Many would argue that LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony are the league’s new Larry and Magic.  But who, if anyone, will follow in Michael Jordan’s footsteps?  Charles Rowe delves into basketball history and discovers that the answer to that question will be provided by not one, but many, and in a language not native to the 50 States.

1996 was a turning point in the history of NBA and USA basketball.  There was Michael Jordan’s re-coronation – in the Chicago Bulls’ record-breaking 72-win season and championship – as the league’s foremost ambassador and superstar.  There was the movie Space Jam, a live action/cartoon flick that reflected on the return of the NBA’s most revered player, and saw him quash an alien threat to his supremacy.  Then there were the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta, where Team USA won gold medals on home soil.

But there was, in the wake of these three pro-American affirmations, a hint that the US was starting to lose the courage of its basketball convictions.  The Dream Team won the gold, yet their victory came a sterling silver compared to that of their predecessors in Barcelona.  And although Jordan’s place in NBA lore would be secure, by the 1996 NBA Draft, the aliens he had been called to vanquish in Space Jam had become more than frivolous fiction – they were allegorical.

Seven of these ‘aliens’ were drafted in 1996, a marked increase on the earlier average of 3.6 per year (1993-1995).  That year’s NBA Draft also set a precedent, as prior to 1996 no international player had ever been selected higher than 24th overall.  (And since this pivotal year, the figures have crept up annually, the number of foreign draftees peaking at 21 in 2003.  Indeed, nine international players were picked in the first round last year, yet another record).  That crucial draft has also come to foreshadow the election of this season’s Most Valuable Player.  By no means a two-horse race, there are a fair few thoroughbreds in the running this year: Jermaine O’Neal (Indiana Pacers), Kevin Garnett (Minnesota Timberwolves) – even rookie sensation, LeBron James (Cleveland Cavaliers).  But none of these compare to dark horse, Peja Stojakovic of the ‘96 Draft class, today’s international torchbearer.

Clearly 1996 was a pivotal year.  If foreign hoops historians have not already recorded it as the throwing down of the gauntlet, the global riposte to the American claim to basketball superiority, in 2004, the gauntlet has well and truly landed.  As NBA announcer, Marv Albert would say: “it has come down to this”: a question of US versus Them.  (Well, if the international press were allowed to vote, the Serbio-Montenegran’s invitation to such a historically US affair could make for divisive polling).  For who could have foreseen that the ripple of international players that began in 1996 would become today such a talent-laden wave?  Indeed, will the 2004 MVP contest in time be remembered as the last opportunity for the Americans to save face before basketball, once the property of America, is lost forever to the world?

Before that question is definitively answered, let us confirm that a dethroning is in progress.   According to NBA.com, “as of March 15, 2004, NBA team rosters featured 67 international players from 33 countries and territories”.  The 2004 All-Star game reflected this, and the international community came well represented.  Featured were a Russian (Andrei Kirilenko) a Canadian (Jamaal Magloire), a German (Dirk Nowitzki), a Serbio-Montenegran (Peja Stojakovic) and a Chinaman (Yao Ming).

Notwithstanding their achievements, the questions persist:  how did this happen?  And is it possible that international success is due to American failure?  The comments of Ed Tapscott, scouting consultant for the Milwaukee Bucks prior to the 2001 Draft, certainly reveal one American shortcoming: “Our kids waste time developing a shot they’re only going to shoot 10 percent of the time – the dunk”.  In Europe, however, where athleticism is not innate, players must learn to rely on the jump shot as their primary weapon.  Milwaukee Bucks president, Ernie Grunfeld, has noticed a disparity between US and European teaching methods, too:  “The European players get better training at a younger age.  In the United States, we tend to put big people in the post when they’re young.  In Europe, they just want you to be a basketball player”.

So by draft age, Europeans are at a distinct advantage.  Most will have already been absorbed into their country’s club system by their mid-teens, where they play and attend school.  During this time, they are able to learn the tricks of the trade from established pro mentors before turning professional.

Americans, on the other hand, are bound by the term, ‘student-athlete’.  To ensure that college players have adequate time in the classroom, the NCAA limits them to 20 hours’ practice per week.  The compromise between the NCAA and the universities exposes a severe flaw in the college sports ethos:  of the impracticality of encouraging scholar and sportsman simultaneously.

The hybrid student athlete that high schools, the NCAA (and the NBA, through its ‘Read to Achieve’, and now defunct ‘Stay In School’ programs) try to groom is illusory.  To accomplish this would require a feat of genetic engineering.  Europeans, though, can choose to leave school behind a lot sooner than their American counterparts; and despite the drawback being a lost education, they are able to compensate for the scholarly deficit with a vocational focus on basketball.

This preparation stands them in good stead come Draft day.  Compared to their American counterparts, successful Euro-draftees are not only well educated in basketball, but also far more prepared for the rigors of travel, cultural differences, language barriers and celebrity, having already had abundant experience on their own side of the world.

Conversely, a world away in the US, American draftees tend to be immature and ill prepared for life as professional sportsmen, which is hardly surprising given that most players are underclassmen nowadays.  In 1999 Rockets star, Steve Francis, whined profusely about being drafted by Vancouver, demanding an immediate trade (and it was not as though the language was any different in Canada, was it “eh”?).  Similarly, Stephon Marbury’s attitude toward his first job in Minnesota would be regularly expressed in his crumpled up, frustrated face pining for his hometown, Coney Island.  One could also accuse the Americans of cultural ignorance; in light of this, it is not especially startling to learn (through Dan Shalin of Pioneer Press Online) that ten-year, Euro-basketball veteran, Josh Grant’s time in Europe “helped him gain a greater appreciation for World History”.

Clearly even before they reach the NBA Draft, Internationals and Americans are not competing on a level playing field, having trodden different paths to arrive at the same destination.  Yet still the visiting Euros have the advantage.  In fact, their success, which can be largely attributed to an early start in their hoops education, is now having an adverse effect on the drafting process.  The prospect must fill them all with Schadenfreude.  According to Dustin Dow of the Cincinnati Enquirer, the effect of “the influx of overseas players, who possess superior skills to many American college and high school stars, [has been to take] what was already an elusive dream of playing in the NBA and [make] it that much harder to attain for up-and-coming U.S. players.”

One casualty of this phenomenon is Byron Mouton.  As a starter, he helped lift the Maryland Terrapins to NCAA championship victory in March, 2002.  However, by the NBA Draft in June, he had been forgotten.  But rather than Mouton having been the victim of European opportunists capitalizing on a fashion for foreigners, he has in fact been the unwitting pawn in a system that is consistently failing its students.

By the age of 22, the college senior’s academic and biological clock is ringing alarm bells.  He has written his last essay, the height of his vertical leap has peaked (this was his main selling point, remember) and he begins scouring the stands for NBA scouts.  College basketball was the once honest route into the NBA, but with Internationals jumping the queue, these days that route is becoming ever more bottlenecked.  Alas, for the hoop dreamer, it’s the Draft or bust.  “If you don’t make it”, Mouton bleats, “You think:  ‘I’ve failed’”.  The follower of the NBA dream (‘mouton’ is after all, French for ‘sheep’), not the shepherd, continues:  “It’s almost a pride thing.  Everybody wants you to go to the NBA”.

And so they should.  But quite frankly, the argument that NBA players need a college degree is becoming ever more flimsy.  Many players leave without one and already, International players are demonstrating that on the court, academic qualifications are about as necessary as English fluency.  Mouton’s dashed hopes amount to more than bad luck on Draft Day.  They are the culmination of substandard American coaching, the bad influence of streetball culture, the farce of the ‘student-athlete’ and the NBA Draft system.  Result?  An egg-on-your-face paradox:  the very system that was to assure American dominance now refuses to give Americans a sporting chance.  A veritable “own goal”, as the British would say.

Thus, undrafted, under-talented college players like Byron Mouton are forced to migrate (in his case to Braunschweig, Germany).  They leave behind an American system in dire need of revision for a continent that promotes and upholds the notion of pure basketball – of teamwork, fundamentals and jump shots.  For players like Mouton, migration is a logical move, because although the NBA player’s job description has not changed, his requisite skills have.  Because of this, according to Steve Kyler of HoopsWorld.com, “it has been practice [recently] within NBA circles for teams to draft more and more ‘project’ players and stash them in Europe”.

Obviously the NBA has known for some time that the system under which it works currently can no longer be relied upon to produce pro-ready ballers.  That is why it harvests American talent in Europe’s fertile basketball soil, plucking players when they are ripe for the NBA.  It seems somewhat fitting then, that the international basketball community should have a hand in cultivating these players, given the NBA’s plan to expand into Europe by 2015.

Indeed, that Europe is gradually becoming the paradigm of NBA basketball seems an evolutionary certainty.  The Utah Jazz are already the embodiment of this evolution, if not at the same time, an icon for today’s international NBA.  On the one hand, they are a throwback to the archetypal ethos of teamwork, passing and defense.  On the other hand, they are a strikingly modern phenomenon: a successful fusion of international stars and homegrown talent, who despite language barriers, are together fluent in basketball.

How apt it is that the Jazz roster of All-Star, Andrei Kirilenko (Russia), Carlos Arroyo (Puerto Rico), Gordan Giricek (Croatia), Raul Lopez (Spain) and Aleksander Pavlovic (Serbia and Montenegro) should lead the NBA into a new era.  Even SLAM magazine is allowing itself to be seduced by the new Jazz’s international brand of basketball.  The Hip-Hop ballers’ bible, despite its well-known editorial bias toward new school street urchins, appears to have reconsidered its stance on old school gym rats.

It rapped recently:  “You could actually argue that the Jazz play the most entertaining style in the league […] Watching Utah in the half court is akin to seeing a James Naismith playbook come to life”.  Evidently, this is the kind of basketball that Dr. Naismith, the game’s inventor, would have envisaged.

Though the game remains decidedly American, today’s European contingent, with its versatile players, secure grasp of basketball fundamentals, team ethos and egalitarianism may well have saved American basketball from its own selfish ambition.  How apposite that the two teams riding the new wave of international cooperation, the Utah Jazz and Dallas Mavericks, should be so aptly named for the current zeitgeist.

With five internationals, ‘maverick’ is the word: a team whose name inspires, and is inspired by, determined non-conformism.  Then there is the Jazz, a team that owes its name to musical improvisation.  The Jazz are therefore the epitome of the NBA’s movement with the times, while Dallas’ successful hybrid game of American furious finishers and international juggernaut jump shooters, has come to exemplify the global NBA.  Together, they are the destiny of the league made manifest.

From three-peating Bulls to three-peating Lakers, in recent years continuity in the NBA has always been assured.  Yet change, the task of the underdog, has been consistently more difficult to achieve.  If NBA basketball is indeed the “global sport” David Stern claims it to be, and if he really intends to expand outside the United States, then the only thing lacking now is an ambassador for international basketball.

If one were able to drown out the American voices in the arenas of Utah or Dallas, the Commissioner would hear, beyond the incomprehensible murmur of foreign tongues, the spirit of James Naismith whispering his approval – and realize that in his ailing American league, there is a miracle cure for successful international marketing in the MVP candidacy.  A heavy dose of Europe, it seems, is just what the Doctor ordered.

By Charles Rowe, NBA Staff Writer for Basketball.com