OFFICIAL Game thread: Sweet 16 game vs. Louisville

You're right, as revealed in my continued cogitations in my prior post.  I have no talent, and neither did Lew Alcindor.  After all, he wasn't any kind of playmaker, but just relied on his great height to hit all those little hooks!  We need to call all of the basketball talent evaluators together and get them to rethink their ratings!  "Physcial attributes" are out according to you and BB#1!  Let's go!  Lebron James?  Well lemme see, I've known 5'6" players who were more coordinated and better shooters, so they have more basketball talent than L.J., right?  Wow, I'm still having a tough time.  Are coordination and shooting physical attributes?  I'll have to ask some experts.  You've made this SO HARD!  All those Louisville players are just pretenders!  They have no "talent"!  They run faster, jump higher, they're stronger and quicker.  It's all just those damned physical attributes that we have to discount.

Wait!  Hold on!  Maybe it's all RELATIVE!  That is, maybe RELATIVE TO OTHER BIGS, Aquino and Mitrovic are "talented".  Is that possible, that we can make judgments relative to others in the sport?  Sorta have to, because if we're not using a little Einsteinian relativitiy here then not a single female in the history of the game would rank among the top 100,000 male players ever.  So let's ask ourselves:  Are our 2 new bigs talented relative to the other bigs in the game?  I guess it remains to be seen, doesn't it?  But based on video, I'd have to say yes.  Either that or that none of the other bigs in college basketball has any talent.

LOL... scary thing is, those rambling, nonsensical, contradictory posts are edited! 

This is silly. Height is a talent just as much as any skill needed to excel in basketball. You cannot discount height by saying that there are many that are tall who are poor basketball players just as you cannot discount speed by saying there are many fast people who are poor basketball players. Of course height can be developed to be used properly just as speed can be. Any talent needs to be developed.

Hopefully this illustrates the absurdity of the debate.

Of course we know 2222 is almost always wrong. I am really impressed how a person is wrong so often, but always recovers to think they are right. I guess ignorance really is bliss.

All this babble about height reminds me that in the official talk/GT/OregonLive etc the only freshmen they mention for next year is Brown and Jones. Has anyone seen anything about Mitrovic lately?

Yes, you can learn that being tall, while being a positive in basketball, is not advantageous in every sport. 

Thanks for the info rmancarl.

What the BB man fails to realize is that in the parlance of basketball, people don't distinguish physical attributes from talent.  All "talent" is a dependent on possession of the physical traits that enable it, so you can't separate them.  Bottom line is that the talent of a basketball player is measured according to their production.  Look at this excerpt from an article on Kalani Brown:

        Despite being one of the top talents in the country with an overflow of accolades, Brown often flies under the radar.

Now, is Kalani Brown really talented?  And what about this on Mercedes Russell:

        "Not only is she a unique talent who is 6’6″ and can handle the ball, her basketball IQ for a young person, who is still only 18 years old, is off the charts” Springfield High School head coach Bill Wagner said.

Now how talented really were either of these players?  Compared to a decent guard, their ball-handling and passing skills are nothing special.  They are both slow and prone to turnovers if they try to put the ball on the floor.  Their moves around the hoop would never be described as acrobatic the way smaller players' moves sometimes are.  Yet they are lauded as "talented" because of their production in their role as a big on a basketball team, as measured by the standards of a tall player.

My original statement, the one that inspired BB man on this tirade, was pretty darned innocent:  "We have the raw talent, at least, of a top-5 program."  If Kalani Brown and Mercedes Russell qualify as talented, then, based on their video, I judge our 2 to have talent.  If you shrunk them down to 6'0", they wouldn't qualify for a major WBB team, so it sure looks to me like "height" is what is key to their "talent".  If you want to get picky, then it is height that makes them talented because it enables them to play the position on the team where their height makes them really productive.  The distinction between "height is a talent" and "given an average skill set, their height allows players to be considered talented" is pretty nutty, but feel free.