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Another article on Europeans in the NBA:
Weekly Countdown: European influence expanding its NBA reach -- by Ian Thomsen, Sports Illustrated, June 6, 2009
5. Drazen Petrovic was a self-made star. Sunday will mark the 16th anniversary of the death of Petrovic, a 28-year-old Croatian coming off an All-NBA season when he was killed in a car accident in Germany.
"He was a basketball hermit. He didn't have a lot of social life other than basketball," said Kenny Grant, the American agent who helped Petrovic break ground by entering the NBA in 1989. "He believed he could make it in the NBA and he really wanted the opportunity to do it."
There were 75 "internationals" on NBA rosters this season, and many of them follow the example established by the 6-foot-5 Petrovic during the Cold War, when players from the Eastern bloc never dreamed of reaching the NBA. The political ins and outs of his departure from the former Yugoslavia are less relevant today than the story of how he became an NBA-ready talent in so distant and foreign a place. There was no secret to it other than hard work.
"He lived across the street from the gym, and even when his team practiced two times a day, he was in there before everyone else taking his 500 shots," Grant said. "Basketball was all he did. He had phenomenal scoring records back then, even though he was facing constant double teams and box-and-ones, and I remember when he was going to the NBA, he said, 'I'll be so happy to never see a box-and-one again.' "
In 1988, Petrovic moved from the Yugoslavian club Cibona Zagreb to Spain, where he played one season with Real Madrid. He joined the Trail Blazers a year later, and while he was frustrated by his limited role off the bench, he used his one-and-a-half seasons with Portland to lift weights and develop his body to deal with the physical NBA defenses. After being traded in 1991 to the Nets -- who had a need for backcourt scoring -- he became a revelation. Petrovic averaged 20.6 points in his first full season for New Jersey, followed by a 22.3-point performance in the season of his death.
"He was a great shooter, but he wasn't a natural shooter," Grant said. "He was a 'made' shooter because he shot so many times. He wasn't the kind of guy you watched and said, 'What a fluid stroke.' You didn't think it was going in because of the way he looked; it was going in because you knew he played a lot. He was a very tough, very competitive guy who worked for it."
4. A European will influence the championship. Four imports are playing a variety of important roles in the Finals. Lakers power forward Pau Gasol of Spain is the No. 2 star to Kobe Bryant. Hedo Turkoglu of Turkey is the starting small forward for the Magic as well as a part-time point guard, especially in fourth quarters when the games are in doubt. His teammate Mickael Pietrus of France is a three-point-shooting sixth man who defended LeBron James in the East finals and is guarding Bryant in the Finals. Sasha Vujacic of Slovenia is a shooter off the bench for the Lakers who fancies himself a defender as well.
"When you watch them in international events and you see them play against our best players -- and obviously we won [the Olympics last summer] pretty handily -- what you notice about our team is our athleticism is on a very high level," Orlando coach Stan Van Gundy said. "But [the Europeans] are able to compete because of their skills."
And so Van Gundy launches into a constructive rant -- a tremendous, thoughtful sermon, a spot-on tirade, delivered without so much as raising his voice -- on the advantages of developing players overseas rather than in the United States ...
3. Europeans know what they're doing. "If you look around the league, it becomes pretty evident that the Europeans are quite a bit ahead of us in terms of skill development for players, especially [if you look] at the bigger players -- Dirk Nowitzki, Hedo Turkoglu, Peja Stojakovic," said Van Gundy, listing a trio of European shooters all 6-10 or taller. "We tend to take our big guys and stick them all around the basket. From a very young age, our coaches say, 'Get it to a guard' -- they get upset if our [big] guys even try to dribble the ball.
"The way we develop our players from a young age is just inferior to what they do there. They spend a lot more time on skill development. We want all our young kids here to play as many games as possible, to play in AAU tournaments from the time they're 8. You'll run into people who will tell you their son's team won the 8-and-under state AAU tournament -- like, who cares? But we're really into that for our kids, we want our kids to get recognition for being the best at a young age.
"In Europe, I think it's so much different. Their club teams practice a couple of times a day. One of those practices, I think, is just skills development. And then I think the other thing that helps them is, from a young age, when they're good, they move up."
By this, Van Gundy means that phenoms like Ricky Rubio grow up from their mid-teens playing against grown men in the European professional leagues. Instead of dominating their age groups at the AAU or high school level as American players do, the best European teenagers are striving to play to a much higher level among professionals.
"So they're always having to work and get better," Van Gundy said. "What we want to do is take our young [American] kids and put them on the covers of magazines and tell them how great they are and fill them up with adulation, instead of them having to work and get better.
"Think about what goes on in our youth sports. We cheat. We want to say the guy who is 13 is only 12, so he can play down [at an easier age level], whether it's Danny Almonte or whatever, so we can glorify them and win our championship. Instead of that, why not play the guy up with 16-year-olds if he's that good and let him learn that I can't throw the fastball down the middle, I can't overpower this kid? But that's not us. Our system is to do just the opposite. And why is a kid going to take two hours a day in a gym by himself, when he can go play in an AAU tournament and have somebody hand him a trophy and say he's the ninth-ranked sixth-grader in America and stuff like that? It's ridiculous, our system. Who cares who the top 10 sixth-graders in America are? Why would that even matter to anyone? It's certainly not going to aid their skill development as time goes on.
"The whole thing in our basketball is that the system is not conducive to developing players. You get a guy like Hedo growing up over there, and for them, what they're thinking of is the end in mind. They're thinking of the national team down the road and how do we make this guy better. But we're not thinking that way here."
2. No limitations. The NCAA limits practice time to 20 hours per week, and it is a well-intentioned rule meant to create time for athletes to pursue academic studies. But in the narrow sense of developing basketball talent, it creates an advantage for Europeans.
"That was one of the major things I noticed," said former Lakers shooting guard Coby Karl, the son of Nuggets coach George Karl, and a teammate of Rubio's at DKV Joventut Badalona this season. "I've talked to one of my dad's assistant coaches who loves working guys out, and a conversation we've always had is European players are always getting [relatively] better because of the NCAA system of not allowing you to work out."
Last month, when I was in Barcelona to report a recent feature on Rubio, the 18-year-old Spanish point guard who is likely to be the No. 2 pick in the NBA draft, I was led through the arena of Rubio's club by his father, Esteve Rubio. On one of many practice courts adjacent to the main arena, 10-year-old kids were weaving through a series of drills teaching them to dribble with either hand. A sophisticated young group they were: Half of them were wearing the NBA jerseys of Spaniards Rudy Fernandez and Pau Gasol, as well as Dwyane Wade, Allen Iverson and other stars.
"Over here, my team has probably eight to 15 [junior] teams underneath it, so you have kids running around here at the age of 6 who are working on skills that you don't teach in America until you get to middle school," Karl said. "So that's where you begin to understand why Ricky is as good as he is and why some of these younger guys on my team in Europe are as good as they are. It's because they learn these skills from when they could start walking and dribbling a ball, and that's a distinct advantage the European player has. They can work on their game from the age of 6 with a coach who knows what he's talking about in a proven way.
"I've seen some of the ball-handling drills they do and some of the pick-and-roll situations they go over with the middle-school kids. They do the slow European one-two change of direction like Sarunas Marciulionis used to do, or like Manu Ginobili or Ricky."
He is referring to the "Euro step" -- the move in which Ginobili sidesteps a defender by making a 90-degree detour before resuming his momentum toward the basket.
"They're teaching this to young kids here," Karl went on. "Some of the younger guys have been practicing with us from the [junior] team, so these guys are developing into players as the season goes along. They might be playing games [at their own age level], but they're also here in practice with us playing against top professionals, as well as practicing with their younger team in the same day. And they might have an individual workout on top of that. I mean, you could have a kid who's 18 years old having an individual workout at 10 a.m., going to practice with his team at 2 p.m., and then coming to practice with Joventut at 6 p.m.. It doesn't give much time for anything else, but you can definitely develop as a basketball player."
Karl had a frustrating season in Spain after joining the team in midseason, failing to establish a major role in the rotation. It's a common rookie experience for Americans in Europe, but instead of being discouraged he sees the merit in their system.
"The way they drill situations is far superior to any coaching system in middle school and high school that we have in America," he said.
Now he understands how Rubio has mastered so many tricks with the ball at such a young age: Rubio's creative talents have been fed and nurtured.
"A lot of that stuff has been taught," Karl said. "So it's not just him being a creative mind -- they teach the Steve Nash scoop layup, they teach the slow one-two. They teach a lot of these things from a young age, and those are things I want to improve on this summer, the use of pivots or the use of your two steps after you pick up the ball. Those are things I want to work on and use because they're very crafty things, and I think I already have a lot of that in my game but I want to have more."
In short, these are skills that aren't usually taught to American players.
"But they don't have a choice," Karl said. "When you only have three hours a day to practice, you have to make everything team-oriented -- to work on your team defenses and those aspects of the game. But over here you have multiple hours in the day to work on individual and team."
1. Humility. Apart from the European club system that signs the best players in their mid-teens and works them through the daily factory of drills that further their skills, the Europeans have a psychological edge in viewing themselves as underdogs. To me, they draw strength from an inferiority complex: They look across the ocean to majestic athletes such as Kobe Bryant and Dwight Howard, and the Europeans fear they will never be able to match up. And so they work ever more.
The same anxiety helps to drive coaches in Europe. Maybe they lack the background of U.S. coaches who have been raised in the American culture of basketball. So the coaches in Europe study the technical aspects of the game and learn the finer points through clinics and textbooks and videos. To many of them, basketball becomes an academic, technical exercise, something to be learned step-by-step.
"You see an occasional LeBron James, but for the most part who are the great, highly skilled American 6-9 and 6-10 guys?" Van Gundy said. "I wish we would get to their system, because we still have the best athletes -- we've got people that have the potential to do all of those things.
"I look at a Dirk Nowitzki, and I find it hard to believe that we'll ever have guys of that size with those kinds of skills here. Because we don't take the time to develop them. We'll never have those guys."
No sooner has he said that than Van Gundy is backing away from that statement, because, of course, there are highly skilled U.S. players. Kevin Garnett and Chris Bosh are two homegrown big men who can do a number of things with the ball.
"That doesn't mean we don't have highly skilled athletes, because we do," Van Gundy acknowledged. "But I think those guys have to somehow do it on their own. There's certainly not a system that's set up for us here to develop skills. It doesn't mean there aren't certain guys who just go in the gym and make themselves highly skilled guys, but we don't have a system to develop skills here."
5. Drazen Petrovic was a self-made star. Sunday will mark the 16th anniversary of the death of Petrovic, a 28-year-old Croatian coming off an All-NBA season when he was killed in a car accident in Germany.
"He was a basketball hermit. He didn't have a lot of social life other than basketball," said Kenny Grant, the American agent who helped Petrovic break ground by entering the NBA in 1989. "He believed he could make it in the NBA and he really wanted the opportunity to do it."
There were 75 "internationals" on NBA rosters this season, and many of them follow the example established by the 6-foot-5 Petrovic during the Cold War, when players from the Eastern bloc never dreamed of reaching the NBA. The political ins and outs of his departure from the former Yugoslavia are less relevant today than the story of how he became an NBA-ready talent in so distant and foreign a place. There was no secret to it other than hard work.
"He lived across the street from the gym, and even when his team practiced two times a day, he was in there before everyone else taking his 500 shots," Grant said. "Basketball was all he did. He had phenomenal scoring records back then, even though he was facing constant double teams and box-and-ones, and I remember when he was going to the NBA, he said, 'I'll be so happy to never see a box-and-one again.' "
In 1988, Petrovic moved from the Yugoslavian club Cibona Zagreb to Spain, where he played one season with Real Madrid. He joined the Trail Blazers a year later, and while he was frustrated by his limited role off the bench, he used his one-and-a-half seasons with Portland to lift weights and develop his body to deal with the physical NBA defenses. After being traded in 1991 to the Nets -- who had a need for backcourt scoring -- he became a revelation. Petrovic averaged 20.6 points in his first full season for New Jersey, followed by a 22.3-point performance in the season of his death.
"He was a great shooter, but he wasn't a natural shooter," Grant said. "He was a 'made' shooter because he shot so many times. He wasn't the kind of guy you watched and said, 'What a fluid stroke.' You didn't think it was going in because of the way he looked; it was going in because you knew he played a lot. He was a very tough, very competitive guy who worked for it."
4. A European will influence the championship. Four imports are playing a variety of important roles in the Finals. Lakers power forward Pau Gasol of Spain is the No. 2 star to Kobe Bryant. Hedo Turkoglu of Turkey is the starting small forward for the Magic as well as a part-time point guard, especially in fourth quarters when the games are in doubt. His teammate Mickael Pietrus of France is a three-point-shooting sixth man who defended LeBron James in the East finals and is guarding Bryant in the Finals. Sasha Vujacic of Slovenia is a shooter off the bench for the Lakers who fancies himself a defender as well.
"When you watch them in international events and you see them play against our best players -- and obviously we won [the Olympics last summer] pretty handily -- what you notice about our team is our athleticism is on a very high level," Orlando coach Stan Van Gundy said. "But [the Europeans] are able to compete because of their skills."
And so Van Gundy launches into a constructive rant -- a tremendous, thoughtful sermon, a spot-on tirade, delivered without so much as raising his voice -- on the advantages of developing players overseas rather than in the United States ...
3. Europeans know what they're doing. "If you look around the league, it becomes pretty evident that the Europeans are quite a bit ahead of us in terms of skill development for players, especially [if you look] at the bigger players -- Dirk Nowitzki, Hedo Turkoglu, Peja Stojakovic," said Van Gundy, listing a trio of European shooters all 6-10 or taller. "We tend to take our big guys and stick them all around the basket. From a very young age, our coaches say, 'Get it to a guard' -- they get upset if our [big] guys even try to dribble the ball.
"The way we develop our players from a young age is just inferior to what they do there. They spend a lot more time on skill development. We want all our young kids here to play as many games as possible, to play in AAU tournaments from the time they're 8. You'll run into people who will tell you their son's team won the 8-and-under state AAU tournament -- like, who cares? But we're really into that for our kids, we want our kids to get recognition for being the best at a young age.
"In Europe, I think it's so much different. Their club teams practice a couple of times a day. One of those practices, I think, is just skills development. And then I think the other thing that helps them is, from a young age, when they're good, they move up."
By this, Van Gundy means that phenoms like Ricky Rubio grow up from their mid-teens playing against grown men in the European professional leagues. Instead of dominating their age groups at the AAU or high school level as American players do, the best European teenagers are striving to play to a much higher level among professionals.
"So they're always having to work and get better," Van Gundy said. "What we want to do is take our young [American] kids and put them on the covers of magazines and tell them how great they are and fill them up with adulation, instead of them having to work and get better.
"Think about what goes on in our youth sports. We cheat. We want to say the guy who is 13 is only 12, so he can play down [at an easier age level], whether it's Danny Almonte or whatever, so we can glorify them and win our championship. Instead of that, why not play the guy up with 16-year-olds if he's that good and let him learn that I can't throw the fastball down the middle, I can't overpower this kid? But that's not us. Our system is to do just the opposite. And why is a kid going to take two hours a day in a gym by himself, when he can go play in an AAU tournament and have somebody hand him a trophy and say he's the ninth-ranked sixth-grader in America and stuff like that? It's ridiculous, our system. Who cares who the top 10 sixth-graders in America are? Why would that even matter to anyone? It's certainly not going to aid their skill development as time goes on.
"The whole thing in our basketball is that the system is not conducive to developing players. You get a guy like Hedo growing up over there, and for them, what they're thinking of is the end in mind. They're thinking of the national team down the road and how do we make this guy better. But we're not thinking that way here."
2. No limitations. The NCAA limits practice time to 20 hours per week, and it is a well-intentioned rule meant to create time for athletes to pursue academic studies. But in the narrow sense of developing basketball talent, it creates an advantage for Europeans.
"That was one of the major things I noticed," said former Lakers shooting guard Coby Karl, the son of Nuggets coach George Karl, and a teammate of Rubio's at DKV Joventut Badalona this season. "I've talked to one of my dad's assistant coaches who loves working guys out, and a conversation we've always had is European players are always getting [relatively] better because of the NCAA system of not allowing you to work out."
Last month, when I was in Barcelona to report a recent feature on Rubio, the 18-year-old Spanish point guard who is likely to be the No. 2 pick in the NBA draft, I was led through the arena of Rubio's club by his father, Esteve Rubio. On one of many practice courts adjacent to the main arena, 10-year-old kids were weaving through a series of drills teaching them to dribble with either hand. A sophisticated young group they were: Half of them were wearing the NBA jerseys of Spaniards Rudy Fernandez and Pau Gasol, as well as Dwyane Wade, Allen Iverson and other stars.
"Over here, my team has probably eight to 15 [junior] teams underneath it, so you have kids running around here at the age of 6 who are working on skills that you don't teach in America until you get to middle school," Karl said. "So that's where you begin to understand why Ricky is as good as he is and why some of these younger guys on my team in Europe are as good as they are. It's because they learn these skills from when they could start walking and dribbling a ball, and that's a distinct advantage the European player has. They can work on their game from the age of 6 with a coach who knows what he's talking about in a proven way.
"I've seen some of the ball-handling drills they do and some of the pick-and-roll situations they go over with the middle-school kids. They do the slow European one-two change of direction like Sarunas Marciulionis used to do, or like Manu Ginobili or Ricky."
He is referring to the "Euro step" -- the move in which Ginobili sidesteps a defender by making a 90-degree detour before resuming his momentum toward the basket.
"They're teaching this to young kids here," Karl went on. "Some of the younger guys have been practicing with us from the [junior] team, so these guys are developing into players as the season goes along. They might be playing games [at their own age level], but they're also here in practice with us playing against top professionals, as well as practicing with their younger team in the same day. And they might have an individual workout on top of that. I mean, you could have a kid who's 18 years old having an individual workout at 10 a.m., going to practice with his team at 2 p.m., and then coming to practice with Joventut at 6 p.m.. It doesn't give much time for anything else, but you can definitely develop as a basketball player."
Karl had a frustrating season in Spain after joining the team in midseason, failing to establish a major role in the rotation. It's a common rookie experience for Americans in Europe, but instead of being discouraged he sees the merit in their system.
"The way they drill situations is far superior to any coaching system in middle school and high school that we have in America," he said.
Now he understands how Rubio has mastered so many tricks with the ball at such a young age: Rubio's creative talents have been fed and nurtured.
"A lot of that stuff has been taught," Karl said. "So it's not just him being a creative mind -- they teach the Steve Nash scoop layup, they teach the slow one-two. They teach a lot of these things from a young age, and those are things I want to improve on this summer, the use of pivots or the use of your two steps after you pick up the ball. Those are things I want to work on and use because they're very crafty things, and I think I already have a lot of that in my game but I want to have more."
In short, these are skills that aren't usually taught to American players.
"But they don't have a choice," Karl said. "When you only have three hours a day to practice, you have to make everything team-oriented -- to work on your team defenses and those aspects of the game. But over here you have multiple hours in the day to work on individual and team."
1. Humility. Apart from the European club system that signs the best players in their mid-teens and works them through the daily factory of drills that further their skills, the Europeans have a psychological edge in viewing themselves as underdogs. To me, they draw strength from an inferiority complex: They look across the ocean to majestic athletes such as Kobe Bryant and Dwight Howard, and the Europeans fear they will never be able to match up. And so they work ever more.
The same anxiety helps to drive coaches in Europe. Maybe they lack the background of U.S. coaches who have been raised in the American culture of basketball. So the coaches in Europe study the technical aspects of the game and learn the finer points through clinics and textbooks and videos. To many of them, basketball becomes an academic, technical exercise, something to be learned step-by-step.
"You see an occasional LeBron James, but for the most part who are the great, highly skilled American 6-9 and 6-10 guys?" Van Gundy said. "I wish we would get to their system, because we still have the best athletes -- we've got people that have the potential to do all of those things.
"I look at a Dirk Nowitzki, and I find it hard to believe that we'll ever have guys of that size with those kinds of skills here. Because we don't take the time to develop them. We'll never have those guys."
No sooner has he said that than Van Gundy is backing away from that statement, because, of course, there are highly skilled U.S. players. Kevin Garnett and Chris Bosh are two homegrown big men who can do a number of things with the ball.
"That doesn't mean we don't have highly skilled athletes, because we do," Van Gundy acknowledged. "But I think those guys have to somehow do it on their own. There's certainly not a system that's set up for us here to develop skills. It doesn't mean there aren't certain guys who just go in the gym and make themselves highly skilled guys, but we don't have a system to develop skills here."
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