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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   2256 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 1, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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The Serbia-USA game proved conclusively that the racial makeup of the NBA is mostly the result of racism. An all white team played the USA all star team to the fourth quarter, a USA team that didn't feature a single white player. There wasn't a single white American who was even particularly close! Yet even if we assume that Slavs are uniquely, among whites, good at basketball: the USA has vastly more Slavic citizens than Serbia. You have to play serious genetic gymnastics to come out with a logical genetic explanation for American slavs relative lack of talent compared to European slavs. We're missing out on a lot of talented players!

It’s not Slavs qua Slavs that overperform- it’s specifically south-west Slavs. I’m not sure there’s as many people from the former Yugoslavia in the US as you think.

Turkey once in a while ends up with pretty good male basketball teams and they are always almost entirely manned by people who (themselves or their families) emigrated sometime in the last ~150 years from western balkans.

Yugoslavia had a very good basketball tradition as well so maybe some of this is simply good sports education. But comparing the physical attributes of your average Anatolian to Bosniak immigrant, it’s not difficult to draw some conclusions.

We also see current NBA stars from Lithuania and Poland. There are more Polish americans than there are Serbians or Lithuanians. There's enough genetic timber that we ought to be developing it, and we clearly aren't.

Balts aren't Slavic.

The two groups that reliably produce an outsized portion of basketball players are balts (specifically Latvians and Lithuanians) and Dinaric Slavs, which both are among the tallest European subgroups, with the latter being literally the tallest group on earth.

You say we see current NBA stars from Poland, there is literally one player. There are more players from Montenegro (a country of some 600k) than Poland.

We see more current NBA stars from either than we see from the white portion of America. There are literally currently none, haven't been in years.

Is this when I note that the one "polish" player in the NBA was born in America, is half black and is not a star?

No this is the part where I admit I got Porzingis' nationality wrong.

Blacks in America are also willing to min/max for athletics. You're right, though, we don't hear slavic names in professional sports in the USA even compared to other whites, which points to a talent pipeline that doesn't cover parts of the population.

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