really good articles about the U.S. system as well, but you'll have to do a search on the Washington Post website to find them, as we can't quite recall all of them (blame it on the pet peeve apprehension to using browser bookmarks).

Can the U.S. sustain its present path?

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