How hard is it to make the NBA?

[oh the horror]

This is why I always laugh when people downplay players in the league for having an off night or empty stats or downplay an amazing performance if it's against a "bad team"


Do people realize the level at which these guys are playing on?

[AlphaWolf24]

I always felt that basketball players are the best athletes out of all the major sports.

- Luckily I got the chance to play with and compete against a few NBA players growing up ( in highschool)...and many Divison 1 BBALL/Football players.

- I remember playing against Jason Kidd....Kidd's hand/eye coordination is non describable. In Highschool , He was so strong / fast....he could Rip any guard and toss them to the ground like a Grown man playing against grade schoolers.

Kidd is just as Big as Tony Gonzalez( TE on the Falcons)..but faster....stronger and on a whole other cognitive skill level.

- I guess my point is.....Pro players are amazing athletes who are generally Bigger faster and stronger then 90% of the population......seriously unless you ever compete against a NBA player.....it's hard to understand just how great of an athletes these guys are.

I played with alot of Bay Area players.....GP , Lamond Murray , Tony Gonzalez, Abdul rahim.....guys could dominate at will...amazing players.....

showed me enough to understand how special NBA/Pro players really are.....and how hard it must be to also put in the work to make it.

[IGOTGAME]

Like my friend said, there are thousands of players in the world as good as lebron but choose not to play in the nba because of their different interests. Some might be into painting, art, or music instead.

this is just silly. i would be surprised if there were 2/3 other people in the world with Lebron's talent but just didn't know it. You would figure it out just doing everyday things. The difference in coordination, height, strength and speed would just be jolting. He is basically not human.

[ALBballer]

If you win the genetic lottery and are 7 foot tall then with some skill and coordination you have a good shot.

For the rest of us it is extremely difficult.

Drawing on Centers for Disease Control data, Sports Illustrated‘s Pablo Torre estimated that no more than 70 American men are between the ages of 20 and 40 and at least 7 feet tall. “While the probability of, say, an American between 6’6″ and 6’8″ being an NBA player today stands at a mere 0.07%, it’s a staggering 17% for someone 7 feet or taller,” Torre writes.

(While that claim might seem like a tall tale, more than 42 U.S.-born players listed at 7 feet did debut in NBA games between 1993 and 2013. Even accounting for the typical 1-inch inflation in players’ listed heights would still mean that 15 “true” 7-footers made it to the NBA, out of Torre’s hypothetical pool of about 70 men.)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamo...ch-in-america/

[jstern]

Semantics? You literally said thousands of players are as good as Lebron and chose not to play in the NBA. There's nothing to misinterpret here, just complete nonsense from you.

I read and got his point. Forget about basketball, there are thousands of people with potential to do anything, but some would never know it due to life circumstances. That's basically his point, so don't focus so much on a poorly chosen example just to defend what you thought he said.

I could probably have been the GOAT cricket player in the world, if I had been place at the right circumstance, but in my current life, I have no idea how cricket works. That's an example of a scenario, doesn't literally mean that I would be the GOAT cricket player.

I used to have a similar thought back in the 90s. That perhaps there are hundreds, if not thousand of people capable of being as good as Jordan, if they had the same height, but all happened to be under 5'8" so never even began to play basketball.