On Losing Our Basketball Identity

Don't know if you saw Austin Burton's piece in the magazine, "A Hoop Scene Without Heroes?" Burton examined whether, if the Sonics leave, the city's vaunted NBA pipeline will dry up.

He talked to Jamal Crawford, Nate Robinson and Marvin Williams, all of whom said to varying degrees that, yeah, having NBA players around helped me develop and, no, I probably wouldn't be where I was without them.

But I thought that the most compelling bit of information came from an interview he did with the Storm's Swin Cash, who grew up in Pittsburgh. The Steel City has an MLB and NFL but no NBA team--the same arrangement Seattle would have if the Sonics leave.

Cash told Burton: "When you grow up without NBA basketball, [the sport] gets off your mind real fast. You gravitate to what’s there, be it football or baseball or hockey. Growing up for me, it was a football-dominated area. Everything centered around football and around the Steelers. All my cousins played football. That’s what you knew, because your role models were the Pittsburgh Steelers."

I read something in this month's SLAM that backed that up--Pitt's DeJuan Blair is the Panthers' first recruit from the Pittsburgh City League in more than twenty years.

Think about that--only a single player from the city leagues in twenty years. Contrast that to the Huskies, who in just in the past few years have had Overton, Hawes, Roy, Conroy, Robinson--all of whom came out of the Metro League.

Not that it's hurt Pitt too much--they've been to the tournament for the last seven years, a streak that started under Ben Howland and has continued under Howland's former assistant, Jamie Dixon.

Lorenzo Romar has shown that he can recruit nationally, and having fewer local players might not have an impact on the program at all.

It would just be weird, is all, since Metro guys have been such an important part of top Husky teams--from Queen Anne High's Bob Houbregs, who led the Dawgs to their only Final Four; to Roosevelt High's James Edwards, star of the UW's next NCAA tournament team, 23 years later; to Garfield's Alvin Vaughn, starting guard on the 24-win 1984 team; to the Roy, Robinson, Conroy years.