Stars Sitting Out The FIBA World Championships? Blame Capitalism!

Throughout the annals of recent human history, there have been a lot of problems blamed on the single force known as "capitalism." When the global economy collapsed (twice), it was all capitalism's fault. When World War II happened, it was all capitalism's fault. When the Cold War first brought on the potential for nuclear war, it was capitalism's fault. When several big-name players dropped out of the 2010 FIBA World Championships because they were concerned about their professional careers, it was all capitalism's fault.

Wait, what? Capitalism can be blamed for the watered-down talent in FIBA these days? If you ask Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports, the answer is yes. Wojnarowski filed a column today in advance of tomorrow's Team USA-Russia quarterfinal game, and concluded it with this:

Thirty-eight years later, all the hate and acrimony between the Americans and Russians is gone on the basketball court. They used to look across the floor and wonder what in the world they had in common. All those Eastern European states - Serbia, Croatia and Lithuania - gobbled up the best players, and Russian basketball is left fighting for its identity, its soul, its future. Chicken fingers and potato skins in the shadows of the Ottoman Empire and Sea of Marmara - yes, the final victims of American sporting capitalism have paid a steep price.    

Woj got to that final paragraph after talking to Russia's coach David Blatt, who is resigning at the end of the World Championships after rebuilding the Russian basketball program over the past six years. Blatt admitted that things have changed for Russia, pointing to Andrei Kirilenko, the Russian star that is not playing because his pro team wants to protect their $80 million investment. Eager to pile on, Wojnarowski definitively called Kirilenko a "diva," and also had this to say.

When your nation's best player is a flake, good luck building a national team around him. AK-47 is no product of a Red Army team, but the spoils of a teenage sensation who got too much, too young. Just like what happens in the United States - and just about everywhere else in basketball now.    

That's one way to classify Kirilenko. Here's another: a professional player who does not want to jeopardize his way of life, his final chance at making a living (his contract is up after this year) and injury by playing in a volunteer tournament, all as a member of a professional team that needs him desperately next season and wants to avoid having to deal with the nagging injuries he always ends up having. But no, we have to go with the convenient patriotism angle instead, because millionaires always make the best patriots. Right?

The funny thing about Wojnarowski's entire premise is that, historically, the best players in the world have never played in international competitions. The only exceptions are the 1992 Olympics and possibly the 2008 Olympics. Even in 1972, in that great Soviet Union-US gold medal game that Blatt and Wojnarowski keep romanticizing, all of the US players were amateurs. The only thing that's different now is that more international players are in the NBA, which has always been the premier global stage. If the tradeoff to that exposure is a decline in FIBA participation, that's a trade-off these countries just have to accept.