South Korea - What happens when talent gets diluted

From joongangdaily.joins.com
Download source here

This KBL season has so far seen teams bunched up in the standings with no clear-cut front runner. Six KBL teams are at or above .500 in the standings, and a seventh team is one game below the even mark.

And this is what I wrote on Jan. 8, 2008. You can look this up.

“Take a look at the KBL standings this week: six of the 10 teams have win-loss records at or above .500, with a seventh just a game below the mark,”

But there are slight differences this year.

The Dongbu Promy are once again in first place. After 30 games a year ago, they were 22-8. Through 27 games so far this season, they’ve already lost nine games and have for the most part looked more sluggish than a year ago.

Their lead over second-place Mobis Phoebus is only one game. Even the KCC Egis, the eighth-ranked team at 12-15, are six games behind the Promy. With another 27 games or so left to play for each team, this is by no means an insurmountable margin.

And remember, if anybody had the chance to bounce back, it’s the talented Egis.

The current season has been marked by streaks of both kinds, winning and losing. Nine teams, except for the last-place KTF Magic Wings, have had a winning streak of at least three games. And nine teams, other than the Promy, have suffered through a losing skid of at least three games.

So what gives?

The talent level has definitely been watered down across the league, especially with import players who often have huge roles in determining the outcome of games. There’s a reason only three of 20 foreign players - Marquin Chandler of the KT&G Kites, Reggie Okosa of the Promy and Terrence Leather of the Samsung Thunders - were re-signed with their 2007-08 clubs.

The KBL adopted an open draft for foreign players before the 2007 season, in tacit acknowledgement of the long-held rumor that under the free agency system, teams in pursuit of top-flight players were shelling out cash under the table.

Suddenly, the KBL teams couldn’t afford free agents from top European leagues or prospects out of U.S. colleges.

Choi In-sun, a television analyst and former KBL head coach, once said with less talented imports, Korean players would have to pick up the slack and that presented a golden opportunity for homebred talent to shine. But that hasn’t happened.

Most key local players are 30-something veterans, the usual suspects, who have had their ups and downs over the course of the season. From a purely offensive perspective, the number of Korean players averaging double figures in scoring has fallen from 20 to 12 to nine over the past three seasons.

No one from the vaunted rookie class this year, including the 222-centimeter-(7-foot-3) center Ha Seung-jin, ranks among the top-20 Korean scorers.

Choi has another theory stemming from my watered-down argument. Because teams have less talent, they’re having to tighten up defensively, leading to cheap fouls on fast breaks and causing what he calls “unnecessary disruption” to the flow of the game.

“Fouling an opponent ball carrier on fast breaks just to stop the break has been really problematic,” Choi said. “Referees don’t call technical or intentional fouls but they should. You can play proper defense to foil fast breaks.”

My position on parity has not changed over the past 12 months. If you don’t have a rooting interest in any team, league-wide parity is a lot less fun than watching selected few teams dominate, because at least those few teams would actually play some good basketball.