Whenever Chinese basketball comes up, people are always baffled: Why, with a population of 1.4 billion, can't we find five people who can play ball?
Countless people have offered countless answers to this question. Chinese people aren't physically suited to the game, they lack basketball IQ, China has no basketball tradition, the Chinese Basketball Association is irresponsible... But all these answers have been proven wrong.
The simplest answer is right there in the question: It's precisely because we're trying to find five people who can play ball among 1.4 billion that we can't find five people who can play ball.
Does that seem hard to understand?
Then let's put it another way: Is a population of 1.4 billion necessarily an advantage for developing basketball? If a country's overall strength and economy improve, does basketball have to improve at the same rate?
Too much of a good thing can be bad. A population of 1.4 billion is actually an enormous disadvantage for developing basketball. The population of each province in China, on the other hand, is just right for developing the sport.
In this book, you'll see what happens after China lets each province develop basketball independently: China's provincial teams can crush the powerhouses of the United States, Spain, France, Serbia, Argentina, Canada, Australia, and other Western nations, while nearly all of the world's top ten basketball clubs come from China.
