Euro Aversion

My buddy Dave commented on the Billy King post about BK's "Euro Aversion." I want to make the case here for drafting foreign players.

If you look at the best teams in the league, they are littered with great foreign talent. The Spurs stayed awesome by plucking Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili late in drafts. They have consolidated by adding Fabricio Oberto, Tiago Splitter, Ian Mahinmi, Beno Udrih, and others. The Lakers have Pau Gasol, Sasha Vujacic, and Vladimir Radmanovic. The old Kings had Peja and Vlade. Today's Jazz have Andrei Kirilenko and Mehmet Okur. The Suns have Boris Diaw and Leandro Barbosa.

What's strange is that the Eastern teams, save the Nets, Pistons and Raptors, have basically been averse to foreign talent--to their own detriment. Yes, Andrea Bargnani is no stud. But plenty of great players in the NBA--from Dirk Nowitzki to Thabo Sefalosha, not to mention Yao Ming--hail from overseas. Most of the foreign players have a specific skill set: they know how to play the offensive team game well, many of them can shoot, and few of them are great defenders. Guys like Gasol and Ginobili are absolutely unstoppable at the international level.

Teams ignore these players to their own detriment. Not every international star is a boon, many are busts. But we could say the same about high school or even college stars. Jiri Welsch, Korleone Young, and Trajan Langdon do not a good team make. But Yi Jianlin, Lou Williams, and Al Horford are the future of the NBA. To ignore any source of talent is catastrophic. The Raptors were able to piece together a very good team by simply plucking international talent that other teams had ignored. What team couldn't use Anthony Parker's (picked by the Sixers) shooting or Jorge Garbajosa's savvy? Jose Calderon will be one of the hottest commodities on this year's free agent market.

Every team needs guys who can pass and shoot, who know how to play the team game. European and South American players are particularly adept at these skills. The best teams in the West--the Suns, Spurs, Lakers, Mavericks, Rockets, and Jazz--all employ them heavily. In the East, the Nets and Raptors have decent foreign players and the Pistons famously drafted Darko Milicic over Carmelo Anthony and now appear to be once bitten, twice shy. The Spurs strategy of staying great by drafting foreign players late in the draft has served them extremely well. Few other teams have caught on. The Spurs even had to draft-and-trade (for salary cap reasons) Luis Scola and Leandro Barbosa to competitors because of the dearth of scouting on these players. How can so many teams be dropping the ball?