"In any given year there are more than 500,000 American boys playing on almost 20,000 high school basketball teams, and fewer than 2% of them will make it to March Madness. Only 60 young men get drafted by an NBA team each summer, and in the most recent draft a third of those spots went to international players. The numbers suggest the funnel from the Amateur Athletic Union into the NBA is one of the narrowest in all of sports."
"The numbers were initially about the love of the game. But ever since sports media personalities decided to embrace faux debates for ratings - at the expense of pure fandom - disingenuous hot takes have set programming agendas, and the numbers that used to tell us something about players are cynically used to win vacuous arguments. And after states began to legalize sports betting, athletes went from being the focus to being props for parlays."
In any given year more than 500,000 American boys play on almost 20,000 high school basketball teams, and fewer than 2% will make March Madness. Only 60 players are drafted to the NBA each summer, and a recent draft allotted a third of spots to international players, illustrating the extremely narrow AAU-to-NBA funnel. Historical analytics innovation, like Bill James's sabermetrics, and the first fantasy baseball league grew from love of the game. Media emphasis on provocative debates and the legalization of sports betting have repurposed statistics to serve bettors and ratings, turning athletes into props and reviving gambling-related scandals.
Read at Los Angeles Times
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]