Entry 3:

Chas,

If foreign players wind up serving the purposes of hoops reactionaries, it'll be a shame, but only an incidental one, methinks, because sports are so remorselessly results-oriented. Every general manager understands that it makes more sense to cull from 6 billion than 275 million. In the same way, moving and passing and shooting are such essential skills that any NBA player, regardless of provenance, had better have each down, even if he has the slickest crossover or most stylish dunk going.

Re your comment about basketball's "accelerated evolution," that's wholly true and something that has redounded particularly to the benefit of the NBA's foreign players. In this era of Dirk Nowitzki, Peja Stojakovic, Pau Gausol, et al., it's easy to forget that plenty of migrants before them flopped for every reason, from poor skills to poor attitude. (The roll of failure would include the ciggy-butt-sucking Montenegrin Zarko Paspalj and Bulgaria's Georgi Glouchkov, the very first import, who scared NBA scouts off Europeans for years.) Even today, most imports don't have a natural predilection for defense. But that's a cultural aversion, like eating Wonder bread must be for people who have always picked up a fresh loaf at the corner boulangerie. Take Drazen Petrovic. He couldn't—wouldn't?—play a lick of D when he arrived from Croatia. But he realized he had to and out of pride and pluck turned himself into a pretty good defender.

In the case of Yao Ming, the cultural hurdles will be even higher. Both Chinese sport and culture prize skill and presentation over strength and aggressiveness. (At the Olympics, China excels at table tennis, gymnastics, and diving—not weight lifting or boxing.) But Yao is shrewd enough to know this. He has filled out substantially in the three years since I first saw him as an 18-year-old, and he's studying the progress of his countryman, the Mavericks' Wang Zhi Zhi, as if Wang were a kind of experimental probe. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that, during that workout in Chicago a few weeks ago, Yao tipped the Toledos at 296 pounds. Even for someone 7 feet 5 inches, that's not done on a bean-sprouts diet. I'm not saying he'll ever develop into another Shaq, but he could become a very effective high-post offensive center, setting screens, knocking down threes, and drawing the Big Aristotle and his fellow low-post philosophes away from the basket. On D, he's a total skeptic when presented with a pump fake, the way Dikembe Mutombo is. And he'll make 85 percent of his free throws. The Big Aristotle is still pondering on how to do that.

As long as we're talking Marvin Barnes—and I'll happily talk News anytime—what say you to those Nike commercials featuring the Roswell Rayguns, an ersatz ABA club, circa 1975? I swear, that bountifully Afro-ed fella in a full-length mink who swans out of the locker room must be Marvin himself. If music videos had been around back then, imagine the stuff George Clinton and P-Funk could have done with Darnell Hillman highlight clips alone. Would have made that Dire Straits "Walk of Life" video seem pathetically derivative.

In hoop,
Alex