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If the IOC restricted the opening ceremonies only to those basketball players who went to college in the United States, it still might take forever to march them all into London’s Olympic Stadium.
There are 12 basketball teams in the field. Each is permitted 12 players. That’s 144 guys. According to preliminary rosters and the lineups used by teams in the final qualifying tournament, at least 46 played at U.S. colleges, including 40 who spent extensive developmental time at Division I programs. Roughly a third of Olympic basketball players came out of American college basketball, including almost the entire Nigeria, Great Britain and, of course, U.S. squads, and more than half of Lithuania.
That’s astonishing, and yet the value of college basketball in developing the world’s best basketball players continues to be ignored or derided. The NBA rarely acknowledges the service the colleges provide in terms of advancing basketball talent, and some of its coaches and executives surreptitiously mock the colleges’ developmental acumen.
The colleges themselves probably are more at fault. Instead of trumpeting an Olympian statistic such as this, the powers-that-be at the college level prefer to continue the pretense that NCAA basketball players are students engaging in an extracurricular activity.
Indeed they are students, but they foremost are students of their game.
There are 12 basketball teams in the field. Each is permitted 12 players. That’s 144 guys. According to preliminary rosters and the lineups used by teams in the final qualifying tournament, at least 46 played at U.S. colleges, including 40 who spent extensive developmental time at Division I programs. Roughly a third of Olympic basketball players came out of American college basketball, including almost the entire Nigeria, Great Britain and, of course, U.S. squads, and more than half of Lithuania.
That’s astonishing, and yet the value of college basketball in developing the world’s best basketball players continues to be ignored or derided. The NBA rarely acknowledges the service the colleges provide in terms of advancing basketball talent, and some of its coaches and executives surreptitiously mock the colleges’ developmental acumen.
The colleges themselves probably are more at fault. Instead of trumpeting an Olympian statistic such as this, the powers-that-be at the college level prefer to continue the pretense that NCAA basketball players are students engaging in an extracurricular activity.
Indeed they are students, but they foremost are students of their game.
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