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Low Expectations

  • Thread starter Thread starter JGX2
  • Start date Start date
Malaysia under a Filipino coach is at least confident enough to take on India sans their NBA second-rounder Satnam Singh Bhamara, who chose to stay in the US to pursue his dream of playing in the world's biggest professional league.

But yeah, this is a really tall order, 2 Malaysian C's ~6-7 vs 4 Indian big men with 1 7ft C. Malaysia can only hope Coach Paul Advincula can bring out the Filipino brand of basketball to this team, otherwise they have a real chance of landing dead last.

Singapore, uh, well, they just have the worst luck of landing in a group together with the top 4 Asian teams according to FIBA rankings: China (1), Korea (3), and Jordan (4). I was thinking they could have a chance against a depleted and rushed-out Jordan, but with Coach Rajko Toroman at the helm, Jordan can pull off a lot of surprises in this group, but frankly, I won't be surprised if Singapore gets annihilated en route to a 13th-16th place exit.
 
Singapore team is the youngest (average age 23) and the shortest (average height 6'1). Inexperience would already be an disadvantage not to mention the height which looks more like the average height of a soccer team rather than a basketball team.
 
bballcrazy said:
Singapore team is the youngest (average age 23) and the shortest (average height 6'1). Inexperience would already be an disadvantage not to mention the height which looks more like the average height of a soccer team rather than a basketball team.
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Keep this team together and in a few years they should be a lot stronger.
 
Malaysia's biggest problem is probably segregation. If nobody has noticed, Malaysia has only ~20% ethnic Chinese in their country but their national team is 100% ethnic Chinese, almost ALWAYS. This isn't quite like America, where blacks dominate basketball, but many white Americans still play in the NBA. In Malaysia, you would be hard-pressed to find ANY Malay players in their domestic NBL. (The website, www.nbl.com.my is in Chinese). In fact, if I remember correctly, the only 2 players to ever represent Malaysia in Asia in the past decade or so without Chinese names, Guganeswaran Batumalai and Kuppusamy Satyaseelan, are both ethnic Tamils who attended Chinese schools which teach subjects in Mandarin Chinese rather than Malaysia's official language Malay (Guganeswaran later studied 6 years in China for college.) Might as well rename the team "Chinese Malaysia" instead, because if Malaysia pools its players from the entire population, they should never lose by 30+ points to Singapore.
 
sinobball said:
Malaysia's biggest problem is probably segregation. If nobody has noticed, Malaysia has only ~20% ethnic Chinese in their country but their national team is 100% ethnic Chinese, almost ALWAYS. This isn't quite like America, where blacks dominate basketball, but many white Americans still play in the NBA. In Malaysia, you would be hard-pressed to find ANY Malay players in their domestic NBL. (The website, www.nbl.com.my is in Chinese). In fact, if I remember correctly, the only 2 players to ever represent Malaysia in Asia in the past decade or so without Chinese names, Guganeswaran Batumalai and Kuppusamy Satyaseelan, are both ethnic Tamils who attended Chinese schools which teach subjects in Mandarin Chinese rather than Malaysia's official language Malay (Guganeswaran later studied 6 years in China for college.) Might as well rename the team "Chinese Malaysia" instead, because if Malaysia pools its players from the entire population, they should never lose by 30+ points to Singapore.
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that's right. it seems like even MY sports is segregated because on the other hand their football team is composed almost exclusively of Malays. Maybe it's because Malays don't really have the genes for height so they don't really have a lot of Malay basketball players. I think Izran Edika who once played for KL Dragons was a Malay though.
 
sinobball said:
Malaysia's biggest problem is probably segregation. If nobody has noticed, Malaysia has only ~20% ethnic Chinese in their country but their national team is 100% ethnic Chinese, almost ALWAYS. This isn't quite like America, where blacks dominate basketball, but many white Americans still play in the NBA. In Malaysia, you would be hard-pressed to find ANY Malay players in their domestic NBL. (The website, www.nbl.com.my is in Chinese). In fact, if I remember correctly, the only 2 players to ever represent Malaysia in Asia in the past decade or so without Chinese names, Guganeswaran Batumalai and Kuppusamy Satyaseelan, are both ethnic Tamils who attended Chinese schools which teach subjects in Mandarin Chinese rather than Malaysia's official language Malay (Guganeswaran later studied 6 years in China for college.) Might as well rename the team "Chinese Malaysia" instead, because if Malaysia pools its players from the entire population, they should never lose by 30+ points to Singapore.
Click to expand...

Excuse me, but what you wrote is simply a joke. Malays do not really like to play basketball, they prefer playing soccer thus the Malaysia team consists purely of Chinese ethnic players. Its like saying, if India pools all its population into playing basketball then it can beat USA since 1 billion plus is way more than 300 million. But their sport of choice is cricket, so its all hypothetical you see? We always deal with reality instead of "what ifs". What if Singapore had 100 million people? Can they beat Korea or Japan?
 
bballcrazy said:
Excuse me, but what you wrote is simply a joke. Malays do not really like to play basketball, they prefer playing soccer thus the Malaysia team consists purely of Chinese ethnic players. Its like saying, if India pools all its population into playing basketball then it can beat USA since 1 billion plus is way more than 300 million. But their sport of choice is cricket, so its all hypothetical you see? We always deal with reality instead of "what ifs". What if Singapore had 100 million people? Can they beat Korea or Japan?
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Singapore with the land area cannot possibly contain 100 million people. But India and Malaysia both have a lot of untapped potential in terms of basketball talents in their populations, this is not "what if" but reality. See how much India improved in recent years after minimal efforts in basketball efforts? Anyway, I've met with Malay students in America and the only sport I've seen them play was basketball (and I didn't meet them in a basketball court either). What you said is probably true but isn't it also the result of segregation? In any multi-cultural country you'd see some preference of sports among ethnic groups, e.g. in America blacks play more basketball, Chinese play more ping pong or badminton, whites play more soccer, golf, tennis, ice hockey or baseball, but it's not completely separated on racial lines. Having talked to Malaysian Chinese my impression is the country is really segregated by ethnicity, with different school systems which teach in different languages. All Chinese-Americans born and raised in America speak English as their first language, but all Malaysian Chinese speak some dialects of Chinese as their first, second (and sometimes third) languages when Chinese isn't a national language, you don't think this is a serious problem? Of course all countries like US or China or whatever have ethnic problems, and I haven't been to Malaysia so maybe everything I said is indeed a joke, please enlighten me if you live in the area.
 
Basketball does seem to be a Chinese sport in Malaysia, but I'm not sure how much untapped talent there really is--Malays aren't exactly known for their size or athletic prowess. IIRC the Indonesian basketball team also has historically had a disproportionate number of ethnic Chinese. On the flip side, you don't see many Chinese soccer players in that region, even in Singapore.
 
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