Is The Best Professional Basketball Played In The U.s.?

2007-06-29 Word Count: 443 Category: Games

A big area of concern surrounding U.S. professional basketball is the notable lack of recent success against international competition. In the quadrennial World Championship tournament, a United States team has failed to win the top prize since 1994, and in the Olympics since 2000.

In the 2006 WC competition held in Saitama, Japan, the team came in third place, winning a bronze medal. The 2004 Olympics in Athens produced the same result. The 2002 WC tournament held in Indianapolis, IN, was disastrous, as a team riven by internal dissension placed sixth, the worst showing in history by an American squad in an international tournament.

This situation has engendered lots of hand wringing and harsh criticism as fans and commentators have taken turns lambasting the "lazy" players for not destroying the foreign competition. Not surprisingly, there is no dearth of proposed "solutions" to "fix" the problem. The 2007 WC tournament to qualify for the 2008 Olympics is scheduled to be held in Las Vegas, NV, Aug. 22 through Sept. 2. We'll see what happens then.

There is a consistent theme here -- the world has caught up. The days are finished when a group of U.S. professional players could just show up and easily defeat international opponents. That era passed after the first Dream Team, led by Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan, won the gold medal in the 1992 Olympics by many accounts the greatest collection of talent on one team in any sport in history. Of late, the international teams, who feature a more pass-oriented, free-flowing version of hoops, smell weakness and are more than eager to heap more indignities on the heads of the American players.

All of this leads to a boatload of speculation as to whether the finest basketball is actually played in the NBA. Some sports analysts have indicated their partiality for the European-style game. Given the fact that American teams have been soundly beaten in international competition for most of a decade, it is impossible to dismiss this notion.

Something that many have noted is the fact that the team that wins the NBA championship is referred to as the "World Champion." How appropriate is that title? Shouldn't the championship team have to prove that it's the best at what it does in the world?

Why not hold a true World Championship series between the U.S. and Euroleague champions? The entertainment value, along with international interest in such a event would be tremendous, and the games themselves would serve to settle for once and for all which side of the Atlantic the best brand of hoops is played on.

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