Donn Beach wrote: ↑Sat Jun 07, 2025 7:13 pm
Yeah, American style football and the NFL is popular in England, and Germany as I understand it. But how many NFL MVPs has England actually produced? I don't think you are grasping the significance of the relationship between Europe and the NBA. Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets, he has won the NBA MVP three times, Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks has won it twice, those two are currently the NBA's premier players. Then there are guys like Victor Wembanyama, the number one pick in the draft two seasons ago that is considered the future face of the NBA. This isn't about watching it on TV, this is about playing it, getting good at it, dominating basketball at its highest level, the NBA and actually changing its very nature.
Wasn't disagreeing with you. In fact you had persuaded me in your first post that its not necessarily the number of people watching games that matters. I actually said that.
But, by the same token there are not millions of NBA fans in France because Victor Wembanyama is playing for the Spurs. The same goes for Nikola Jokić and Giannis Antetokounmpo in their respective countries. Its the Olympic Games down the years that will have generated far more interest in the game than anything the NBA had done. Ginóbili (quoted in your article which I read in full) was part of the 2004 Argentina Gold Medal team that beat the US in 2004 - whilst it may not have been a dream US team - who cares? Argentina won the gold and basketball's popularity will grow dramatically on the back of it. Who are the other Olympic teams that have a decent record - Yugoslavia and its offspring ie Serbia, France, Spain and Lithuania. How interesting that of your 4 named players, 3 of them are from countries which have been to Olympic FInals?
As much as I might have underestimated the impact of having MVP players from Europe, you are just as similarly overestimating their impact. My AI search tells me, "According to a survey, basketball has a following of only 2% and is played by 2% of the population in Europe, compared to football [soccer], which has a following of 38% and is played by 10% of the population". Soccer therefore has a following 19 times the size of basketball. If that is correct, the following of basketball is really small. That would be a population of 700 million and 14 million followers, of which the large bulk will be in these Olympic contending countries.
Donn Beach wrote: ↑Sat Jun 07, 2025 7:13 pm
These players aren't dropping out of of the sky, they are being produced by the basketball systems in their respective countries. You will have a hard time convincing me there isn't a lot of interest in basketball in Europe when its producing some of the best players in the world, and influencing the very nature of how the game is played. I really do not think there is a comparison to the NFL or the MLS
Whilst you accuse me of having no grasp on NBA popularity, you certainly have less grasp on how sport is funded over here. Soccer looks after itself just as the NFL/NBA/NHL/MLB does. But almost everything else is often based on performance at the Olympic Games. We are not as wealthy as a continent to fund these sports to a significant level, so you have to cut your cloth accordingly. The basketball systems in these countries are focused on only one thing - to try and win that Olympic Medal.
If a country like the UK considers it has no chance of challenging they just pull the funding. Thus we put $2 million into basketball and $40 million on cycling during a 4-year period. We are never going to contend and any superstar players that this country have will remain undiscovered. Other big nations in Europe would ditch basketball funding if they felt their national team was never going to be challenging. There are soccer teams who also run basketball clubs across Europe that nurture the players but it’s not really heavily invested in. The total budget of most teams would be the size of one decent NBA star’s salary.
Paris was awarded the Olympics in 2017 giving them 7 years to ramp up funding, Wembanyama turned pro in 2019 I noticed. With the increase in funding, plus a few other factors of course a star would be uncovered, surely? And I'm not saying that he was discovered as a direct result of the awarding of the Olympics to Paris. But its a big co-incidence. Three of last years top 10 draft picks were from France, another co-incidence?
If you want to put Giannis Antetokounmpo's success down to a basketball system in Greece or Nikola Jokic to the Basketball Federation of Serbia, I'm sorry I don't see that either. Maybe some money went on their development and they thrived as they had a chance to win a medal - but not the overall system in those countries.
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