Women in the NBA?

David Stern says he believes "a woman could be playing in NBA within the next 10 years"
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/ian_thomsen/12/04/countdown/index.html

This is a topic that comes up often and gets debated. Are women in basketball near the point where one might play against the top men soon?
Or are women in any other sport close to playing against men?

I doubt this column will change people's minds, but here are some simple facts and a few opinions to make the case.

We'll get to basketball later...but first let's touch on a few other sports.
Once in a great while we read of how a girl can play against the boys and maybe even be successful at the junior high or grade school level.

Here is one of those cases, where a Beaverton, OR (kinda Freudian, huh?) girl wanted to play on a boys travel basketball team.
But the issue here isn't that girls can play with boys, the issue was that a very exceptionally good girl who was way, way more developed and mature than the boys in her peer group, could play with a mediocre group of travel team boys, thus maybe bumping a boy off the team.
But she was 6-1 as a 7th grader!
This is hardly an example of a girl playing at the top level in her sport. Plus give it a couple years then by the time she's 14 or 15, the average boys of her age group will beat her easily.
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2008/09/beavertons_jaime_nared_given_o.html

Then we all know how a washed up 55 year old man, Bobby Riggs, who was never even that good of a tennis player even in his prime, took on the TOP two ranked women in all of professional tennis and beat one while playing solidly against Billy Jean King in the other.
Riggs, had he been ranked among MEN tennis players at the age of 55 wouldn't have been within even the top 10,000,000 men players...every high schooler would have been better!
Yet he was on par with the top women.

Chris Everett, shortly after that when making an appearance on the Johnny Carson Show said that even in her prime, she would work out against her younger brother who was a high school tennis player (and who never even became a pro), and that she routinely got beat by him - badly!

Coors sponsored a women's baseball team, the Silver Bullets, and they were the MOST talented women's baseball players in the world...possibly the best women's team ever, who knows...
Claims were made that they could beat the men's teams!!
They went on tour to prove how good they were and that they could take on the men....

Yeah-- right....anyone recall what happened?
Actually, it turned out they had a hard time even finding a men's baseball team BAD enough for the game to even be close to competetive. It became a bit of a joke because they were so inferior to even low level amateur men teams!
It was cute, and it got publicity...but most of the real facts got suppressed, as the Silver Bullets were killed in almost every game they ever played against men...and most of the opponent teams were simply a pick up group of teens from local park district programs!
It actually was hard to even find the scores, because all you'd see were fluff pieces talking about how hard the girls played and how they were "winners in the larger sense"...for having proven how great women were in this sport....
but they lost nearly every game they ever played...the very top group of adult, professional women baseball players was roughly on par with an average group of high school or possibly even high school JV baseball players.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1208/is_n22_v217/ai_15278633/

And of course, many are familiar with Michelle Wie....who at the top of her game tried numerous times with special sponsor exemptions to break into the mens pro tour...but time after time, she never even made the first cut...it was so embarrassing that the press finally called on her to quit it and stop embarrassing herself and the womens sport.
And some say golf might the best sport for a women to actually maybe make it against men - because all out, raw athleticism isn't always needed....golf can be won by finesse and strategy!
In fact it may have actually hurt Wie in the long run, as she has never since been the same player....no longer winning and dominating like she did. As if getting humiliated by her efforts against the men has crushed her confidence and ruined her game.

But getting back to basketball....how would women do if playing against men....?
One bit of evidence, is that men's pro teams are all about winning and making money....
If they thought for a minute that any woman on the planet would actually help them win, they'd sign her. They take long shot chances with high school kids, with obscure European guys, with project players, and with even African giants like Manute Bol.
Why wouldn't they take a chance with one of the top women, unless the answer was obvious??

Then as my final bit of evidence, there's the story of the women's Dream Team. The Women's US Olympic team that won the Gold Medal in Atlanta. The best collection of women's basketball talent ever....Sheryl Swoopes, Lisa Leslie, Carla McGhee, Rebecca Lobo, etc...all who went on to superstar careers in pro basketball.
All were and are fine women's player, deserving of top respect in their sport (but not in someone else's sport ;))

But in preparation for the Olympics, they had to find someone to play against - to scrimmage against. And there simply weren't any women's teams even good enough to challenge them or give them any competition.
So they chose men to scrimmage against....usually a bunch of college men known as their scout team...and they weren't even guys who played basketball in college...more just college kids who the women could work with and play against to get stronger.

PBS did a documentary, and many who saw it will agree...those scout teams were a mis-mash of nearly talentless guys...5-11 and 6-footers who simply gave the women a slight challenge, but who weren't even of sufficient talent to make a good high school team.

But...the key scene in the documentary was when the Dream Team went to Atlanta for their final tune up and preparation. There they had to find a new scout team, so they went to a local army base and rounded up a bunch of guys in their late 20's and 30's who were just guys playing ball on the base...guys who hadn't actually played competetively in a decade...none were college players and some never even played back when they were in high school.
They were army guys so they were in shape, but they had little talent, and if matched against an average high school team probably would have struggled.

Even in the documentary, they narrator acted like this would be a good challenge but that the women's Dream Team had a good chance to beat those army guys.
The truth was far, far different...

The coach-less, chaotic group of hacks who had never played together before other than shoot around in an army base gym, not only beat the women's Dream Team badly, they pummelled them as bad as any mismatch I have ever witnessed.
The women went 10 minutes before scoring, two had to be carried off the court, one tore her knee up and was out of the Olympics, and the men, playing at about 1/2 speed so as not to hurt the women too badly, showed the nation on film that they were the victors.
The game was halted before more of the women dropped or collapsed with the final score of the scrmimage game being about 75 - 20.
The women decided not to even finish the game as their casualties were mounting, and they realized it was a very bad idea.
They were not only getting embarrassed by a bunch of hacks, they were being humiliated...
at one point one of the assistant coaches for the women approached the cameraman doing the video documentary and asked him to turn off the camera as they didn't want this stuff being filmed - it was too embarrassing.
Even more ridiculously, when PBS aired the same documentary a few weeks later right before the Olympics...the entire sequence showing the humiliating scrimmage against the army guys was strangely removed and not shown.

Oh well...the truth got out, and they were not able to suppress it any longer...the very top women in the world...who went on to easily march right through the entire Olympic field and win the GOLD, were annihilated easily by men who wouldn't even be ranked within the top one milion men if there were an endless NBA Draft...

So, to David Stern....you might be fooling some people...but if a women ever gets to the NBA it's be purely as a gimmick...a publicity stunt. Just like the tryout offered Ann Meyers a few years back by the Phoenix Suns...and like Nancy Liebermann playing on the summer circuit with some low level men's teams.
It just isn't going to happen...

But then why should it?? Can we not simply accept that men and women ARE different?
There are very good women's players and they don't NEED to beat or be compared to men...why is there this incessant effort to make the point that women are as good as men?
Why do the very same people who make these ludicrous claims about women being as good as men, also get so riled when the shoe is one the other foot?
Anyone recall a few years back when a couple boys were allowed on one high school girl's bowling team, and they advanced all the way to the state championship?
Of course the rules were changed to never allow that again! And the uproar and anger in many of the losing team's players and parent took years to squelch!
Then just this past spring, it happened again in Pennsylvania and a couple of girl's volleyball teams allowed boys on the team and became dominant!
of course there was a bit of an uproar!!
http://thedailyreview.com/polopoly_fs/1.396100.1257485099!/image/1765198663.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_240/1765198663.jpg

Case closed.........