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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Saturday, April 21, 2012
In an article about Jeremy Lin, the Rockets’ GM writes that the NBA could benefit from a farm system like baseball’s.
Major League Baseball (MLB) drafts some 1,500 players a year. Once selected, they must work their way up four levels of minor-league teams before joining the parent club. This gives MLB organisations the incentives of salmon, which spawn scores of young far upriver in hopes that a handful make the treacherous journey all the way back to sea. Each team can invest in hundreds of prospects and see which pan out, needing only a few winners that “hit it big” to make up for all the failures.
In contrast, NBA teams cannot hold the rights to anyone beyond the 15 players on their active roster. That makes them more like elephant mothers, who give birth to very few babies and have to gestate them for almost two years. With limited investment opportunities, teams are forced to choose only the players with the greatest likelihood of success, and then give them a long-term contract and a potential path to significant playing time.
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1. Dangerous Dean Posted: April 21, 2012 at 11:49 AM (#4112120)If so, can we retroactively re-name "The Decision" as "Operation Dumbo Drop"?
The entire premise of the article is inane. Lin's story doesn't tell us that many players' talents are massively underrated by the NBA talent scouts; it tells us that Lin's talents were underrated. As an Asian-American from an Ivy League school, he's been fighting two strong stereotypes throughout his professional career, and those stereotypes undoubtedly hurt his chances of being taken seriously as an upper-tier talent. Lin is an outlier in the overall pool of scouting evaluations, not an example of a larger pattern of incompetent scouting. That's not to say that scouts don't make mistakes, or even that scouts don't make a lot of mistakes. But Lin, by himself, doesn't prove that point.
I haven't read the article and won't, but based on the excerpt, I would disagree.
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