Yes, but maybe one of those women is better than a pro player! I mean 5 on 5 they get stomped by people that aren’t even athletes, but that doesn’t mean that the best of the bunch couldn’t compete with NBA players!
The best women’s golfers are as good as the 100th-best male golfer or so, which is a higher rank than you’ll see in almost any other sport. Women’s hockey, soccer, softball, and tennis are very watchable sports in and of themselves, even though their best athletes couldn’t compete with a bad men’s player.
Women’s basketball is doubly cursed by the fact that its athletes can’t hold a candle to a boys’ high school team, and that they’ve basically gone their whole lives being told how brave they are for playing sports so they never really bother to develop basic skills at the game. There’s an old cliche about how women’s basketball players have great “fundamentals.” In fact, they have awful fundamentals. Players on Final Four teams in the NCAA and at the professional level shoot from their bellies and look at the floor while dribbling. Women’s basketball is an aesthetic nightmare that has set women’s sports back decades – I wish something like women’s hockey or NCAA softball was being pushed instead, because those are at least fun to watch.
I’m a fan as well, but I completely disagree with you. Diana Taurasi in her prime was probably a better shooter than a number of male benchwarmers and smarter than a good number of them. But she’d still be pretty much unplayable in 99% of situations because she’d automatically be the slowest, smallest, weakest player on the floor. She’d be an utter liability on defense and crippled on offense except on a spread floor with open set shots from the perimeter, because she wouldn’t be quick enough or strong enough to make her own opportunities. Unfortunately basketball is a sport that the higher up you travel in its ranks the more athleticism trumps skill. Women just aren’t big enough, strong enough and athletic enough to compete in the NBA. Not by a longgggg shot.
Which is fine. I regard women’s basketball and men’s basketball as two distinct sports. Related, but seperate and I enjoy both. Indeed until recently I preferred the WNBA as I hated the dominance of ugly-ass isolation ball NBA ( like LeBron’s recent score-fest in the finals ) with big bruisers in the paint clubbing the opposition into submission. Thankfully I love the new Warriors and the pendulum seems to be swinging in their direction.
on what evidence do you base this opinion?
Based on the women who have played in PGA events from time to time.
I wouldn’t know; while I follow a few women’s leagues, the only men’s league I pay attention to is the NBA.
My sense of basketball has always been that, whereas it resembles other sports in that the truly super-elite players tend to combine freakish athleticism with high basketball IQ, and even most middling players have some level of athleticism, I believe it differs from other sports in that it’s still possible to be an effective player, even if you have vastly inferior athleticism, as long as you have a high basketball IQ, and are not completely immobile.
To be fair, Griner is a center who doesn’t have the skillset to play any other position but center. At 6’8", she clearly couldn’t play center against men but, then again, aside from a few unique players in highly specialized circumstances, 6’8" men can’t play center against other men, either. Griner’s height and build would demand that she play small forward, and she doesn’t have the athleticism or the skillset to do that, even against other women. That’s the most obvious reason why any NBA team drafting Griner, or otherwise bringing her in for a tryout would be a publicity stunt, and that’s why I didn’t mention her as someone who I thought might be able to do it.
If it could be done (and I stipulate that we’re talking about an astronomically large ‘if’), it would most likely have to be a player who is 6’3" or taller (making her a ‘big’ in women’s basketball), but who also has guard skills. Griner would be disqualified from that list. If it could be done, it’d be somebody like Elena Della Donne, or Candace Parker, or Sancho Lyttle… maybe Tamika Catchings, if she were still in her prime.
I played against Delle Donne recently. She has guard skills, no doubt. She may have been the best player on the floor even though she was probably taking it easy; she probably shot 50-55% and I had a pretty tough time stopping her when she got into the post. I got a couple of steals and I don’t think she could stay with me full court off the dribble, but geez she is smooth out there. We only barely squeaked out the win.
… of course, I’m five ten and I’m 32, and at my athletic prime I couldn’t get a D1 offer to save my life. But still.
But there are dozens of D League and college players the same size who are stronger, faster, and quicker, and they can’t make NBA teams. What make you think any of these women would be considered?
Might want to talk to the IOC about that, for it recognizes bridge as a sport.
The IOC recognises synchronised swimming and dressage as a sport, I think I’ll trust my own opinion on that one.
Based on the women* invited* to play on PGA events from time to time?
How many times has that happened? how well did they do?
Serious question. If the top 10 women golfers played on the PGA tour against the men week-in week-out, where do you think they would rank?
You seem to be suggesting they are around top 100, I think that is massively optimistic.
Then you don’t know anything about baseball.
Throwing 70 mph will let you dominate little-league baseball against boys who haven’t hit puberty yet, but unless you have really devastating secondary pitches, getting a sniff from affiliated pro ball entails throwing 85+ mph and up; even the guys who make a living throwing knuckleballs generally started out their careers throwing hard. It’s possible that she’ll get taller and add the needed muscle, but unlikely.
Girls can hold their own at Little League for the same reason they’re taller than the boys at the seventh-grade school dance. It passes.
The hardest a woman has ever thrown a softball is 77 mph:
http://monicaabbott.com/monica-abbott-blog-new-speed-record-womens-fastpitch-77mph/
Which is about comparable to what the best pitcher on a bad high school baseball team can do, and won’t cut it in the NCAA or the minor leagues.
In the majors, it won’t even constitute a changeup.
In Peru volleyball is THE women’s sport. It’s the sport all girls play. Out team has won a silver medal and a 2nd place in wolrd’s championship. Even that all-star, top-level team was creamed by U17 men’s team. This is made worse by the fact that in Peru men’s volleyball was considered (and still is although less) a “sissy” sport, so those playing it were those who’s been rejected from all other sports teams.
It reminds me that the Swedish national team met a U17 men’s club team a couple of years ago to prepare for a championship; and even though the boys were told not to put pressure the national team when the women had the ball on their own side of the pitch, and played with 10 players in the second half to even things out, they boys won by 3-0. It was a great learning experience, according to the coach, but the boys are simply quicker and finds each other with the passes much better.
She would make multiple times what she makes if she played in the NBA off endorsements alone. The fact is that the financial incentive to play in the NBA would trump anything she could ever make playing women’s basketball.
She is not even close. You forget she is playing against women, not men, which basically means she is not being guarded… Have you ever played against any man even close to being a pro? They are all insanely good relative to your average rec player. The reason some of them may shoot poorly in the NBA is because they are being guarded by other insanely talented people. The fact is that Taurasi would barely be able to get a shoot off.
What is this even supposed to mean? When you are a professional athlete, athleticism IS your skill. Even you are making some point about modern players lacking “fundamentals”, you are still wrong.
I really think people underestimate the WIDE gulf between male and female athletes in nearly every sport or competition.
This is wrong IMO. John Stockton? Magic Johnson? Steve Nash?
In soccer England is full of highly athletic yet not technically gifted players and always disappoint. Technique usually triumphs athleticism in the long run.
What about them? Just because they look like they’re succeeding on guile doesn’t mean they don’t far exceed human norms for physical capability. Just the fact that Steve Nash could run up and down a basketball court for three hours a night at age 40 puts him a few standard deviations above the average male.
Fully explaining this concept may help some people understand the difference between the highest levels of men’s and women’s sports.
Every one of these players (and you picked three Hall of Fame guys, this applies equally to the worst player in the NBA at any given moment) spent their entire lives through high school dominating their peers at every aspect of every sport by sheer physical superiority. Only once you reach the DI NCAA level do you see any separation at all between people who have technical skills and specialization and those who don’t. You need to be that kid who is singlehandedly winning baseball, basketball, football, and track championships for his high school team to even be considered pro material. Completely out of that pool, the best 1% then make it to the privilege of sitting on the bench for a year in the majors. The 1% of the 1% have a 20-year career as a star like the three guys you mentioned did.
That guy who struck out every batter and hit three home runs every time you played him in Little League and spent the whole year on travelling all-star teams? There’s 99 guys like him who can’t cut it in the majors for every 1 who can. Not 99 guys in your Little League. 99 guys that good.
That’s what pro sports that everyone wishes they could get in on are like. Playing women’s soccer for $15,000 a year? Be a woman who is interested in soccer, stays in shape, and has enough passion for it that you’d rather take the sub-minimum wage salary than go work at Burger King for more. It doesn’t even come close to comparing. And remember – if you’re just one of the best all-around women athletes in the world, you would play tennis or golf where the top women can actually make serious money. Professional women’s soccer or basketball are for people not even good enough to do that.
They are ALL fantastic skilled athletes. I am not sure what your point is.
First, that is not what your initial claim was. You initially said athleticism trumps skill, which makes no sense.
Second, technique doesn’t trump skill even in the long run. Even using a liberal definition of those two words, no one in a mature professional sports league lacks athleticism so the two concepts are not really at odds.
You are going to have to define athleticism.