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(More customer reviews)Harvey Araton, long-time sports columnist for the New York Times, explores the history of "pure basketball's" decline in his latest book, CRASHING THE BORDERS. As someone who grew up watching and playing pure basketball in its American capital, Indiana, I could hardly agree more with Araton's basic contention: that basketball has lost its balletic soul, that the ultimate in spontaneous team games has become a game of power and force too often centered around individuals whose attention-seeking egos match their outsized Nike sneaker endorsements. Worse, too many players lack the fundamental skills that were formerly the hallmark of NBA play.
Araton traces the decline to the rise of Michael Jordan as a one-player product bigger than the NBA itself. Jordan became a role model for the next generation of "look at me" American players whose inarguable athleticism catapulted them into the spotlight before their psyches or their fundamental basketball skills had had time to mature and develop for a team game. In Araton's view, Jordan begat Vince Carter begat Kobe Bryant begat Alan Iverson begat Lebron James ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Yet half those begatted stars fell flat on their public relations faces, tarnishing the NBA and upping its hip-hop image while inciting racist sentiments in the stands that culminated in the Pacers/Pistons/fans rumble at The Palace of Auburn Hills (Detroit) on November 19, 2004.
At the same time, NBA Dream Teams had their proverbial hats handed to them in the 2002 World Championships and the 2004 Athens Olympics. Those defeats signaled deep problems in the quality of the NBA's underlying team game and accelerated the infusion into the NBA of foreign players with better basketball fundamentals than the 18-year-olds from urban America's playgrounds (hence the weakly-punned title, as in "crashing the boards"). Araton blames Nike and Adidas, the scouts and summer camps who hype 12-year-olds as the next incarnation of Michael, fawning college coaches, and David Stern for this marketing-over-substance approach. He argues that Jordan himself shoulders some of the blame for his unwillingness to act for any purpose other than his own financial self-interest.
While Araton's thesis seems largely on target, his book's execution is somewhat disappointing. It reads like an extended version of his newspaper column, full of personal stories and anecdotes but lacking in depth of analysis. We learn quite unnecessarily, for example, how the author chose family over work and missed taking an airplane flight that crashed. We visit Tbilisi, Soviet Georgia, to learn about two workmanlike but relatively undistinguished players from Soviet Georgia, Nikoloz Tskitishvili and Manuchar Markoishvili, but we never visit the inner city playgrounds of Chicago, Philadephia, L.A., or New York. We see far too much of David Stern and far too little of the great team players like Magic and Bird and Jason Kidd or the great coaches like Bob Knight, Coach K, Larry Brown, and Pete Carrill.
More important, Araton opines endlessly about the decline of the NBA game, using nothing but a few references to team scoring per game as his wholly inadequate gauge. What about shooting percentages, turnover to assist or assists to goals scored ratios, team scoring or shots taken distributions, or other player performance measures? A February 13, 2005 article by Michael Sokolove in the New York Times Sunday Magazine provided in just one statistic a better measure of the situation than Araton's entire 200-page run-on. In the 2004 Summer Olympics, the U.S. woman's team outshot their NBA men's team counterparts from the free throw line, 76% to 67%. What better evidence could there be of the decline in fundamentals than ability to hit an 15-foot shot - unguarded?
In point of fact, Sokolove's article, entitled, "Clang!" and sub-headed, "Pro basketball doesn't have a drug problem or a thug problem. It has a basketball problem," makes virtually the same case in four pages as Harvey Araton makes in 200 pages. And Sokolove at least has the courage of his convictions to argue for the elimination of both the slam dunk and the three-point shot (sadly, neither can happen as long as the NBA is more about marketing than it is about the sport). Read CRASHING THE BORDERS if you've missed the last ten years of the NBA or want to read Araton's version of "famous people I have touched." Otherwise, check out Sokolove's more insightful article from the Times archives, watch the games for yourselves, and stick with your daily sports pages. Araton's book is interesting, but it's simply too lacking in insight and analysis - and far too timid - to justify its $25 price tag.
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