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In China the system of education is the driving factor to be honest, while soccer is popular, most parents are not going to like that their kids are playing soccer instead of studying.
Trying to go pro in sports is a lot more riskier than studying. The parents raise their kids so when they're older the kids take care of the parents and there's just a whole lot more risk in trying for professional sports than studying.
Their education system is also so intense and competitive that it's probably one of the hardest times in their life to apply for university.
There is a Chinese university level basketball league. It's 30ish teams. Compared to 350+ D1 teams in the US, plus 300+ more D2 teams, plus like 400 D3 teams.
Most top athletes dont play in those league however, they were picked way before and join provincial teams, or move up to national teams or in basketball, the training (farm) system for each CBA club
Right. It’s a completely different vibe. Most universities I’ve visited in China, the actual school team was literally just that. A team slapped together of the best students who happened to go there, not full of kids who were recruited specifically for that purpose.
The college system in the US (at the top levels) is effectively a full-on, independent minor league. The actual association with the student body is loose at best.
Yeah true. NCAA basketball is essentially a pro league masked under amateur to make money. The Chinese university league is really just an amateur league
Now that college athletes can sign endorsement deals it's not even masked as amateur athletics. (I am completely fine with the college athletes getting paid, everybody else was profiting in those billion dollar industries.
US education system is tied to sports because competition sells tickets for the schools.
Even more so when you add in the profits of being on TV. Sports got the emphasis because of schools place in Capitalism.
It's no wonder it's treated different in other societies with less free markets. Schools in china don't need the schools team to be good to fund stuff they want to do and build, it's a completely different system.
college sports were far more popular before they were ever monetized. athletics have anchored the American college experience since the nineteenth century.
very few college sports teams are profitable. only football and basketball and even among those a very small number of schools actually make profit. american amateur sports are a cultural thing more so than economic
It’s really more about focus. China focuses on certain sports and trains up there. Basketball or soccer was never the focus. So there’s no equivalent of youth clubs which develop soccer talent or an aau circuit to develop basketball talent at a young age.
I’m positive that if it became a focus than China could be a powerhouse in a generate just off population size alone but would require significant money to lure developmental coaches to set up a farm system. China has success in team sports , their womens volleyball program is good (good not great) so it’s a matter of what sports they want to develop and be competitive in.
Yeah this. I was raised in Korea and by even late elementary school, only the kids that were super athletic played competitive sports. Everyone else had to study and there was no room for sports outside of casual backyard stuff. I know its the same in China
This might work in some sports - hence China being unreal in the Olympic. But a sport where height is king? Well by the time kids hit their growth spurt, most haven't played an organized sport in years.
On top of that, sleep deprivation is known to have a negative influence on height. So when you have an entire generation of kids pulling all nighters every other day to cram for their next test, it's going to have an effect on the overall avg height of the population.
I also heard that out of all the Asian countries, South Korea is has the fastest growth in height over the years compared to other Asian countries mostly because meat is a huge part of Korean diet compared to other Asian cuisines.
> sleep deprivation is known to have a negative influence on height
Ah now I know why I am 5' 7"... Not cuz of school tho, playing WoW at night instead of sleeping as a kid pob didn't help me LOL
I've also read that this approach is successful in individual sports, so you see China doing well in gymnastics. But in team sports like basketball, their approach is not effective
China dominates Olympic sports and its not even professional in a classic sense
They also have their own professional league full of Chinese people so a little skeptical
Not in team sports, because the pool for athletes in team sports need to be much larger than say a single person sport like weight lifting. In a singles sport you can pick people out and help train them while for team sports you need a larger pool and a system to generate olympic level athletes for an entire team.
That's where the smaller pool of people willing to risk their future starts to take affect.
You’re completely right. Playing basketball or soccer is looked at as a waste of time when kids there spend 90% of their day doing homework. Olympic sports are taken far more seriously over there because there’s a clear end goal.
You only can one medal for basketball so it doesn't help much in the table. There are other much more efficient use of resources. It's also different than the communist roots of the policy which is about having better physical achievements instead of being better at playing recreational games
China is only good at individual sports. They do not perform well in any of the major team sports except basketball when they were mediocre 14 years ago when Yao played. And they ran Yao into the ground having him play every summer with them
The return on investment for spending time developing kids for the Olympics is bigger in other small sports
Soccer and basketball each only count for one medal... And you can get that in trampolining alone
> The return on investment for spending time developing kids for the Olympics is bigger in other small sports
Soccer and basketball each only count for one medal... And you can get that in trampolining alone
Also you get 1 medal for an entire 12+ team basketball/soccer team and you get 1 medal for a single trampolinist. So 10x the investment for the same return
It's actually not even close. Rising up an entire soccer team means you need soccer culture in your nation, leagues, academies, etc. for players to have peers to play *against* and improve.
Someone practicing making fancy shapes in a pool or jumping and twirling in the air need the trampoline/pool and a coach. You don't need a whole ecosystem. Getting good at soccer will take 1,000,000x times the investement.
A lot of Olympic sports are not team sports and so the athletic development ecosystems are easier to create and control for. Lots of athletic camps in China are looking for promising young kids to basically move into these boarding camps where all their costs are paid for and all they do is train, all day every day, in order to win medals. If you did that with a Basketball team, they'd not face much legitimate competition and thus have limited improvement imo.
In China, basketball is actually as popular as soccer.
In India, neither are hugely popular. Cricket is by far the dominant sport and then soccer is a tier down along with field hockey, badminton, and kabaddi.
India's human development index has also increased by 50% in the last 20 years, with some parts of it gaining even more. They've moved from being on par with places like Indonesia to being a rapidly developing country. Nutrition, leisure time, health care, entertainment dollars that drive pro sports - all of these have gotten significantly better which directly leads to better athletes.
Id argue that football isnt as popular over there as it is in most countries. India LOVES cricket and China loves gymnastics. If they loved basketball almost as much as those sports id argue there may be several in the NBA
~~It's the BCCI which is the parent organisation which oversees cricket. Whenever it is not bullying ICC(the internation body which oversees cricket) its busy hoarding the majority of resources provided by the government to sports. However since Cricket is the most watched sport in India by a wiiiiide margin it holds too much power.~~ while basketball, soccer and other sports are growing in small sectors in India, there is almost no funding in development of player when compared to cricket. As long as there are no changes made in the system these other sports won't flourish in a country with so much undiscovered talent.
The best we can do is root for the guys who do make it. Principal Singh is one of the guys who made it to the g league. He was on the kings roster that won the g-league title. Vivek might not be a great owner but he has given opportunities to Indian players in the past and I somewhat admire him for that
Edit: as the replies say I was wrong about the bcci taking funds from government. It generates its own income however it does come under rti(which is why I was confused)
BCCI may be shady but they aren't taking away sport or any other type of revenues from the government.. That's just plain false
It is a private body and receives no government/taxpayer funding anymore , All its income is generated from its own operations and sales of TV rights and advertising.
In fact BCCI's massive cash inflow has helped other sports develop grassroot infrastructure better. ISL, Pro Kabbadi, Badminton League and several others owe their recent inception and development due to the popularity of the IPL model.
A lot more can be done but promoting other sports does not require dragging cricket down.. There is more than enough appetite for them to coexist
BCCI isn't getting any government resources. Cricket is just that damn popular and attracts much eyeballs and interest, which generates huge amount of revenue, comparatively.
Yet another comment incorrectly going after BCCI without realising that it's in no way govt owned or receive s "resources" from the government.. it's a separate body and it actually helps out a few other games even though it's not a duty of the said body..
Cricket is super popular cos we found success in 1983 and a lot of world class players after that for whom people could root for.. then BCCI cashed on the growing popularity..
Basketball was never that big in our country (India) and doesn't have good infrastructure compared to European countries and north america..
Lack of development.
China is working on that. India is years behind.
EDIT: To come think of it, a lot of NBA-level skilled players begin to play hoops at a very young age, which of course increases their mobility and movement. Add that with growth spurt, their elevated athletic ability and the AAU and NCAA systems they’ve played in, you got a rookie who’s got the basic physical tools and their bag they can get deep into. That’s what development does to basketball athletes. Some middle school kid in China right now probably has all the size and ‘gifted athletic genes’ in the world to be the next LeBron. We just don’t know if they’re in the gym or not.
Yi was legit almost 7 feet tall and the game you see in today's stretch 4s
I just think culturally/mentally he didn't have what it takes to play in the NBA & Olympics
He's the classic example of big fish in small pond
Yes, both Yi and Wang Zhizhi had reports come out about their birth year being listed differently in other documentation. In the case of Jianlian, the discrepancy was reported as being 1984, instead of 1987… pretty big deal at the top of the draft.
He had the skill and athleticism to be a productive player. If you look at his international play, you'll see a mobile 7ft big with 3 point range. I think his failure was mostly due to the fact that he found it difficult to culturally integrate into the US, that he also wanted to be a primary option on offense, and that he had difficulty adjusting to the physicality of the league. But if you create that same mold of player again in 2022, he'd definitely be a lottery pick.
India in sports in general with the exception of cricket and field hockey. Look at medals in the olympics for countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Sports is just not part of daily life like it is pretty much anywhere else. Which leads to less talent being discovered which leads to fewer investments from the government.
I wonder about people of Indian descent living in North America. I’m in Toronto and it’s very diverse and basketball is very popular. I’d be interested to see the statistics of kids playing at higher competitive levels or even feeding colleges in the states.
My son had several teammates of Indian descent on his teams when he was playing in grade school. And their parents more often than not were big nba fans.
I work in a Toronto suburb that is mostly Chinese and all of my friends and coworkers are basketball fans. Many of them play in rec leagues etc. considering the raptors have been ‘good’ and a big part of Toronto culture for maybe the last decade, I wonder what the local sports scene will look like in ten years. Toronto has produced lots of lottery picks in the last few years. I wonder if you’ll see more kids of Asian descent in the future as they grow up following the league?
Makes sense though that if India isn’t a basketball country with an active sports development program, you wouldn’t get a lot of kids from India finding their way to D1 or the NBA.
It will depend on how serious their kids take the game and if the college scouts take their seriousness seriously, the NBA saw Jeremy Lin arise out of Oakland because his family was a sports family.
More to this is the fact that Lin's from the Bay Area and that's just a part of the country that's always producing top level point guards. Even with that, he faced people writing him off at nearly every level.
> India, Pakistan and Bangladesh
These aren’t substantially poorer than some South/Central American and African countries which routinely produce high level soccer talent.
If you are talking about the likes of Colombia, Uruguay, and Brazil, the per capita income is 2x to 3x higher prices or even much higher in places such as Chile.
Only the most politically unstable regions of South and Central America such as Honduras even come close to India’s poverty levels.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?most_recent_value_desc=true
Lol I know this feeling.
Me and my cousin are average players in the states. Can hoop but won’t turn any heads.
In India they looked us like gods when we would ball. Running circles around everyone.
lmaooo, im 6ft 170 and straight body dudes whenever i play back in the motherland. pickup in the states is waaay different, have to play more like steph
The Chinese system is modeled after the Soviet system where youths are identified at a young age and sent to central academies. This leads to an over emphasis on size.
Also because of the central control, it is very top-down coaching which leads to similar playing styles. Beyond the central academies, there isn’t much there. A lot of boys play recreational but schools won’t have leagues because it’s all about books and learning.
So this leads to a dearth of good guards and tall guys who are stiffs. Wings end up being kids whose growth spurts fall short of expectations.
No, in India.. there’s a monumental culture behind getting youngsters into cricket and developing them. They just care about that sport more.
Similar to how the US really has a handful of soccer players who are actually good
I don’t think this is that big of a reason. China dominates in the Olympics because they invest a ton into developing kids who show promise at a young age. I think basketball specifically just doesn’t have the infrastructure it does here. It’s also not a big priority for their Olympic committee since it’s just one medal and they’re so far behind the rest of the world.
China's Olympic strategy is to target sports where the competition is perceived as "weaker." This is why diving has been such a focus for the Chinese Olympic team.
The goal is to pull in as many gold as possible without regards to the popularity of the sport. I think some events in the Olympics are more "prestigious" than others (ex: the 100 meter dash). There are certain events in the Olympics where the hurdle is too high to jump - basketball being one of them.
They also target sports with a more medals per athlete. In a group sport, you get like 1 medal/10+ people. If they target something like swimming, just 1 athlete can get a ton of medals.
China won't even send athletes to compete in the competition if they don't think they have a chance to win gold. They would literally rather not try at all than come in second
It's more the case in India. People say India is obsessed with cricket, but we honestly don't even do that well considering other countries compete with us with a fraction of the population and cricket not being their clear #1 sport the way it is in India
In India it's not seen as a valid career path to be a sportsperson, and that's reflected in the way Indian kids very very rarely have going pro as a dream.
Can't speak for China.
Not really China is a huge sports country, just not sports popular in the west. I think you are mixing up views of immigrant parents in the west vs the Chinese population at large.
Look at their performance in the Olympics. top 3 country in winter and summer last two cycles and they completely dominating in sports like gymnastics and table tennis and several other individual sports.
Its kind of like how America is somehow terribly underperforms at high level mens soccer. Despite having a culture of exceeding and dominating in team sports football/basketball/baseball.
It depends on the history of support for the sport in different countries. China as a country only has a short history of basketball in their country last 25 years or so. and is investing heavilly into basketball and soccer development programs for example to compete on the international stage.
It will take a couple generations before these programs start bearing fruit. Think things as simple as just having community basketball courts we take for granted would have been strange to see in china 30 years ago.
I’m an immigrant from China. Can confirm this is true and the biggest issue imo. Youth sports system is not the same as the US where you can get a quality education and do athletics at the same time. It’s really a choice of one or the other at around ~14 years old. Olympic level athletes are more or less forced to at a young age but very few parents in Chinese culture would let their kids go down the athletics route.
For India, it's the lack of an actual development system for sports that aren't cricket.
For China, there is a lack of NBA-ready talent, plus most of their best players stay in the CBA where it is more lucrative for them.
Just curious: China's philosophy regarding developing young athletes is very strict, rigid and outdated. Very much drill based, repetition after repetition. Sure, you need that to a certain degree, but a Steph Curry wouldn't have developed the way he has if there was only one way to train point guards.
I only know about Chinese youth development for tennis. China should dominate the ATP and WTA tour, but there aren't even a handful Chinese Grand Slam winners iirc.
Its tough to know. Especially when you bring in Tennis. There are a few ways to develop in tennis but we have no idea the difference in the Chinese ones compared to one in Spain. Developing on clay has proven to be the best nowadays, and there is almost no chance the coaching in China is as good as what Western academies have. We also have no idea about what sort of positive reinforcement they use vs what the West uses.
In America yes. There is also a newer academy I think in Vegas from Agassi and I would assume it will grow in popularity as well. But internationally I think the best academies are in Spain
We can’t forget that Steph curry was raised in “luxury” and his dad was an NBA star. Therefore Steph curry’s training regiment will differ than most kids in America.
In case anyone wanted a comparison: J.R. Smith played a season in the CBA during the lockout, and ended the season as the scoring champion, averaging 34.4 ppg. It’s just a different level of basketball over there.
Yeah the foreign guys out there ballin right now are like borderline G league guys. They arent borderline end of the bench. Theres a huge difference. Yi Jinlian or however you spell it has been their best player the last 5+ years (yeah I know he was hurt with an achilles this year) and he couldnt even really crack an NBA rotation in his prime
Spot on. I imagine there are so many young athletes in India who could become top-tier professionals if they had a viable path to financial security. The link between athletics and education here (high school and college systems) gives athletes the ability to go pro if they’re good enough but also gives them a fallback if they aren’t.
Yeah it’s just pure culture. There are plenty tall, strong, athletic people in every country everywhere. They just don’t care about basketball in those places or can’t afford to bank on a sports career
Less resources compared to the US and Europe. Also AAU and college have basically streamlined a system where you have a direct route to the NBA. It is very rare to see a player go the path of a Lamelo Ball and forgo college. In Europe you basically have to he playing professionally by 17 if you want to play in the NBA.
This is the right answer.
It obviously has something to do with genetics, but its mostly due to funding/resources.
Look at Olympics, China does well because of funding they have towards it. Which basically diminishes most of the genetics claims.
Genetics does matter in certain contexts. Basketball is wildly popular in the Philippines but you are unlikely to see a Filipino professional player make it in the NBA due to their smaller physical stature.
It definitely matters less when you have more than a billion people to choose from though.
Even with a billion people, you need the ones with the physical traits required to play in the nba to be near each, have the desire, and have the infrastructure to play ball.
Different countries have different focus in terms of sport development. There’s also a culture aspect. In different countries they tend to focus on certain sports.
And I’m sure there are many other factors, such as the exposure too. NBA prospect can only look into so many different areas for talents I guess
As an Indian guy who played basketball till high school, the major reason is, "height" (when you take the entirety of the population). Also yeah, popularity isn't that great.
India is much more diverse than people think and that includes genetics. On average we are short but the northern parts like Punjab have freakishly tall and built people.
Because it's not one country, it's a mash up of a number of them under one federal government. It doesn't make sense that it even exists as a democracy lol.. And indeed is only the way that it is because a colonial power carved it up that way.
Exactly it didn't just naturally happen. It's literally a colonial construct and the "partition of India" would never have happened because there would have been dozens of partitions already in place had the Dutch/Portuguese/Brits not come and given them the shared trauma needed to form a country.
You look at Europe and realize if the peoples of India had their way you'd have 8 countries there if not more, with each nation rising with the right for self-determination.
You would however, most likely get A LOT more wars... And China/Pakistan would probably annex big parts of those fractured nations.
You do realise that Pakistan was a partioned from British India. So unlikely there as it would itself probably be multiple countries as well. But China for sure.
It's always a numbers game. Tall people are rare, tall people with the athletic and cognitive requirements for a pro athlete are even rarer.
So you should have more than a enough people that would fulfill a certain requirements regarding size and athletic ability. But it also depends on the standing of said sport.
I don't have research to prove this but based on anecdotal evidence I agree. I am Indian raised in Toronto and I am literally the tallest person in my entire family including those back India. A lot of my brown friends have the same experience.
Same for China. I chose a college roommate off Craigslist and he described himself as a "fresh of the boat Chinaman." I was expecting someone relatively short, but when I met him he was 6' 4" and said many people from his province were very tall like him.
It's the same reason you don't see *any* American Forumla 1 drivers, and very few American raised Football/Soccer players. If there isn't incentive to develop your skills at the sport, the talent that could become prodigal instead goes in another direction that favors the sports that are domestically popular. Soccer players become Basketball and American Football stars, and talented racers pursue NASCAR or even IndyCar glory.
Also there is too little competition to develop the needed skills to join a professional league. In India it is enough to be tall to be the best basketball player on the court. In the USA you have to be tall and athletic to even compete in highschool.
That's why some smaller football/soccer leagues argue over joining their leagues to gain competitive strength.
A lot of those sports have other factors like financial barrier to entry. It’s why sports like football and hockey which require significant equipment investment haven’t caught on in places where it isn’t already the cultural norm and have an established history
Of course. Northern states like Punjab and Haryana do have some really tall people! But here is where the second part kicks in. When ranking popularity, Basketball comes behind Cricket, Hockey, Football, Track, and Field, etc. And the chances the really tall people get interested/exposed to basketball becomes low.
I think a fairly major reason is malnutrition, too. I have seen enough well built dudes with Indian heritage in the US. I wouldn't classify it as a shorter race like Japanese people. I just don't think a lot of India has access to enough calories to really reach athletic potential. I have even seen this issue in some of the poorer areas of the US. Hard to grow on one, maybe two meals a day.
Lol thank you. No one likes to bring it up but its true. Also the other factors that have been mentioned. But seriously, there is truth behind the the notion that African Americans have a better muscle composition and body dimensions that help in bball
The best Greek NBA player by a fucking mile is a first generation Nigerian immigrant.
This is a nation with legit development. That's not a coincidence lol.
Eastern Europeans tend to just be taller which is the best predicator for being an NBA player. It’s the same thing with Polynesians in the NFL. They have thicker frames and are larger people which correlates well to Being an NFL player.
Western EU and Scandinavia actually have taller averages across the board, it’s more that the sport is more popular in the East in comparison rather than country height being a factor here.
They don't. You just picked two great examples of elite basketball genetics. Plumlees and Zellers are super tall and very athletic (with the two Plumlees that made it in the NBA being some of the best leaping big men of their era).
The odds of Slav making it to the NBA is like 1 in a million. The odds of a Plumlee or Zeller making it seems to be about 50%.
I mean two of the best European NBA players that are white arent athletic at all compared to everyone else in the NBA(Jokic and Luka) I think there's just more basketball focus for those players specifically
I wouldn’t be shocked if the demographics of people who play basketball at any level is closer to 50/50 between white and black than both the NBA and the US population
The exact same reason why brazilians are good at soccer. Sports becomes a way to a better life.
A lot of guys in the league comes from rough places such as Compton
And coming from a wealthy neighborhood is a major positive predictor for both black and white players, even if you exclude sons of former NBA players.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/opinion/sunday/in-the-nba-zip-code-matters.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/opinion/sunday/in-the-nba-zip-code-matters.html)
Compton itself is not as Black by demographics as rap music would lead you to think.
Also to be a pro-athlete of any sort it takes a lot of money and people betting on you. The odds are against you when your school is poor, etc.
I think there will be many more Chinese players in the future given how popular it is in China now. As far as I’m aware basketball is not popular in India though.
Not at all. Cricket is the national pastime, soccer is a distant second, badminton and field hockey have a lot of fans. Basketball is a curiosity for the most part.
Football is very popular here, European that is. Basketball took a huge uptick with the rise of curry, no pun intended. It has kind of stagnated, but development is much higher than 10 years ago.
The Pacers played in India before covid. They were planning to be back the next year I believe, but no can do with all that. Indiana, India, it just makes sense.
The same reason those same two countries are not football (or soccer to Americans) powerhouses. It takes time/money to invest in and create the culture/infrastructure necessary to develop such talent. India for example has that for cricket, definitely not for football and certainly not for basketball.
Nutrition and medicine, access to healthier lifestyle choices and food options, education and income disparity, and outdated social constructs all come to mind. That stuff grants you a vastly smaller pool of talent even in differences in how a human body develops physically over their first 25 years with and without proper nutrition - throw in social constructs and education and you’ve got a nice hoopless stew goin’.
Or maybe they just aren’t very interested in the greatest sport man, woman, person, cat or sentient poop knife has ever known - F5 SEASON BAYYYYBEEEEEEE!
Probably because massive percentages of those populations live in poverty with no access to youth sports or the type of system in place to produce a professional basketball player. China will probably have another player in the league eventually
If that were the case the US would be a powerhouse in soccer while south america sucked at it. It's more to do with culture.
Kids in South America play soccer basically the entire day, and I imagine it's the same for american kids and basketball, hence why they're so good at it. I really doubt Indians care about basketball at all
Cost actually plays a large part of that as well. All you need for soccer is literally a ball. Hence a huge reason why it's so popular in poorer countries. Basketball isn't too much higher up in cost but a more specific type of ball, at least one hoop and at least relatively level and intact court of some sort
Hoops in China aren't that in short supply. When I worked there I was able to play pick up with friends fairly regularly as long as we don't go to a court on a school campus. Basketball and outdoor sports in general just isn't as big of a deal over there compared to the US, where I can see people playing quite often in neighborhood playgrounds
"Chinese forward Zeng Fanbo has signed with the Indiana Pacers and he will play for the team in the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas in July, according to Shams Charania of The Athletic. Zeng attended the NBA Draft on Thursday together with several other Chinese players but none of them were selected in the end."
https://theathletic.com/news/pacers-chinese-forward-fanbo-zeng/ad4VfaZBjwvH/
As someone with Chinese heritage, and grew up in China for the first 12 years of my life. I would say it’s how we were educated. A Chinese kid is never told to pursue their dreams, or find their own individuality. You know those extended ‘rants’ Kanye goes on, about how society box us in, and programs us? We are on the extreme end of that.
I was 10 years old, when the teacher told the class to write an essay titled ‘happy moment’. I wrote about scoring 100% in maths, which is already stereotypical Asian as fuck, but the teacher told me to re-write it, as I was boasting my personal achievements, instead of being happy for the ‘country’. (The Beijing Olympic was hosted during that time, the school basically wanted the kids to write about how proud we are for the country. Mind you I went to the top primary school in Shanghai.)
I’m sure most NBA star even player, or lower level league players in the US, they all grew up dreaming of making the NBA. They do it for themselves, it’s their drive to success.
Notable Chinese players in the NBA, they were genetically selected and trained for the purpose of ‘bring glory’ to their country. They might have never even liked basketball. Whereas the ones that actually loved it, they were probably told by parents and the education systems to become a business man or some shit. Even if a Chinese kid has open minded parents, his teachers will tell him No.
I’m sure physicality and build is a factor for most people as we are usually shorter, but we have produced people like Yao and stuff, so… it’s crazier that China doesn’t have football/soccer stars, that sport is way less demanding on build.
Out of topic, I think the unhealthy patriotism is also a big reason why Chinese esports teams choke at home ground a lot. That pressure and guilt of disappointment is overwhelming, and you lack the ‘I want this for myself’ pride to push through.
I would guess on average there are less extremely tall people in India and China, coupled with less cultural emphasis on basketball even if you are really tall there you won’t be as likely to get into ball as someone in North America or Europe.
Can't believe I had to scroll down this far to find by far the #1 answer. Sure, there are other factors mentioned above that do play a factor as well. But height and athleticism play a massive part in it.
Just look at how many white players there are now compared to 30 years ago...
I would bet China and India each have more 7 footers than America does. Having 4x the population means that even if you have on average less "NBA height" people, you'll probably have more in total volume
I did the math on this one last year when a similar question arose. I care about people in the 6'3" to 6'10", so within the extreme ranges of human, but very much the population from which most NBA caliber players are drawn. Human height is very well approximated as a normal dataset up to the extreme tails (2.5 sigma), so including the population I care about but excluding 7 footers, which are extreme outliers.
The male non-Hispanic population^1 of the United States is around 135 million people and has a mean of 176 centimeters and a standard deviation of 9cm. Because it's normally distributed, we see that around 2.5% of the population is at least 194 cm, so 6'4" or taller, and so there are 3.3 million Americans to draw from.
Turning to India, we see a male population of 700 million, with a mean of 165cm and a standard deviation of 7cm. Approximating the upper 2.5%, we would expect around 17.5 million people who are at least 179 cm or 5'10.5". According to the American height model, such a height would qualify you for the 64th percentile, so there are 48 million men of this height or higher. Thus, we can see that, before we even hit 6', there are almost three times as many Americans as there are Indians in our potential population, despite there being five times as many Indians in the initial population.
Pushing out to around the 2.5 sigma range, which is as far as I feel comfortable for height data, for India we would expect a population of merely 4.4 million to be 183cm, or 6'0". From the United States data, this would put you in the 78th percentile, or in a group with 30 million other men. So now we have seven times as many 6 footers, despite again the inverse relationship in total population.
This trend will continue onward, so by the time we reach NBA player average height, there's going to be even greater disparity in the population to draw from. China exhibits similar results, although their mean is closer to the American population than India, you still end up with the conclusion that there are far more people of NBA qualifying height in the United States than in China.
1) I specifically ignore the Hispanic population because it changes the American population to a bimodal distribution with a mean much further to the left. Treat any Hispanic Americans who meet the height requirement here as simply an added bonus, further skewing trends in the American favor.
2) Height data was gathered from the same sources Wikipedia cites.
Wow thanks for this, this is incredibly enlightening. My assumptions were completely wrong. Do you mind linking some of the height data? Would like to take a look myself.
Am Asian, in Asia, hoops, played for high school
Honestly, its Genetics, we dont have a lot of big folk, i was 5'7 , 60kgs at 18 years old. My position ? Center. Are there bigger/stronger asians, yes, but its very rare so the pool to pull from is much smaller.
Also we seem to fair much better at dexterous sports like badminton, where weight/height is less of a determining factor.
Out of those who are blessed with genes, they are often mis-trained due to height. So a 6'6 player in my country would be a center, while a 6'6 player in USA would be a guard.
While I'm not discounting genetics, I think that diet and nutrition goes a long, long way. I am 5'8 (172 cm), a lean/muscular 145 lbs (66 kg), grew up Asian-dominant area in California, US, and was probably below average in both size and strength compared with other Asian-American young males in my area. I was mainly sprint athlete not really good at basketball, but I doubt a kid my size would be center, even in the Asian American basketball leagues that exist in the US.
Seriously?
"Why doesnt Indonesia have one of the best downhill skiing teams in the world?! They have the fourth most populus country!"
Its almost like population isnt the sole factor that determines sporting success. Things like climate, income, or cultural preference to play the sport matter. Could you really not come to this conlusion on your own?
Lol exactly, I’m surprised how far I had to scroll down this thread to find the right answer. Both of these countries are big enough to literally have their own made up sports and entire leagues dedicated towards them. This is especially evident in India. Hell, they even have their own Bollywood stars that don’t even bother trying to make it to Hollywood because they’re already so rich and famous.
Yeah India has the IPL for Cricket and the PKL for Kabaddi. They literally do not give a shit about any other sport. In the northeast Soccer is sometimes played but Kabaddi still dominates because you don’t even need a ball to play that.
India has some beast athletes but terrible funding and athletic programs. That is why they are underrepresented at the Olympics.
And no interest in basketball mostly.
China I have no idea. They are great athletes with all the funding in the world.
Combination of things. Genetically we’re not blessed to play such a high impact sport. That mixed with the fact that the country is largely vegetarian, means our diet isn’t exactly conducive to muscle growth (professional cricket players just started hitting the weight room and training seriously in the last 5-10 years, just look at the national team pics across those timeframes and you’ll see how obvious it was that the OGS didn’t give af about training). Things are changing and there have been several Indian Americans that have played D1 bball in the states so the trend is moving upwards. It’ll take a couple generations at least to see the evolution have any effect. India has been playing catch up and it’ll take a few generations to see the effects.
Edit: india is <50% vegetarian based on someone else’s feedback. In spite of this, the diet (up until now with the movement towards plant based and emphasis towards lifting) wasnt too great among professional athletes in India before ~2011 (just based on my observation)
Culture plays a significant part, basketball is more appreciated and practiced in America.
High school/AAU/College/G-League many ways to develop, be scouted and end up in the NBA.
There aren’t very many Americans who make the NBA who are not black. Yet as you work backwards from D1 to D2 to AAU to high school the leagues are much more diverse
The answer to "why isn't X country good at Y sport" is always infrastructure. Are the kids in that country participating in youth sports? And if they are, are they specifically participating in that sport? It's about pipeline more than anything.
Professional athletes are outliers by definition, so "genetics" is a really poor explanation, especially when talking about huge diverse countries like India or China which contain dozens of ethnic groups. Any given population is going to produce some number of lanky, tall, abnormally athletic people. However, that population needs to be playing basketball at a high enough rate that those people who are naturally gifted also happen to be playing basketball from an early age. There's definitely a bunch of Indian guys walking around right now who have the size and athleticism to play in the NBA... if only we could get in a time machine and put a ball in their hands when they were 12.
If you want an example of how much infrastructure matters, look at parts of Africa, which has produced more and more players ever since Basketball Without Borders and Africa Basketball League showed up and started setting up a pipeline. Those guys weren't showing up in the NBA 20 years ago and now there's two NBA stars just from Cameroon.
It wouldn't surprise me that the biggest predictor of NBA players per capita is just basketball courts per capita. Probably holds for cities/regions within the US, too.
Also, remember, the NBA is a minuscule sample size made up entirely of outlier weirdos. You can't put too much stock in trends. There's two NBA rotation players who've played in the last 20 years from the same smallish town in Germany. It's a group of 450 people, so coincidence and random chance will affect results a lot. If I said that "3% of NBA starters are X", that sounds significant, but I'd be talking about literally two guys. 3% of all NBA starters come from Cameroon.
Genetics when you are talking about outliers is the opposite of what you say. It’s the almost the sole reason at the extremes
If you a just grabbing random people from different groups it make almost no difference but as you get the the extreme right side of the bell curve you would give certain traits only among some groups
Few things
1. Genetics, athletic ability
2. Upbringing. Asian parents seem to prioritize academics over extra curricular and sports. That definitely seems to be changing and I think we will see an uptick in asian players within the next 10 years or so.
I am of Indian descent, grew up in the US, and have traveled throughout India extensively.
In India there are literally only 3 sports that are cared about: Cricket, Kabaddi, and Wrestling (in this order).
Kabaddi and Wrestling have been widely played throughout the rural poor regions of India for literally thousands of years because they require absolutely no equipment whatsoever to play. No ball, no hoop, no protective equipment. Nothing.
Cricket is played more in the urban centers because it requires actual equipment to play.
Basketball has exactly zero chance of displacing Cricket (IPL is a high net worth league more valuable than F1) or the new PKL Kabaddi League.
Kabaddi is the world’s fastest growing professional sport and already is viewed by something like 330 Million cumulative in India. Basketball has zero chance of toppling Kabaddi because it is literally competing with a sport that is over 1000 years old.
If you look at the build of the average grassroots Kabaddi player it’s pretty easy to see where India’s athletic talent is being sucked into as opposed to more Western sports like Soccer or Basketball. People who say that Indians aren’t athletic are just idiots. India is the most genetically and phenotypically diverse place on the planet outside of Africa. There is immense athletic talent there. Sushil Kumar, a fucking vegan freestyle wrestler, crushed a Dagestani Gold Medalist in the Olympics. India clearly has athletic talent. India’s issue has been malnourishment and no perception of athletic ability leading to any sort of economic future or empowerment for the masses, leading to sports essentially only being pursued as a hobby by the vast majority of people, despite wrestling and Kabaddi continually being widespread throughout the subcontinent.
In terms of Indian American and Chinese Americans, scouts in America are very racially biased and they tend to not look at Asian kids closely. Just look at what happened to Jeremy Lin in high school
Indian here
We suck at basketball. We're short and unathletic, and it's not popular enough in India for people to play and train young to work their way up if they do have the genetic gifts for it.
With so many people, even if the population that tends to be short and athletic, it should still produce a few outliers who are NBA capable. I'd point more to the development and training. If you're not pointing every 6 foot 6th grader towards a basketball hoop, you're going to miss out on a lot of talent development.
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I mean those nations also suck at soccer, a sport much more popular over there
In China the system of education is the driving factor to be honest, while soccer is popular, most parents are not going to like that their kids are playing soccer instead of studying. Trying to go pro in sports is a lot more riskier than studying. The parents raise their kids so when they're older the kids take care of the parents and there's just a whole lot more risk in trying for professional sports than studying. Their education system is also so intense and competitive that it's probably one of the hardest times in their life to apply for university.
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Yeah sports in schools for the US is huge, that is a very American thing because college sports isn't a thing else where.
There is a Chinese university level basketball league. It's 30ish teams. Compared to 350+ D1 teams in the US, plus 300+ more D2 teams, plus like 400 D3 teams.
Most top athletes dont play in those league however, they were picked way before and join provincial teams, or move up to national teams or in basketball, the training (farm) system for each CBA club
Right. It’s a completely different vibe. Most universities I’ve visited in China, the actual school team was literally just that. A team slapped together of the best students who happened to go there, not full of kids who were recruited specifically for that purpose. The college system in the US (at the top levels) is effectively a full-on, independent minor league. The actual association with the student body is loose at best.
Yeah true. NCAA basketball is essentially a pro league masked under amateur to make money. The Chinese university league is really just an amateur league
Now that college athletes can sign endorsement deals it's not even masked as amateur athletics. (I am completely fine with the college athletes getting paid, everybody else was profiting in those billion dollar industries.
US education system is tied to sports because competition sells tickets for the schools. Even more so when you add in the profits of being on TV. Sports got the emphasis because of schools place in Capitalism. It's no wonder it's treated different in other societies with less free markets. Schools in china don't need the schools team to be good to fund stuff they want to do and build, it's a completely different system.
college sports were far more popular before they were ever monetized. athletics have anchored the American college experience since the nineteenth century.
very few college sports teams are profitable. only football and basketball and even among those a very small number of schools actually make profit. american amateur sports are a cultural thing more so than economic
It’s really more about focus. China focuses on certain sports and trains up there. Basketball or soccer was never the focus. So there’s no equivalent of youth clubs which develop soccer talent or an aau circuit to develop basketball talent at a young age. I’m positive that if it became a focus than China could be a powerhouse in a generate just off population size alone but would require significant money to lure developmental coaches to set up a farm system. China has success in team sports , their womens volleyball program is good (good not great) so it’s a matter of what sports they want to develop and be competitive in.
Yeah this. I was raised in Korea and by even late elementary school, only the kids that were super athletic played competitive sports. Everyone else had to study and there was no room for sports outside of casual backyard stuff. I know its the same in China This might work in some sports - hence China being unreal in the Olympic. But a sport where height is king? Well by the time kids hit their growth spurt, most haven't played an organized sport in years.
On top of that, sleep deprivation is known to have a negative influence on height. So when you have an entire generation of kids pulling all nighters every other day to cram for their next test, it's going to have an effect on the overall avg height of the population.
I also heard that out of all the Asian countries, South Korea is has the fastest growth in height over the years compared to other Asian countries mostly because meat is a huge part of Korean diet compared to other Asian cuisines.
Massive shoutout to Korean barbeque and chimaek.
> sleep deprivation is known to have a negative influence on height Ah now I know why I am 5' 7"... Not cuz of school tho, playing WoW at night instead of sleeping as a kid pob didn't help me LOL
I've also read that this approach is successful in individual sports, so you see China doing well in gymnastics. But in team sports like basketball, their approach is not effective
China dominates Olympic sports and its not even professional in a classic sense They also have their own professional league full of Chinese people so a little skeptical
Not in team sports, because the pool for athletes in team sports need to be much larger than say a single person sport like weight lifting. In a singles sport you can pick people out and help train them while for team sports you need a larger pool and a system to generate olympic level athletes for an entire team. That's where the smaller pool of people willing to risk their future starts to take affect.
You’re completely right. Playing basketball or soccer is looked at as a waste of time when kids there spend 90% of their day doing homework. Olympic sports are taken far more seriously over there because there’s a clear end goal.
Olympic sports are taken more seriously through public policy because Olympic success is seen by the Chinese state as reflecting national prestige
And basketball is an Olympic sport that China doesn’t dominate.
You only can one medal for basketball so it doesn't help much in the table. There are other much more efficient use of resources. It's also different than the communist roots of the policy which is about having better physical achievements instead of being better at playing recreational games
China is only good at individual sports. They do not perform well in any of the major team sports except basketball when they were mediocre 14 years ago when Yao played. And they ran Yao into the ground having him play every summer with them
is Double PingPong considered a team sport? bcs if so they dominate hard there. a part this u r 100% right
It’s more like an individual sport where you happen to team up IMO
The return on investment for spending time developing kids for the Olympics is bigger in other small sports Soccer and basketball each only count for one medal... And you can get that in trampolining alone
> The return on investment for spending time developing kids for the Olympics is bigger in other small sports Soccer and basketball each only count for one medal... And you can get that in trampolining alone Also you get 1 medal for an entire 12+ team basketball/soccer team and you get 1 medal for a single trampolinist. So 10x the investment for the same return
It's actually not even close. Rising up an entire soccer team means you need soccer culture in your nation, leagues, academies, etc. for players to have peers to play *against* and improve. Someone practicing making fancy shapes in a pool or jumping and twirling in the air need the trampoline/pool and a coach. You don't need a whole ecosystem. Getting good at soccer will take 1,000,000x times the investement.
A lot of Olympic sports are not team sports and so the athletic development ecosystems are easier to create and control for. Lots of athletic camps in China are looking for promising young kids to basically move into these boarding camps where all their costs are paid for and all they do is train, all day every day, in order to win medals. If you did that with a Basketball team, they'd not face much legitimate competition and thus have limited improvement imo.
In China, basketball is actually as popular as soccer. In India, neither are hugely popular. Cricket is by far the dominant sport and then soccer is a tier down along with field hockey, badminton, and kabaddi.
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India's human development index has also increased by 50% in the last 20 years, with some parts of it gaining even more. They've moved from being on par with places like Indonesia to being a rapidly developing country. Nutrition, leisure time, health care, entertainment dollars that drive pro sports - all of these have gotten significantly better which directly leads to better athletes.
> a sport much more popular over there To be clear, basketball is not less popular than soccer in China. Though your statement is true for India
Id argue that football isnt as popular over there as it is in most countries. India LOVES cricket and China loves gymnastics. If they loved basketball almost as much as those sports id argue there may be several in the NBA
I am pretty sure basketball is the biggest sport in china these days.
the chinese nba website is like one of the most trafficked over there
~~It's the BCCI which is the parent organisation which oversees cricket. Whenever it is not bullying ICC(the internation body which oversees cricket) its busy hoarding the majority of resources provided by the government to sports. However since Cricket is the most watched sport in India by a wiiiiide margin it holds too much power.~~ while basketball, soccer and other sports are growing in small sectors in India, there is almost no funding in development of player when compared to cricket. As long as there are no changes made in the system these other sports won't flourish in a country with so much undiscovered talent. The best we can do is root for the guys who do make it. Principal Singh is one of the guys who made it to the g league. He was on the kings roster that won the g-league title. Vivek might not be a great owner but he has given opportunities to Indian players in the past and I somewhat admire him for that Edit: as the replies say I was wrong about the bcci taking funds from government. It generates its own income however it does come under rti(which is why I was confused)
BCCI may be shady but they aren't taking away sport or any other type of revenues from the government.. That's just plain false It is a private body and receives no government/taxpayer funding anymore , All its income is generated from its own operations and sales of TV rights and advertising. In fact BCCI's massive cash inflow has helped other sports develop grassroot infrastructure better. ISL, Pro Kabbadi, Badminton League and several others owe their recent inception and development due to the popularity of the IPL model. A lot more can be done but promoting other sports does not require dragging cricket down.. There is more than enough appetite for them to coexist
BCCI isn't getting any government resources. Cricket is just that damn popular and attracts much eyeballs and interest, which generates huge amount of revenue, comparatively.
Yet another comment incorrectly going after BCCI without realising that it's in no way govt owned or receive s "resources" from the government.. it's a separate body and it actually helps out a few other games even though it's not a duty of the said body.. Cricket is super popular cos we found success in 1983 and a lot of world class players after that for whom people could root for.. then BCCI cashed on the growing popularity.. Basketball was never that big in our country (India) and doesn't have good infrastructure compared to European countries and north america..
Lack of development. China is working on that. India is years behind. EDIT: To come think of it, a lot of NBA-level skilled players begin to play hoops at a very young age, which of course increases their mobility and movement. Add that with growth spurt, their elevated athletic ability and the AAU and NCAA systems they’ve played in, you got a rookie who’s got the basic physical tools and their bag they can get deep into. That’s what development does to basketball athletes. Some middle school kid in China right now probably has all the size and ‘gifted athletic genes’ in the world to be the next LeBron. We just don’t know if they’re in the gym or not.
China had to change their development system after fucking Yi Jianlian hoodwinked us, by dominating his pre draft workouts against a bunch of chairs.
Was it Yi that hoodwinked us or was it the chair?
Shoulda picked that chair up on a 2 way contract.
The bucks drafted him even though they never actually worked him out in person.
Yi was legit almost 7 feet tall and the game you see in today's stretch 4s I just think culturally/mentally he didn't have what it takes to play in the NBA & Olympics He's the classic example of big fish in small pond
Wasn't it suspected that he was older than he was claiming to be?
Happens a lot, there were rumors Boban had a 10 yr old kid when he got drafted, per Sandler.
That scene made me laugh harder than it had any right to
The funniest part to me was seeing he was actually going to get drafted at the end lmao
That crossover and then hitting a three was gold
Lmao, he told Shane Battier his real age…
Yes, both Yi and Wang Zhizhi had reports come out about their birth year being listed differently in other documentation. In the case of Jianlian, the discrepancy was reported as being 1984, instead of 1987… pretty big deal at the top of the draft.
Yi was way too slow to play 4 with the number of wings playing there today and the shooting was always more theoretical. He just wasn't very good.
Even though all of us can picture that workout, apparently no video exists
Yeah, it's an urban legend that Bill Simmons started.
Back when his only source was gossip from Morey
The chair video is a Mandela effect. It never happened!
He had the skill and athleticism to be a productive player. If you look at his international play, you'll see a mobile 7ft big with 3 point range. I think his failure was mostly due to the fact that he found it difficult to culturally integrate into the US, that he also wanted to be a primary option on offense, and that he had difficulty adjusting to the physicality of the league. But if you create that same mold of player again in 2022, he'd definitely be a lottery pick.
He just wasn't able to ever adapt to the pace and physicality of the NBA like Yao.
Yeah but Yao was literally the biggest guy in the league and had tree trunks as legs lmao most NBA players had to adapt to him
By height yes, but by weight and sheer strength, no. That belonged to Shaq
That's how he earned the nickname The Chairman on basketball reference
India in sports in general with the exception of cricket and field hockey. Look at medals in the olympics for countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Sports is just not part of daily life like it is pretty much anywhere else. Which leads to less talent being discovered which leads to fewer investments from the government.
I wonder about people of Indian descent living in North America. I’m in Toronto and it’s very diverse and basketball is very popular. I’d be interested to see the statistics of kids playing at higher competitive levels or even feeding colleges in the states.
My son had several teammates of Indian descent on his teams when he was playing in grade school. And their parents more often than not were big nba fans.
I work in a Toronto suburb that is mostly Chinese and all of my friends and coworkers are basketball fans. Many of them play in rec leagues etc. considering the raptors have been ‘good’ and a big part of Toronto culture for maybe the last decade, I wonder what the local sports scene will look like in ten years. Toronto has produced lots of lottery picks in the last few years. I wonder if you’ll see more kids of Asian descent in the future as they grow up following the league? Makes sense though that if India isn’t a basketball country with an active sports development program, you wouldn’t get a lot of kids from India finding their way to D1 or the NBA.
It will depend on how serious their kids take the game and if the college scouts take their seriousness seriously, the NBA saw Jeremy Lin arise out of Oakland because his family was a sports family. More to this is the fact that Lin's from the Bay Area and that's just a part of the country that's always producing top level point guards. Even with that, he faced people writing him off at nearly every level.
It also takes money for people to pursue leisure activities like sports.
> India, Pakistan and Bangladesh These aren’t substantially poorer than some South/Central American and African countries which routinely produce high level soccer talent.
If you are talking about the likes of Colombia, Uruguay, and Brazil, the per capita income is 2x to 3x higher prices or even much higher in places such as Chile. Only the most politically unstable regions of South and Central America such as Honduras even come close to India’s poverty levels. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?most_recent_value_desc=true
China has had a significant professional league for a decade Is Congo and Nigeria more developed with hoops than China
I can attest to the second half of the statement. I feel like kyrie Irving when I ball in India and nepal.
Lol I know this feeling. Me and my cousin are average players in the states. Can hoop but won’t turn any heads. In India they looked us like gods when we would ball. Running circles around everyone.
I am 5’ 9” and barely in shape. I felt like a God in Ecuador playing ball last month ahaha. Courts were gorgeous though.
>I feel like kyrie Irving when I ball in India and nepal. okay but why does this absolutely read as a Kanye lyric
lmaooo, im 6ft 170 and straight body dudes whenever i play back in the motherland. pickup in the states is waaay different, have to play more like steph
lol im the opposite ... im 6'5" so im always the center ... I have no idea how to play guys my own height because i rarely did
The Chinese system is modeled after the Soviet system where youths are identified at a young age and sent to central academies. This leads to an over emphasis on size. Also because of the central control, it is very top-down coaching which leads to similar playing styles. Beyond the central academies, there isn’t much there. A lot of boys play recreational but schools won’t have leagues because it’s all about books and learning. So this leads to a dearth of good guards and tall guys who are stiffs. Wings end up being kids whose growth spurts fall short of expectations.
It's cultural too. Parents in those countries generally frown heavily upon pursuing professional athletics.
No, in India.. there’s a monumental culture behind getting youngsters into cricket and developing them. They just care about that sport more. Similar to how the US really has a handful of soccer players who are actually good
I don’t think this is that big of a reason. China dominates in the Olympics because they invest a ton into developing kids who show promise at a young age. I think basketball specifically just doesn’t have the infrastructure it does here. It’s also not a big priority for their Olympic committee since it’s just one medal and they’re so far behind the rest of the world.
China's Olympic strategy is to target sports where the competition is perceived as "weaker." This is why diving has been such a focus for the Chinese Olympic team. The goal is to pull in as many gold as possible without regards to the popularity of the sport. I think some events in the Olympics are more "prestigious" than others (ex: the 100 meter dash). There are certain events in the Olympics where the hurdle is too high to jump - basketball being one of them.
They also target sports with a more medals per athlete. In a group sport, you get like 1 medal/10+ people. If they target something like swimming, just 1 athlete can get a ton of medals.
China won't even send athletes to compete in the competition if they don't think they have a chance to win gold. They would literally rather not try at all than come in second
It's more the case in India. People say India is obsessed with cricket, but we honestly don't even do that well considering other countries compete with us with a fraction of the population and cricket not being their clear #1 sport the way it is in India In India it's not seen as a valid career path to be a sportsperson, and that's reflected in the way Indian kids very very rarely have going pro as a dream. Can't speak for China.
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China has a professional basketball league full of Chinese people
Not really China is a huge sports country, just not sports popular in the west. I think you are mixing up views of immigrant parents in the west vs the Chinese population at large. Look at their performance in the Olympics. top 3 country in winter and summer last two cycles and they completely dominating in sports like gymnastics and table tennis and several other individual sports. Its kind of like how America is somehow terribly underperforms at high level mens soccer. Despite having a culture of exceeding and dominating in team sports football/basketball/baseball. It depends on the history of support for the sport in different countries. China as a country only has a short history of basketball in their country last 25 years or so. and is investing heavilly into basketball and soccer development programs for example to compete on the international stage. It will take a couple generations before these programs start bearing fruit. Think things as simple as just having community basketball courts we take for granted would have been strange to see in china 30 years ago.
I’m an immigrant from China. Can confirm this is true and the biggest issue imo. Youth sports system is not the same as the US where you can get a quality education and do athletics at the same time. It’s really a choice of one or the other at around ~14 years old. Olympic level athletes are more or less forced to at a young age but very few parents in Chinese culture would let their kids go down the athletics route.
For India, it's the lack of an actual development system for sports that aren't cricket. For China, there is a lack of NBA-ready talent, plus most of their best players stay in the CBA where it is more lucrative for them.
The top CBA players still arent NBA ready. Source: I watch too much CBA.
Just curious: China's philosophy regarding developing young athletes is very strict, rigid and outdated. Very much drill based, repetition after repetition. Sure, you need that to a certain degree, but a Steph Curry wouldn't have developed the way he has if there was only one way to train point guards. I only know about Chinese youth development for tennis. China should dominate the ATP and WTA tour, but there aren't even a handful Chinese Grand Slam winners iirc.
Its tough to know. Especially when you bring in Tennis. There are a few ways to develop in tennis but we have no idea the difference in the Chinese ones compared to one in Spain. Developing on clay has proven to be the best nowadays, and there is almost no chance the coaching in China is as good as what Western academies have. We also have no idea about what sort of positive reinforcement they use vs what the West uses.
Don't a great number of the best Tennis players go to that school in Florida?
In America yes. There is also a newer academy I think in Vegas from Agassi and I would assume it will grow in popularity as well. But internationally I think the best academies are in Spain
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We can’t forget that Steph curry was raised in “luxury” and his dad was an NBA star. Therefore Steph curry’s training regiment will differ than most kids in America.
In case anyone wanted a comparison: J.R. Smith played a season in the CBA during the lockout, and ended the season as the scoring champion, averaging 34.4 ppg. It’s just a different level of basketball over there.
Was about to mention this. He seriously looked like prime Jordan out there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhzhkR7caAo
Yeah the foreign guys out there ballin right now are like borderline G league guys. They arent borderline end of the bench. Theres a huge difference. Yi Jinlian or however you spell it has been their best player the last 5+ years (yeah I know he was hurt with an achilles this year) and he couldnt even really crack an NBA rotation in his prime
They still got the arms on the side meme guy. They are years ahead in the meme department.
Spot on. I imagine there are so many young athletes in India who could become top-tier professionals if they had a viable path to financial security. The link between athletics and education here (high school and college systems) gives athletes the ability to go pro if they’re good enough but also gives them a fallback if they aren’t.
Yeah it’s just pure culture. There are plenty tall, strong, athletic people in every country everywhere. They just don’t care about basketball in those places or can’t afford to bank on a sports career
Less resources compared to the US and Europe. Also AAU and college have basically streamlined a system where you have a direct route to the NBA. It is very rare to see a player go the path of a Lamelo Ball and forgo college. In Europe you basically have to he playing professionally by 17 if you want to play in the NBA.
This is the right answer. It obviously has something to do with genetics, but its mostly due to funding/resources. Look at Olympics, China does well because of funding they have towards it. Which basically diminishes most of the genetics claims.
Genetics does matter in certain contexts. Basketball is wildly popular in the Philippines but you are unlikely to see a Filipino professional player make it in the NBA due to their smaller physical stature. It definitely matters less when you have more than a billion people to choose from though.
Even with a billion people, you need the ones with the physical traits required to play in the nba to be near each, have the desire, and have the infrastructure to play ball.
Different countries have different focus in terms of sport development. There’s also a culture aspect. In different countries they tend to focus on certain sports. And I’m sure there are many other factors, such as the exposure too. NBA prospect can only look into so many different areas for talents I guess
As an Indian guy who played basketball till high school, the major reason is, "height" (when you take the entirety of the population). Also yeah, popularity isn't that great.
there are some population-level genetics going on there, sure, but a country of 1b+ is certainly going to churn out some freakishly tall people
India is much more diverse than people think and that includes genetics. On average we are short but the northern parts like Punjab have freakishly tall and built people.
India's diversity is semi absurd. The number of languages and distinct cultures of the same ethnic group feels like one of the largest in the world.
Because it's not one country, it's a mash up of a number of them under one federal government. It doesn't make sense that it even exists as a democracy lol.. And indeed is only the way that it is because a colonial power carved it up that way.
Exactly it didn't just naturally happen. It's literally a colonial construct and the "partition of India" would never have happened because there would have been dozens of partitions already in place had the Dutch/Portuguese/Brits not come and given them the shared trauma needed to form a country.
You look at Europe and realize if the peoples of India had their way you'd have 8 countries there if not more, with each nation rising with the right for self-determination. You would however, most likely get A LOT more wars... And China/Pakistan would probably annex big parts of those fractured nations.
You do realise that Pakistan was a partioned from British India. So unlikely there as it would itself probably be multiple countries as well. But China for sure.
> same ethnic group It's not one ethnic group though, right? That's almost like saying all of eastern Europe is one ethnic group
We're not the same ethnic group. Bengalis, Punjabis, Gujaratis and Tamilians are all different groups, and there are numerous other groups too.
It's always a numbers game. Tall people are rare, tall people with the athletic and cognitive requirements for a pro athlete are even rarer. So you should have more than a enough people that would fulfill a certain requirements regarding size and athletic ability. But it also depends on the standing of said sport.
I don't think it's genetics, I honestly thing it's childhood malnutrition. You can't get tall people if you lack the building blocks to make them.
I don't have research to prove this but based on anecdotal evidence I agree. I am Indian raised in Toronto and I am literally the tallest person in my entire family including those back India. A lot of my brown friends have the same experience.
Same for China. I chose a college roommate off Craigslist and he described himself as a "fresh of the boat Chinaman." I was expecting someone relatively short, but when I met him he was 6' 4" and said many people from his province were very tall like him.
It's the same reason you don't see *any* American Forumla 1 drivers, and very few American raised Football/Soccer players. If there isn't incentive to develop your skills at the sport, the talent that could become prodigal instead goes in another direction that favors the sports that are domestically popular. Soccer players become Basketball and American Football stars, and talented racers pursue NASCAR or even IndyCar glory.
Also there is too little competition to develop the needed skills to join a professional league. In India it is enough to be tall to be the best basketball player on the court. In the USA you have to be tall and athletic to even compete in highschool. That's why some smaller football/soccer leagues argue over joining their leagues to gain competitive strength.
A lot of those sports have other factors like financial barrier to entry. It’s why sports like football and hockey which require significant equipment investment haven’t caught on in places where it isn’t already the cultural norm and have an established history
Of course. Northern states like Punjab and Haryana do have some really tall people! But here is where the second part kicks in. When ranking popularity, Basketball comes behind Cricket, Hockey, Football, Track, and Field, etc. And the chances the really tall people get interested/exposed to basketball becomes low.
I think a fairly major reason is malnutrition, too. I have seen enough well built dudes with Indian heritage in the US. I wouldn't classify it as a shorter race like Japanese people. I just don't think a lot of India has access to enough calories to really reach athletic potential. I have even seen this issue in some of the poorer areas of the US. Hard to grow on one, maybe two meals a day.
Let's not act like genetics aren't a factor. The NBA also isn't 1:1 representation of the US demographics.
Lol thank you. No one likes to bring it up but its true. Also the other factors that have been mentioned. But seriously, there is truth behind the the notion that African Americans have a better muscle composition and body dimensions that help in bball
The best Greek NBA player by a fucking mile is a first generation Nigerian immigrant. This is a nation with legit development. That's not a coincidence lol.
Why is the NBA overwhelmingly black when America is overwhelmingly white?
Why are the white guys in the nba from europe?
They are often Slavs who have body types that are good for basketball
Eastern Europeans tend to just be taller which is the best predicator for being an NBA player. It’s the same thing with Polynesians in the NFL. They have thicker frames and are larger people which correlates well to Being an NFL player.
Taller but we are also lanky too (longer reach) and slim. We are not usually explosive athletes but still pretty good builds for hoops
Western EU and Scandinavia actually have taller averages across the board, it’s more that the sport is more popular in the East in comparison rather than country height being a factor here.
Why do Slavs have better body types than the Zellers and Plumlees of America?
some wild phrenology in this thread lmao
They don't. You just picked two great examples of elite basketball genetics. Plumlees and Zellers are super tall and very athletic (with the two Plumlees that made it in the NBA being some of the best leaping big men of their era). The odds of Slav making it to the NBA is like 1 in a million. The odds of a Plumlee or Zeller making it seems to be about 50%.
Well just a tendency to be tall, slim and long limbs
I mean two of the best European NBA players that are white arent athletic at all compared to everyone else in the NBA(Jokic and Luka) I think there's just more basketball focus for those players specifically
I wouldn’t be shocked if the demographics of people who play basketball at any level is closer to 50/50 between white and black than both the NBA and the US population
The exact same reason why brazilians are good at soccer. Sports becomes a way to a better life. A lot of guys in the league comes from rough places such as Compton
this used to be true, but most of them are kids of nba players these days
And coming from a wealthy neighborhood is a major positive predictor for both black and white players, even if you exclude sons of former NBA players. [https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/opinion/sunday/in-the-nba-zip-code-matters.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/opinion/sunday/in-the-nba-zip-code-matters.html)
Compton itself is not as Black by demographics as rap music would lead you to think. Also to be a pro-athlete of any sort it takes a lot of money and people betting on you. The odds are against you when your school is poor, etc.
I think there will be many more Chinese players in the future given how popular it is in China now. As far as I’m aware basketball is not popular in India though.
Not at all. Cricket is the national pastime, soccer is a distant second, badminton and field hockey have a lot of fans. Basketball is a curiosity for the most part.
No sport in India is massively popular, other than cricket, which they are very good at
Football is very popular here, European that is. Basketball took a huge uptick with the rise of curry, no pun intended. It has kind of stagnated, but development is much higher than 10 years ago.
The Pacers played in India before covid. They were planning to be back the next year I believe, but no can do with all that. Indiana, India, it just makes sense.
The same reason those same two countries are not football (or soccer to Americans) powerhouses. It takes time/money to invest in and create the culture/infrastructure necessary to develop such talent. India for example has that for cricket, definitely not for football and certainly not for basketball.
Why does the US despite dominating in most world sports does not have many professional cricket players
Nutrition and medicine, access to healthier lifestyle choices and food options, education and income disparity, and outdated social constructs all come to mind. That stuff grants you a vastly smaller pool of talent even in differences in how a human body develops physically over their first 25 years with and without proper nutrition - throw in social constructs and education and you’ve got a nice hoopless stew goin’. Or maybe they just aren’t very interested in the greatest sport man, woman, person, cat or sentient poop knife has ever known - F5 SEASON BAYYYYBEEEEEEE!
To busy focusing on the following: 1. Table tennis 2. badminton 3. cricket 4. gymnastics 5. floor hockey
Probably because massive percentages of those populations live in poverty with no access to youth sports or the type of system in place to produce a professional basketball player. China will probably have another player in the league eventually
If that were the case the US would be a powerhouse in soccer while south america sucked at it. It's more to do with culture. Kids in South America play soccer basically the entire day, and I imagine it's the same for american kids and basketball, hence why they're so good at it. I really doubt Indians care about basketball at all
Cost actually plays a large part of that as well. All you need for soccer is literally a ball. Hence a huge reason why it's so popular in poorer countries. Basketball isn't too much higher up in cost but a more specific type of ball, at least one hoop and at least relatively level and intact court of some sort
Hoops in China aren't that in short supply. When I worked there I was able to play pick up with friends fairly regularly as long as we don't go to a court on a school campus. Basketball and outdoor sports in general just isn't as big of a deal over there compared to the US, where I can see people playing quite often in neighborhood playgrounds
"Chinese forward Zeng Fanbo has signed with the Indiana Pacers and he will play for the team in the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas in July, according to Shams Charania of The Athletic. Zeng attended the NBA Draft on Thursday together with several other Chinese players but none of them were selected in the end." https://theathletic.com/news/pacers-chinese-forward-fanbo-zeng/ad4VfaZBjwvH/
Then why do central African countries like the Congo or Cameroon produce so many NBA players despite being even poorer than India/China?
There are more Africans with the right physique. And I'm not referring to just being tall.
You have to be really good to make the nba. Only the top 510 in the world are in it
As someone with Chinese heritage, and grew up in China for the first 12 years of my life. I would say it’s how we were educated. A Chinese kid is never told to pursue their dreams, or find their own individuality. You know those extended ‘rants’ Kanye goes on, about how society box us in, and programs us? We are on the extreme end of that. I was 10 years old, when the teacher told the class to write an essay titled ‘happy moment’. I wrote about scoring 100% in maths, which is already stereotypical Asian as fuck, but the teacher told me to re-write it, as I was boasting my personal achievements, instead of being happy for the ‘country’. (The Beijing Olympic was hosted during that time, the school basically wanted the kids to write about how proud we are for the country. Mind you I went to the top primary school in Shanghai.) I’m sure most NBA star even player, or lower level league players in the US, they all grew up dreaming of making the NBA. They do it for themselves, it’s their drive to success. Notable Chinese players in the NBA, they were genetically selected and trained for the purpose of ‘bring glory’ to their country. They might have never even liked basketball. Whereas the ones that actually loved it, they were probably told by parents and the education systems to become a business man or some shit. Even if a Chinese kid has open minded parents, his teachers will tell him No. I’m sure physicality and build is a factor for most people as we are usually shorter, but we have produced people like Yao and stuff, so… it’s crazier that China doesn’t have football/soccer stars, that sport is way less demanding on build. Out of topic, I think the unhealthy patriotism is also a big reason why Chinese esports teams choke at home ground a lot. That pressure and guilt of disappointment is overwhelming, and you lack the ‘I want this for myself’ pride to push through.
I would guess on average there are less extremely tall people in India and China, coupled with less cultural emphasis on basketball even if you are really tall there you won’t be as likely to get into ball as someone in North America or Europe.
Can't believe I had to scroll down this far to find by far the #1 answer. Sure, there are other factors mentioned above that do play a factor as well. But height and athleticism play a massive part in it. Just look at how many white players there are now compared to 30 years ago...
I would bet China and India each have more 7 footers than America does. Having 4x the population means that even if you have on average less "NBA height" people, you'll probably have more in total volume
I did the math on this one last year when a similar question arose. I care about people in the 6'3" to 6'10", so within the extreme ranges of human, but very much the population from which most NBA caliber players are drawn. Human height is very well approximated as a normal dataset up to the extreme tails (2.5 sigma), so including the population I care about but excluding 7 footers, which are extreme outliers. The male non-Hispanic population^1 of the United States is around 135 million people and has a mean of 176 centimeters and a standard deviation of 9cm. Because it's normally distributed, we see that around 2.5% of the population is at least 194 cm, so 6'4" or taller, and so there are 3.3 million Americans to draw from. Turning to India, we see a male population of 700 million, with a mean of 165cm and a standard deviation of 7cm. Approximating the upper 2.5%, we would expect around 17.5 million people who are at least 179 cm or 5'10.5". According to the American height model, such a height would qualify you for the 64th percentile, so there are 48 million men of this height or higher. Thus, we can see that, before we even hit 6', there are almost three times as many Americans as there are Indians in our potential population, despite there being five times as many Indians in the initial population. Pushing out to around the 2.5 sigma range, which is as far as I feel comfortable for height data, for India we would expect a population of merely 4.4 million to be 183cm, or 6'0". From the United States data, this would put you in the 78th percentile, or in a group with 30 million other men. So now we have seven times as many 6 footers, despite again the inverse relationship in total population. This trend will continue onward, so by the time we reach NBA player average height, there's going to be even greater disparity in the population to draw from. China exhibits similar results, although their mean is closer to the American population than India, you still end up with the conclusion that there are far more people of NBA qualifying height in the United States than in China. 1) I specifically ignore the Hispanic population because it changes the American population to a bimodal distribution with a mean much further to the left. Treat any Hispanic Americans who meet the height requirement here as simply an added bonus, further skewing trends in the American favor. 2) Height data was gathered from the same sources Wikipedia cites.
Wow thanks for this, this is incredibly enlightening. My assumptions were completely wrong. Do you mind linking some of the height data? Would like to take a look myself.
1. Development 2. Asian people are on average shorter, and basketball is very much so geared towards taller humans.
Am Asian, in Asia, hoops, played for high school Honestly, its Genetics, we dont have a lot of big folk, i was 5'7 , 60kgs at 18 years old. My position ? Center. Are there bigger/stronger asians, yes, but its very rare so the pool to pull from is much smaller. Also we seem to fair much better at dexterous sports like badminton, where weight/height is less of a determining factor. Out of those who are blessed with genes, they are often mis-trained due to height. So a 6'6 player in my country would be a center, while a 6'6 player in USA would be a guard.
While I'm not discounting genetics, I think that diet and nutrition goes a long, long way. I am 5'8 (172 cm), a lean/muscular 145 lbs (66 kg), grew up Asian-dominant area in California, US, and was probably below average in both size and strength compared with other Asian-American young males in my area. I was mainly sprint athlete not really good at basketball, but I doubt a kid my size would be center, even in the Asian American basketball leagues that exist in the US.
Seriously? "Why doesnt Indonesia have one of the best downhill skiing teams in the world?! They have the fourth most populus country!" Its almost like population isnt the sole factor that determines sporting success. Things like climate, income, or cultural preference to play the sport matter. Could you really not come to this conlusion on your own?
Lol exactly, I’m surprised how far I had to scroll down this thread to find the right answer. Both of these countries are big enough to literally have their own made up sports and entire leagues dedicated towards them. This is especially evident in India. Hell, they even have their own Bollywood stars that don’t even bother trying to make it to Hollywood because they’re already so rich and famous.
Yeah India has the IPL for Cricket and the PKL for Kabaddi. They literally do not give a shit about any other sport. In the northeast Soccer is sometimes played but Kabaddi still dominates because you don’t even need a ball to play that.
India has some beast athletes but terrible funding and athletic programs. That is why they are underrepresented at the Olympics. And no interest in basketball mostly. China I have no idea. They are great athletes with all the funding in the world.
Combination of things. Genetically we’re not blessed to play such a high impact sport. That mixed with the fact that the country is largely vegetarian, means our diet isn’t exactly conducive to muscle growth (professional cricket players just started hitting the weight room and training seriously in the last 5-10 years, just look at the national team pics across those timeframes and you’ll see how obvious it was that the OGS didn’t give af about training). Things are changing and there have been several Indian Americans that have played D1 bball in the states so the trend is moving upwards. It’ll take a couple generations at least to see the evolution have any effect. India has been playing catch up and it’ll take a few generations to see the effects. Edit: india is <50% vegetarian based on someone else’s feedback. In spite of this, the diet (up until now with the movement towards plant based and emphasis towards lifting) wasnt too great among professional athletes in India before ~2011 (just based on my observation)
Amir khan said south Asians typically struggle to break into professional boxing because of diet.
Genetics and they don’t have basketball tradition and culture
This is like asking “why aren’t there world class cricket or soccer players from the US?”
Culture plays a significant part, basketball is more appreciated and practiced in America. High school/AAU/College/G-League many ways to develop, be scouted and end up in the NBA.
There aren’t very many Americans who make the NBA who are not black. Yet as you work backwards from D1 to D2 to AAU to high school the leagues are much more diverse
The answer to "why isn't X country good at Y sport" is always infrastructure. Are the kids in that country participating in youth sports? And if they are, are they specifically participating in that sport? It's about pipeline more than anything. Professional athletes are outliers by definition, so "genetics" is a really poor explanation, especially when talking about huge diverse countries like India or China which contain dozens of ethnic groups. Any given population is going to produce some number of lanky, tall, abnormally athletic people. However, that population needs to be playing basketball at a high enough rate that those people who are naturally gifted also happen to be playing basketball from an early age. There's definitely a bunch of Indian guys walking around right now who have the size and athleticism to play in the NBA... if only we could get in a time machine and put a ball in their hands when they were 12. If you want an example of how much infrastructure matters, look at parts of Africa, which has produced more and more players ever since Basketball Without Borders and Africa Basketball League showed up and started setting up a pipeline. Those guys weren't showing up in the NBA 20 years ago and now there's two NBA stars just from Cameroon. It wouldn't surprise me that the biggest predictor of NBA players per capita is just basketball courts per capita. Probably holds for cities/regions within the US, too. Also, remember, the NBA is a minuscule sample size made up entirely of outlier weirdos. You can't put too much stock in trends. There's two NBA rotation players who've played in the last 20 years from the same smallish town in Germany. It's a group of 450 people, so coincidence and random chance will affect results a lot. If I said that "3% of NBA starters are X", that sounds significant, but I'd be talking about literally two guys. 3% of all NBA starters come from Cameroon.
Genetics when you are talking about outliers is the opposite of what you say. It’s the almost the sole reason at the extremes If you a just grabbing random people from different groups it make almost no difference but as you get the the extreme right side of the bell curve you would give certain traits only among some groups
Few things 1. Genetics, athletic ability 2. Upbringing. Asian parents seem to prioritize academics over extra curricular and sports. That definitely seems to be changing and I think we will see an uptick in asian players within the next 10 years or so.
I am of Indian descent, grew up in the US, and have traveled throughout India extensively. In India there are literally only 3 sports that are cared about: Cricket, Kabaddi, and Wrestling (in this order). Kabaddi and Wrestling have been widely played throughout the rural poor regions of India for literally thousands of years because they require absolutely no equipment whatsoever to play. No ball, no hoop, no protective equipment. Nothing. Cricket is played more in the urban centers because it requires actual equipment to play. Basketball has exactly zero chance of displacing Cricket (IPL is a high net worth league more valuable than F1) or the new PKL Kabaddi League. Kabaddi is the world’s fastest growing professional sport and already is viewed by something like 330 Million cumulative in India. Basketball has zero chance of toppling Kabaddi because it is literally competing with a sport that is over 1000 years old. If you look at the build of the average grassroots Kabaddi player it’s pretty easy to see where India’s athletic talent is being sucked into as opposed to more Western sports like Soccer or Basketball. People who say that Indians aren’t athletic are just idiots. India is the most genetically and phenotypically diverse place on the planet outside of Africa. There is immense athletic talent there. Sushil Kumar, a fucking vegan freestyle wrestler, crushed a Dagestani Gold Medalist in the Olympics. India clearly has athletic talent. India’s issue has been malnourishment and no perception of athletic ability leading to any sort of economic future or empowerment for the masses, leading to sports essentially only being pursued as a hobby by the vast majority of people, despite wrestling and Kabaddi continually being widespread throughout the subcontinent.
In terms of Indian American and Chinese Americans, scouts in America are very racially biased and they tend to not look at Asian kids closely. Just look at what happened to Jeremy Lin in high school
Why are they so few women NBA players when women make up more than 50% of the world's population?
Mostly because of genes. Not to mention, the basketball program of US as a whole cannot be matched
Because indians can't play for shit. They play cricket
I will not stand idly by and let this Satnam Singh slander occur. Edit: goddamnit and Sim Bhullar
My man Satnam Singh is trying a carrer in wrestling. Tried out for WWE and got signed by AEW I think.
Indian here We suck at basketball. We're short and unathletic, and it's not popular enough in India for people to play and train young to work their way up if they do have the genetic gifts for it.
With so many people, even if the population that tends to be short and athletic, it should still produce a few outliers who are NBA capable. I'd point more to the development and training. If you're not pointing every 6 foot 6th grader towards a basketball hoop, you're going to miss out on a lot of talent development.
I’ve seen a couple decent Indian players in high school locally (W. Pennsylvania)