HoopsHype.com Columns

Is the upset really that upsetting?
by Jon Finkel / September 5, 2002

Reggie Miller’s face said it all. He had the bewildered look of disbelief that appears on the mug of men trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. The look. Wide eyes that only crinkle slightly on the bottom from that weird curl the middle part of your upper lip does as your nose sort of flares. We’ve seen the look. The Rams had it. Ms. Melanoma had it after Uncle Buck flipped her a quarter. If the look could talk, it would say, in the clean version anyway, “What in the world is going on here?” Or, more specific to Reggie Miller’s look, “ What in the World Basketball Championships is going on here?”

The shortest version of what happened on Wednesday night is this: The United States lost after winning 58 straight in international competition. The shortest explanation is this: They were outplayed. Actually, their team was outplayed. As the Patriots showed us in the last Super Bowl, solid teams with fiery intensity can beat a cast of stellar individuals. Fine. It was an upset. Not an ‘UPSET!!’ or an ‘Upset!’ or even an ‘Upset’. It was an upset with a lowercase ‘u’. I can feel the stream of international e-mails coming my way already, demanding to respect and recognize the Argentina victory as a cataclysmic event in the history of U.S. basketball. The mighty Americans have fallen they’ll say. I say, along with the millions and millions of other Americans who were not one of the 5,623 people in the stands last night, whatever. A nice, succinct, wholly American response.

Whatever.

I love basketball. I’ll watch almost any NBA, college or High School All-American game on television. If I’m in the mood for basketball. Like most avid sports fans, my sports watching inclinations follow the typical season of sports. Summer is my baseball season. It is the only time where one of the major team sports is on by itself. The end of summer slowly allows me to shift gears into preseason football and ultimately, the NFL season. Now, as the baseball post-season is in full gear, it is time for the NBA preseason to begin. So, the end of September and October looks like this: Baseball Playoffs, Preseason NBA, NFL Football. Almost as soon as baseball ends, the NBA regular season begins. For the next four months, it’s basically the NFL, the NBA, College Hoops and the NHL, but to a lesser extent with some people. The Super Bowl is in February and then I shift high gear into basketball, beginning with March Madness running all the way until the NBA Finals in May or June. All the while, I’m shifting gears back into baseball and the process starts all over again. Not to mention, all of the boxing, golfing, tennis and other sports that American Sports fans watch. Why have I gone through all of this? Just to try and explain that the World Basketball Championships, while they are understandably compelling to the rest of the World, are hardly a blip on the radar screen of American Sports fans. We just aren’t captivated with other sports events unless they happen every two years and begin with a big O.

I know these facts bother people. But Indiana is one of the two or three hot beds of basketball fanaticism on the whole planet. You’d be hard pressed to find a city or state of people more obsessed with hoops than the folks in Indiana. Yet the WBC’s are the lowest attended basketball event in Indiana, behind all other events held in the area, including the boys and girls high school championships. If the WBC’s don’t draw a crowd in the United States in Indiana, then that is telling us something.

So, with all of this said, what does the loss mean? Well, it probably signals a change in the way the players representing the United States prepare for these international games. I don’t know if it will force better players to join the teams, but at least the ones that go will realize that these international teams are not a joke. The Argentinean Team has practiced together for a year preparing for the WBC’s. The United States and its NBA players may have to practice a littler harder during their one month of preparation to make up for lost time.

The flip side of this is that the U.S. team is probably a little ticked off at themselves for losing and the old adage about ‘waking a sleeping giant’ could play out.

Fundamentally, I don’t think this changes things very much. The influx of international talent began a few years ago and is peaking, especially with the results of this years’ draft. So, it’s not as if the NBA scouts and fans are just now realizing that there is a wealth of basketball talent across the Earth’s oceans. They already know that. What they may now consider is the fact that within their lifetimes, their may be enough of that talent to have a truly international league, whereby, a European Championship team plays an American team for a title. Not European, as in just European players, but a League of teams like the Western Conference, only called the European Conference.

Imagine, 20 or 30 years from now a worldwide basketball league, with the best players on Earth concentrated into one World League. It could be the Inter-National Basketball Association. The I-NBA. It would be treated just like the NBA is now, except the league would be separated into two main divisions. The Americas, consisting of North and South America and Eurasia, consisting of Europe and Asia. The teams will select their players in an international draft. Trades and free agent rules will apply as they do now, so each team will be composed of players from all over, not just from that city or countries’ locale. Traveling between Leagues would be tough on a regular basis, but you could keep the 82 game season, but have the middle 10 games or so are played on a different continent. Then, each continent cluster has a tournament and the 7 game series is decided in an awesome location each year, a la the Super Bowl. It would become one of the greatest international sporting events ever, and it would happen every year.

Jon Finkel is a regular contributor to HoopsHype.com

Tell us what you think about this column. E-mail us at HoopsHype@HoopsHype.com