Let's go there!
What are your answers to the question Matthew Yglesias has declared too "unseemly" to ask: Are Balkans good at basketball for the same reasons blacks are?
Yesterday, Matthew Yglesias, NBA fan, notoriously declared:
I’m not sure why people from the Balkans outperform [in basketball] other people experiencing a lack of melanin. I am also not sure why Black Americans outperform white ones. You could imagine these dual outperformances having similar underlying causes or very different ones. I have not looked into it, and frankly I don’t intend to, because I am happy living in a society where it is considered unseemly and inappropriate to preoccupy oneself with such questions.
But, this being SteveSailer.Net, I’d be happy to hear your theories on why blacks and Balkans do so well in the NBA.
My take: one reason is because Balkans, especially those with mountaineer ancestry, tend to be a couple of inches taller than white Americans. And tall Balkans don’t seem terribly spindly. They tend to look more well-proportioned than elongated.
In contrast, the federal NHANES project that measures Americans for the convenience of the clothing industry, finds African-American men to be a fraction of an inch shorter at the median than white American men. On the other hand, black variance is slightly greater, so African-Americans seem to have more very tall men as a percentage, but, in general, black and white Americans are pretty similar in height.
Balkans perform well in other sports demanding rewarding height like volleyball, water polo, and tennis. Serb Novak Djokovic might well be the best tennis player ever.
Balkans also do well in sports that aren’t biased toward the tall. Luka Modric led little Croatia to almost winning the soccer World Cup in 2018.
But they aren’t necessarily super-athletic as Americans now understand the term “athletic” after a couple of generations of watching black athletes. Serb Nikola Jokic, 6’-11’ and 284 pounds, seldom dunks because he doesn’t leap very high off the ground and his arms aren’t particularly long for his height:
But Jokic is in a tight battle with black guard Shia Gilgeous-Alexander to win this year’s NBA MVP award, which would be his astonishing fourth, even more than Larry Bird’s three.
Jokic is a basketball genius, the best decisionmaker among all big men ever. He’s like Bill Walton with a three-point shot. But Walton could jump a mile, during his rare healthy spells, and he still wasn’t as effective as Jokic. Hence, this year Jokic finished in the league’s top three in scoring, rebounding, assists, and in steals per game, a category usually dominated by guys weighing about 80 or 100 pounds less than him.
Maybe, it’s less nature than nurture. Perhaps the Balkan nations are better at training basketball players than American basketball culture? I don’t know that much about the nurture side of the question.
I look forward to your comments?
From The Ringer:
"“In Bosnia,” he says, “we call inat.”
"Everywhere I went—Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia—I heard the same word. The word can’t be translated, not exactly. Which means it can be translated inexactly in a million different ways. It’s kind of just a general sense of fuck you. After first hearing it, I came to love listening to the different ways people around the region define it.
“It means basically, ‘I’m going to do it out of spite,’” says Jovanovic. “I’m going to do it against my better judgment because you have failed to show necessary respect and belief in my good abilities. And I’m going to do it just to prove it to you.”
https://www.theringer.com/2023/02/21/nba/nba-balkans-nikola-jokic-luka-doncic-mvp
For someone who finds ascribing human differences to Nature unseemly, Yglesias offers nothing in the way of a Nurture explanation. Tacit admission of defeat of Blank Slate by "negative pregnant," a lawyer might say. Hell, even though I lean toward Nature I could come up with some argument.
My only sustained attempt at varsity sport was high school wrestling. I noticed that, even at JV level I was stuck at, wrestling kids from Eastern Montana farm communities was significantly harder. Same weight class, but they all felt denser, stouter, just harder to move. Could poorer, rural environments in former Yugoslavia create bigger boned guys that are tougher to block out? (For that matter, I've often wondered about whether the greater durability of old HOF pitchers had to do with blue collar/farm upbringing.)