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Why Are the NBA's Best Players Getting Better Younger? YouTube (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: This is happening across the entire league. The best NBA players are getting better younger. They were born with advantages that weren't available to older players and had access to more information than anyone before them in the history of basketball [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. Justin Tatum, a high-school basketball coach, could tell his son to watch clips with three words: "YouTube this guy." Which sounds totally normal until you remember it wasn't possible until very recently.
NBA players who grew up watching Michael Jordan couldn't even watch clips of Michael Jordan. LeBron James didn't have YouTube. He's been in the league for longer than YouTube has been a company. But today's young players have spent their entire lives watching basketball on demand. The extraordinary amount of knowledge at their disposal is one of the reasons they're entering the league with polished skills and making their influence felt immediately. YouTube allowed Kristaps Porzingis to admire Kevin Durant all the way from Latvia, Joel Embiid to emulate Hakeem Olajuwon and Tatum to geek out about Bryant.
NBA players who grew up watching Michael Jordan couldn't even watch clips of Michael Jordan. LeBron James didn't have YouTube. He's been in the league for longer than YouTube has been a company. But today's young players have spent their entire lives watching basketball on demand. The extraordinary amount of knowledge at their disposal is one of the reasons they're entering the league with polished skills and making their influence felt immediately. YouTube allowed Kristaps Porzingis to admire Kevin Durant all the way from Latvia, Joel Embiid to emulate Hakeem Olajuwon and Tatum to geek out about Bryant.
This is happening across the entire league. The best NBA players are getting better younger.
That's actually happening in a lot of sports. I coach another sport (wrestling) where the average age of an Olympic champion has gotten 2-4 years younger in the last 10 years. A big part of that is access to opportunities train and compete and information that older people like myself simply didn't have access to.
My question would be WTF this article is doing on slashdot? This is definitely not news for nerds or stuff that matters. While I'm sure there are NBA fans reading slashdot, this is pretty far away from what this site is supposed to be about.
I bet the NBA will be happy to hear that.
john madden pro nba
I also grew up watching basketball on demand, but I never really got any better.
Signed,
Short White Guy
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Similarly, Magnus Carlsen attributes his greatness to having access to more games than his role models, at least in part, owing to the games all being online.
They used to sell VHS tapes (it was that long ago) with highlights, interviews, etc. Titles included NBA Superstars, NBA Jam Session, and a lot of player and team specific tapes. For a while, highlight clips cut to music and sold as Basketball Music Videos were also a thing. If you were in the basketball community those tapes were everywhere as were bootleg copies of games and episodes of NBA Inside Stuff. Players, parents, and coaches were watching and studying those things.
What makes today different is that players can watch on the court via mobile devices. It is now a lot easier to break out a video at the park than it was back in the day (cause your mom was not letting you take the TV and VCR out of the house).
It's not really Youtube so much as it is the competition has simply been getting better younger. In the case of basketball you have national AAU tournaments allowing kids to play in a competitive environment year-round. This can also be seen in baseball with the increase in national tournaments, both metal and wood bat. The competition level is also improving because kids are simply getting bigger faster. Whether through better diets, increased knowledge of exercise and strength training, or simple evolution, the size level of kids is just more than it was even a few decades ago. Take football: a couple decades ago 6ft 250lbs would be considered big for an NFL lineman. Now you have high school kids well over 6 ft and pushing 300lbs, and they're strong and quick.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Maybe Clinton had one good idea. Maybe.
This is now: Clickbait, clickbait, and more clickbait.
Slashdot as a thing is going the way of MTV: It's still there, but it's wildly different from what it was and it certainly isn't relevant any longer.
By the same token, Tom Brady is pushing past 40 and still making it to Super Bowls.
Performance enhancing drugs are a marvelous thing. Maybe he's clean but I doubt it.
Slashdot: Political rantings for cranky old men. Plus a story that mentions a website now and then.
Back in the early 90's, when I was trying to figure out the whole 'fitness' and 'weight loss' thing, before the Internet became an easily and cheaply accessible thing, access to good and recent information wasn't anywhere near as easy, so I got sent down the wrong roads by bad information or just a plain lack of information. I doubt I'm the only one who had that experience, either. Since the Internet however there is plenty of information available easily and quickly; sadly you have to have a 'let the buyer beware' attitude towards such information found on the Internet, but otherwise it's much easier to be healthier, fitter, and of course a better athlete because of ease of access to relevant information -- assuming you're driven enough to actually do it all and aren't just looking for a 'quick fix', and I say that because we've got an obesity problem in first-world countries and all sorts of health problems, but they're not because of lack of information, they're because of lack of desire to actually do anything about those problems if it requires thought or work, apparently.
As players get better why does the quality of the game get worse?
I stopped watching NBA in the 90s. Today, the game is simply:
While(GameTime > 0)
{
ChangePossession();
GetBall(hometeam_tallguy);
Pass(ball, hometeam_superstar);
RunToHoop(hometeam_superstar);
Dunk(hometeam_superstar);
GetBall(awayteam_tallguy);
Pass(ball, awayteam_superstar);
RunToHoop(awayteam_superstar);
Dunk(awayteam_superstar);
}
Seems to me the IQ of NBA fans is on a down slide. Maybe I can get some grant money to study this.
A lot of it is based on better training and club teams for younger players.
A coworker of mine has a 9 year old in a Premiere club league sponsored by a large company. Their soccer field area has about 15 fields and several buildings (it is professional level for adults, they have Dr.s on staff). And the team is very good, they play regular games and even tourneys with kids a year older (called "playing up", and they win 95%+ of the time).
They have been visited by Olympic representatives and other teams are trying to court her. She has a personal trainer and plays a soccer variant (futsal) in the winter (heavier ball, small hard court, focus on foot skills).
BlameBillCosby.com
Sorry about that.
BlameBillCosby.com
I watch FortNite replay videos on YouTube. I don't want to suck like this guy.
Shouldn't this phenomenon be happening across ALL human endeavors? Heck even the nerds should be getting better, sooner.
Wow, I have no idea who most of those people are. Could you give me a car analogy, please?
it doesn't get much nerdier than that. Thanks to the internet kids have information they didn't have before. A bad couch can be shown to be a bad coach by a skilled student and they can move on or learn on their own.
When I was a kid learning to code I hit a wall over something silly on my old C64. Years later I went back to it and had a good laugh that I couldn't understand it (It was just C64 basic data statements, it didn't make sense to my 11 year old brain that I could enter the statements at the end of the program and read the data at the front). If I'd had Stack overflow back then I'd have posted, taken a few lumps for being a dumb kid and got on with programming.
That's a huge technological change. We'd probably see it everywhere if we looked. And that's just talking about how it impacts people's success in life. The political ramifications to widespread access to information are crazy. I can find a list of every lie my President & Congress critter told since their term started. I can find evidence of climate change and how many people have died of Marijuana overdoes. There's a ton of things that, so long as I can think critically, I can confirm.
We're just at the tip of the iceberg that is the information age. The only thing that worries me is the powers that be are going to get tired of it disrupting their little fiefdoms and try to shut it all down. You're already seeing this with the end of Net Neutrality...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'll be looking around more often, now, for alternatives to Slashdot. Passing this article through filters or review to an actual successful post is unacceptable in a site historically dedicated to bringing readers news on scientific and technical events and ideas.
I've been reading Slashdot for years, enjoying so much of the reports and commentary for scientific, technical, and engineering news.
In the last year - ESPECIALLY in the last 6 months - I've observed a progressive deterioration of either filtering or vetting to this point now where we see a generic sports article passing through to successful posting... ... because it had YouTube in the title and content.
Unacceptable. I'm outta here.
Anonymously, anyway.
I could still watch from sidelines, also anonymously.
- Some Dude
Maybe some rebranding in Slashdot is going on. "Slashdot: News for athletes and other boring trivial stuff."
But, it's athletes ... on the internet!!! (YouTube)
These young folks are so "techie"! All we oldsters knew how to do was program our own games on our Vic20s ... but these kids know how to use YouTube!!! Skills!
You can see why age discrimination happens, I mean come on.
But why does the NBA suck harder today than ever
Also, when did "watching a lot of basketball" turn into being a better basketball player? I'm pretty sure things don't work that way. I must be confused. Maybe I should watch the Matrix some more...
If the NBA were subject to the same rules regarding diversity that the government imposes on most companies and organizations, they would have been fined out of existence by now.
Testosterone infused Pampers. We got 3 year olds here that can bench 100 lbs. That kid over there, Jimmy, can squat 250. He's not even four. He's crankin 12 seconds for a hundred meters. That kid is gonna rip assholes in the olympics by the time he's 10.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
This truly *IS* news for nerds, since it applies to our industry as well.
The access to knowledge kids have at their fingertips today allows ADD children and others, who formerly spent lots of time dragging their minds through boring make-work in the hopes of learning something they found truly interesting, or being lucky enough to have parents who could take them to the library/buy them books, to instead be able to find knowledge on *ANYTHING* they want to with the only prerequisite knowledge being what terms they need to search for and the time and patience to backtrack links across the references, unencumbered by digging out a dictionary and leafing through pages every five minutes for a definition of a new word, or hunting down an older book whose contents were cited as inspiration for a particular piece of the book they were currently educating themself/researching in.
I have noticed this just in my own personal education in the past 6-8 years or so. Wikipedia has finally gotten good enough on a broad enough range of subjects that combined with the material available on youtube, 'niche' sites like hackaday or khan academy, etc you can rapidly increase your knowledge and skills in anything you are passionate or talented in without wasting money, or time, and far less personal research to determine who is competent in a field to learn from. You can still of course be lead astray by competent sounding but totally incompetent charlatans of whatever knowledge base you are tapping, but unlike in the past, you can go find two dozen others to verify what you learned against to make sure there aren't any glaring omissions or obvious flaws in their knowledge or methodology.
This ties in both at the Science Fiction to Science Fact level of how this technology is shaping society, but also at the more personal level that tech workers who have the old ways, of learning from books and knowledge being a hard fought and hard won path through endless classes, many tedious, and many certification classes and exams, may in fact find they are being outstripped by 'upstarts' watching the same shit on youtube, maybe even at 1.3x-1.5x speed and saving themselves hours or days of equivalent education while being competitively knowledgeable at whatever tasks they are tested on or assigned to.
Whether sports or tech, the landscape is changing. And if you don't keep up, you will be outshone.
The rule changes have had a big effect on the modern NBA game. Hand checking is no longer allowed. Same for zone defenses. Travelling, at least for star players, is almost never called anymore. The fans want to see dunks, not plays halted by travelling calls.
The modern game is a lot more about isolation plays and 3 point shots.
Better shoes, better training and nutrition certainly help. With expansion, the talent is more watered down so the star players can exploit that.
If Wilt Chamberlain were playing today he would destroy these guys.