A couple of days ago some idiot on the Fan 590 (Toronto's local all sports format station) was holding forth on the American Olympic basketball team, which hasn't been blowing the supposedly inferior competition away.
"The rest of the world has caught up with the United States" he thundered with barely concealed glee reveling at the downfall of the hated Americans"
I don't know much about basketball only that it is at times mildly interesting but for the most part populated with showboating megastars who are grossly overpaid despite the presence of a salary cap. But it is apparent that the American "Dream Team" is not performing as well as it should.
So I went to the blog world and found the blog of Mark Cuban owner of the Dallas Mavericks. What does Mark suggest the Americans do to improve their international play? Suprisingly he suggests a Canadian solution
Canadians have gone through much of this "international game is different, we have the best players but don't win, etc." business over the last decade or so in hockey. The parallels in many ways are eerie, and well worth looking into. The influx of Europeans into the NHL draft was a huge issue in the late 90s, for instance.
But strangely, after some huge disappointments (e.g. the men's team not winning in the Nagano Olympics) the country radically changed the way it handles international competitions. And I do mean radically.
First, they appointed a "general manager" responsible for personal selection for each international team. They do this for the annual tournaments like the World Junior's and for the multi-year ones like the World Cup and the Olympics. This GM basically acts like the GM of a major franchise. He scouts for player selection, both on Canada's team and to identify the strengths/weaknesses of other country's teams. He selects the coaching staff. He is in charge of the whole process.
In Salt Lake City, after Canada tied a (much) inferior team, he gave a (now-famous) rant to the media about how the refereeing was biased against his team and how everybody in the world wanted the team to fail. The talk worked: the team didn't have even a marginally close game the rest of the way. He took *responsibility* for the whole process.
Second, the country as a whole politicians, editorialists, and average fans made it clear that losing wasn't acceptable. Sure, international rules are different the size of the rink is completely different! So what? We expect our teams to return with a gold medal each and every year in each and every tournament. Always.
Cuban is right on that last one - in Canada we expect nothing less than pure dominance on the international hockey stage. But beyond all the supposed solutions we have implemented there is one thing that he doesn't mention in his blog entry: We send the absolute best players. Always.
Look at the Salt Lake Olympics and the upcoming World Cup. No one could argue that (barring injury) we haven't selected the cream of the NHL crop. Sure there would be an argument about whether Brian McCabe should be the 9th defenseman but our starting lineups are without a doubt the best we can offer.
I don't think the American basketball team currently playing in Athens is the best team they could put together. Sorry I don't think Lebron James is the best at his position in the NBA - he is barely out of college. And Allen Iverson - he had a subpar year and is clearly past his prime.
I challenge you to go up and down Team USA's starting 5 and tell me there isn't a player in the NBA you wouldn't trade one-for-one with them.
No Shaquille O'Neal? No Kobe Bryant? No Tracey McGrady?
The problem with USA Basketball is that they haven't sent their A Team in fact I think they have sent their C team.
Update: As Brian J. points out in the comments below Lebron James never went to college he is barely out of high school.
That's the good news. The bad news is that some of "them" are still alive.
According to Canada's lovable ex-terrorist Abdurahman Khadr he met "a lot" of Canadians training in Al-Quaida camps. I know a lot of people that are living in the West and are living in Canada, and that live their everyday life now and are not under arrest or anything, that have been to Khalden," Mr. Khadr testified at a July 13 hearing in Montreal.
"I had a lot of friends that were Canadians that came to Afghanistan and went to training," Mr. Khadr said. "Some of them are dead now and some of them are back in Canada and some of them are under arrest."
So the Olympics are upon us. Why am I not excited? When I was a kid I loved the Olympics. I didn’t know much about the sports but the best thing was that anytime you turned on the television there was some type of competition on. I remember when the Montreal Olympics were being held in 1976 we used to try to emulate almost every sport we saw. We even tried to do shot put using big heavy rocks.
Nowadays you don’t get as much live coverage. In fact the first piece of Olympic sport that I saw this weekend was a boxing match and I already knew the outcome. I hate highlight packages – just give me the live stuff.
So on Sunday morning I was watching the women’s bicycle racing and marveling at the massive ass of the Guatemalan cyclist when CBC did one of it’s kitchy cultural bits. Some woman came on to tell us about the island of Crete.
Greece does have a lot of islands and Crete is certainly well known but just how big is Crete?
Well our young hostess informs us Crete is about 3,189.7 square miles. Gee how to put that into perspective for the Canadians watching at home?
Well she helpfully informs us "Crete is about ¼ the size of CUBA"!.
Wait a minute I know lots of Canadian’s have vacationed in the workers paradise but couldn’t they find a Canadian island for comparison? I mean we do have a lot of islands.
If they wanted to pick one that is roughly the size of Cuba, how about Newfoundland which at 42,031 is just a little larger than Cuba’s 40,543? Now there is something I learned today – Cuba is only a little smaller than Newfoundland! I thought Cuba was just a little thing about the size of Jamaica (4,244 sq mi) but nope it appears Castro’s gulag is actually pretty large.
Plus could someone check this math for me please? Crete seems to be less than 10% the size of Cuba not 25% as was mentioned on the show.
But getting back to the Canadian angle, Vancouver Island is about 12,079 sq mi or about 4 times bigger than Crete (which makes Crete 25% the size of Vancouver island not Cuba but then again there are a lot of Fidel sympathizers out there) while PEI at 2184 is about 50% smaller than Crete.
But here’s the kicker – Crete at 3189.7 sq mi is about the size of? Cape Breton Island (3,981 sq mi) ok not exactly the same size but they could have easily said: Crete is about 75% as large as Cape Breton Island.
So now us paranoid right wing conspirazoids are left to wonder why the CBC picked CUBA out of all the islands in the world to make that comparison. Not to mention the CBC’s obvious problem with math.
Update: The CBC does seem to be providing more coverage than I initially thought. Its 7 am and I am watching women's softball right now. Canada and the US have these skinny pitchers while China's and Japan's are built like tanks - what gives?
