If you sniff hard enough, you can smell it. The 2008 NBA Draft is just over 24 hours away, which means two things: 1) The Celtics can no longer bask in the glory of their recent championship because 2) The ’08-’09 season inauguration is already upon us. No, I’m not going to discuss who the Bulls should select at No. 1 (cough, Derrick Rose, cough, cough); that’s already been beaten like a dead horse.
I’m not even going to ponder teams’ needs as Chicago’s clock continues to tick because quite frankly, Chad Ford, Bill Simmons, Jay Bilas, Andy Katz and Co. can simply do it better than I can.
Instead, I’d like to mull over a recent trend in the new-age NBA: The emergence of international players.
It’s no secret; in today’s world, sports are not only a mean of entertainment; each franchise has become a multimillion dollar business. That said, in some cases, owners and general managers alike have more than just winning on their minds.
In Boston, Red Sox owners John Henry and Tom Werner have made it quite clear that winning championships is atop their annual agenda, as they have accomplished that goal twice in the last four years. Meanwhile, across town, Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs is notorious for pocketing extra cash in lieu of spending it on free agents that could subsequently help his team make a postseason run down the stretch.
The contrast of these two ideals poses an interesting question relative to Thursday’s draft: Do teams always select foreign players strictly to help themselves win games, or does revenue alone have anything to do with it?
Let’s see.
The Houston Rockets make a percentage of every Yao Ming jersey sold in China, which in turn, obviously boosts team revenue and everyone upstairs gets paid. The same can be said about Seattle’s Ichiro Suzuki in Japan or Dallas’s Dirk Nowitzki in Germany.
See, even if Yi Jianlian is a complete bust in Milwaukee (which isn’t the case, yet), the Chinese fan base will still care (see nba.com/bucks/china if you don’t believe me) and theoretically buy Bucks merchandise. So, even though there is a soft salary cap in the NBA, the money has to go somewhere, right? In this case, it would go to Bucks owner and U.S. Senator Herb Kohl, which then begs the question: Was Milwaukee’s Yi selection a year ago a good investment, even if he never helps the Bucks make a championship run?
Where I come from, the answer is no, absolutely not. In Beantown, winning is everything. But what I’ve realized as I grow older and wiser is that that is not the unanimous case around the country. No one cares as much as Bostonians or New Yorkers. Yeah, winning would be nice, but to your average sports fan, it just doesn’t matter that much. And when that is the case, owners don’t feel added pressure to win and can thus worry about things other than winning,
like exactly how much loose change goes into their respective pockets.
Aside from Yao – and even he hasn’t accomplished that much since arriving in the states in 2002 – and Dirk – who perennially seems to choke in the postseason – international players have not had that much success in the NBA. That said, players like Italy’s Danilo Gallinari, France’s Alexis Ajinca, and Congo’s Serge Ibaka remain projected first rounders for Thursday's draft.
Will they succeed in the NBA? I have no idea. But maybe success in this case isn’t measured solely on W’s.
1 comment:
Your forgetting about Manu ginobli and tony parker? Ginobli not only has won in the Nba but has won on the international stage as well. Arent you forgetting other sucess stories like Hakeem Olajuwon and Dikembe Mutombo. These players are winners there are a lot more sucess stories that you failed to mention.
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