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You knew what he meant ffs. We were discussing the relative competitiveness of the NBA vs pro tennis. There just aren’t as many people willing to shank their homie to get into the tennis world. Not as a player anyway.
It’s Eels level headline writing.
I basically haven't ventured in to the Covid thread since its inception so I don't know how nasty it got in terms of insults flying between posters but I'm vaguely aware of IALB's thoughts on the topic putting 2 and 2 together from other threads. Like you, I find him to be a good fella with some humourous and insightful contributions. I hope he's back sooner than later....
Hang on, wasn’t it you that brought the amateur side of things into the discussion?
I also think there would be far more people on the tennis pro circuit that have come from poor backgrounds than players in the NBA under 6 feet.
That’s where the talent pool comes from. The key determinant for how competitive it is to get in the door.
While it no doubt requires less talent to make the NBA the taller you are, this just means that the most skilled players will cluster at the lower end of the height range. These guys aren’t filtered until the very end of the journey to the NBA. Meanwhile the majority of superior athletes are filtered out of tennis during childhood, leaving more privileged children to duke it out with significantly less competition. What this means is that there’s no hyper competitive clustering at the ‘poor end’ of the pro talent pool. Where lack of height is a disadvantage in basketball, poverty is an actual (and very early) barrier to career success in tennis.
Yea we were talking about professionals, ie the NBA and pro tennis. You decided to talk about poor people playing basketball on the streets.
No, what it shows you is that not every player is tall.
Which is the origin story of so many NBA players. Far less than tennis professionals.
Which wasn’t my argument. My argument was that you pretty much need to be a giant to be an NBA player.
Again, not true. It’s no doubt easier for giants to make it but there’s a bunch of basketball superstars only 6’2” tall. This is the average height of the top ten men’s tennis players, and hardly ‘giants’.
Playing tennis on the streets instead maybe?
Yea so there are some outliers. Just like there are outliers to the statement that only rich people play tennis.
An outlier would be Muggsy Bogues (5’3”). At 6’2” Irving and Curry aren’t outliers.
Do you think ‘only rich people play tennis’?
