When Steve Nash and Blake Griffin talk player development, it carries weight, and the pair offered their honest thoughts on why Europe is producing fully formed basketball players while the USA is not.
Neither is theorizing. Both lived the systems they are critiquing.
Its pay to play in the States. You know, capitalism is wonderful, but its not great for player development, Nash said. In Europe, to play, its free. You go to your local club. Its subsidized, more or less, mostly by the community. So there are no hidden motives. Theres no we have to win or the kid is leaving for the next club. Everyone is there for the long term, to develop.
And I think what you get from that is coaches. There are thousands of amazing coaches in the United States. Its not like great coaching only exists in Europe. But over there, they have a structure where you generally stick with your coaches, and you learn to play the game the right way, under the right pretenses.
Here, its been totally commercialized. It makes it really hard for coaches to get their hands on a program or a kid and say, We are going to develop you the right way, as a group, to play skill basketball, team basketball, and learn to play a variety of ways.
Over here, its very much like Swin said: get in your bag, learn skills. Some skills coach is charging you by the hour at the park, whatever it is. Its gotten out of hand. Unfortunately, I dont want to take money out of anyones pockets, but it makes the structure really difficult to teach kids to play the long game.
Blake Griffin echoed the sentiment, focusing on how Europe teaches the game itself.
I think the U.S. did a good job of sort of bridging that gap and developing its players skill-wise, but at the same time, Europe does a great job of teaching basketball, the game of basketball, how you play, how you space, how you win, how you move, he explained.
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