From: bih@bagheera.East.Sun.COM (Bennet Ih - Sun BOS Hardware - Sunergy)
Newsgroups: rec.sport.basketball.pro
Subject: Reality Check (was Re: Australias would heve beaten dream team)
Date: 28 Aug 1992 13:59:31 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems Inc. - BDC
Distribution: world
Reply-To: bih@bagheera.East.Sun.COM
NNTP-Posting-Host: bagheera.east.sun.com

Where do these "We could have kicked the US's butts if..." postings keep 
coming from? Even some postings from Australia admit that the Aussie
NBL us a MUCH weaker league than the NBA. And the facts are the Aussie
team didn't even make the medal round. Is this some kind of joke just
to see what kind of flame fest can be started (not that that's very hard 
on this newsgroup)?

Well, assuming this isn't a joke, let's go over blip@tartarus.uwa.edu.au (Bryan Lip)'s
arguements...

> Just remember one and all, the performances of the australian team

They finished a distant sixth at the Olympics. What's your point?

> australia defeated puerto rico by 40 points, which was 2 points more
> than what the USA could do... 38 points
> which proves if the dream team played australia, i feel australia would
> be the team closest to beat the USA , even maybe, kick their asses.

Wow. There's an air-tight arguement if I ever heard one. Let me make an
analogy. I'm not sure if you follow college football (American style) but I
graduated from Cornell a few years back and the school paper ran a 
humorous story on how Cornell's football team should have been ranked
#1 in the country that year. It went like  "Cornell beat Penn who beat Villanova
who beat ...(goes on for about 20 teams)... who beat Stanford who beat Notre 
Dame who is ranked #1. Therefore Cornell should be ranked #1. 
Pretty damn silly. And what you're saying is even sillier. Sorry, all this proves is
that the US got bored pounding on Puerto Rico and didn't bother running
up the score.

Go over some NBL scores sometime and see how often this theory holds up
(If team A beats team C by 25 and team B beats team C by 30, then 
team B always beats team A by 5). I'm sure it doesn't hold up well in any
league in any sport.

> so just remember, stop discrimminating the australian team until you see
> their potential....

> note this...

[crud on how great all the aussie players are]

Can one of the stat masters out there PLEASE dig up the numbers for Gaze and 
Longley in the NBA to settle this once and for all? Also the reason a lot of 
foreign players pass up a chance to play in the NBA is that they know they
will have limited playing time. So when you say "So and so could have played
for this team but turned them down..." doesn't mean the team wasn't good 
enough for the player; it just means the player wasn't going to play much for 
the team and he knew it. So he went on to a weaker league where he knew
he would be able to play every game.

Sorry I don't think anyone is discriminating the Aussie team by questioning 
it's competetiveness.  The facts just are Aussie basketball is not that good.
Croatia and Lithuania are the only two teams within hailing distance of the US.
And the results of the Olympics prove that.

-Bennet
 

Newsgroups: rec.sport.basketball.pro