Guest on ESPN Radio this morning said NBA players are best athletes in the world.

Yeah, I guess the ESPN commentators meant to say that professional basketball players are the best BASKETBALL PLAYERS in the world.

Poiuy explains quite well why this must be what they meant.

I don't know exactly what the commentators said or meant to say. IF they meant that the best measure of being an all-around athlete is the ability to play basketball, then I think that claim is meaningless because part of what makes one a good basketball player is the ability to excel at the arbitrary rules of basketball and this doesn't necessarily translate to other sports.

With all due respect, the discussion involves NBA players. Playing at a DIII school with a 35 second shot clock is not quite an apples to apples comparison.

I think most athletes who have done many sports would agree that basketball players are the best athletes. Speed, agility, hand-eye-coordination, strenght, explosiveness, endurance all comes into play in basketball.

So your position is that when someone says "athlete" you don't know what that means?

I think you are arguing for the say of arguing.

Nobody is saying that basketball players are better distance runners than distance runners. But overall they posses more of the qualities of an athlete than participants of other sports.

co-ordination, speed, strength, endurance.

Son of a Guy wrote:

Some things are obvious wrote:

Things that seem obvious to the stupid seem obviously false to the intelligent.

I played basketball for a DIII school. That makes me one who has played more competitive basketball than 99.9% of the population.

By the way, I do not disagree that great basketball players are great athletes. Only that sprinting (running at top speed) is something that is done far less than 1% of the time on a basketball court (at least when serious basketball players are involved). Of course, if you ever played competitive basketball you would know that already.

With all due respect, the discussion involves NBA players. Playing at a DIII school with a 35 second shot clock is not quite an apples to apples comparison.

With all due respect, the issue is not whether or not one is capable of playing in the NBA but whether one has played "competitive basketball".

Reading comprehension problems?

Volleyball players are under-rated.

I generally rate athletes from differing sports on the likelihood they'd be able to compete in the others genre. How would a bball player fare in running, football, rugby, triathlon, swimming, bazzball.....

What sports players have the greatest chance of excelling at other sports.

my own personal feelings wrote:

I generally rate athletes from differing sports on the likelihood they'd be able to compete in the others genre. How would a bball player fare in running, football, rugby, triathlon, swimming, bazzball.....

What sports players have the greatest chance of excelling at other sports.

I personally agree this is the best starting definition. However, when we actually do that, the results are at best unpredictable, I think. Michael Jordan, for example, did not fare very well at baseball. Neither did Danny Ainge (although better than Jordan).

It helps me to think conceptually about two parts of different sports--generally I think that different sports lie along a continuum of fitness sports to skill sports (perhaps continuum is a bit simplistic). The more a sport emphasizes basic fitness elements the more translatable that athlete might be to other fitness based sports (or to the part of the sport that involves only fitness and not skill).

So in my sort of thinking track and running events generally are basically fitness based activities. So athletes from other sports who have good fitness seem to tranlate pretty well--we see this when we see threads on here about football players who ran track in high school and college, when we see threads about soccer players showing up for track practice and doing well, when we see threads about distance runners translating well to bicycling in a relatively brief period of time. Of course we see immediately the downfall in this sort of thinking--there are at least two different kinds of fitness--speed and endurance--so that sprinters might translate well to basketball, baseball, football and endurance guys to bicycling, triathlon, swimming. Amd of course this generalization works better the lower down on the food chain you get--many great football players may make great high school sprinters but at some point the training requirements for a professional sprinter diverge both in technique (block work) and in body type (can't gain too much weight). That doesn't even get into the complications of more technical field events.

The situation is even more complicated when you start talking about skill sports. Baseball is one that you think of pretty quickly--it takes very specific hand-eye coordination and lots of reps to do well at it. Sure fitness in speed, endurance, power all help but are not sufficient for success. Swimmers have efficiency and technique that can only be learned through long hours in the pool. Soccer players have a need for foot-eye coordination that I don't see in many other sports. Hockey players needs skates and ice, etc. Those are all skills which do not translate very readily from other sports at all. I would pick a modestly athletic kid who grew up on skates rather than a very athletic NBA player who had never been on the ice (it would take this guy years and years to catch up, if he ever could).

So, I think every sport has some mix between fitness and skill. If you want to talk just a mix of fitness attributes, I think that NBA players probably rank pretty high on a range of measures. To a certain extent that does translate well to a variety of other games--for example they would do OK with the running in a soccer game and could do OK at high jumping with a bit of practice. However at the elite level almost every competition also has technique and skill that is specific to that game that makes the top practitioners at that sport very specialized.

Who is the best athlete all depends on the criteria you use.

If it's endurance, it's elite marathon runners.

If it's power, it's perhaps football or maybe a case to be made for basketball or maybe even SOME baseball players (Pujols).

If it's strength, then power lifters or male gymnasts (ever try to do an iron cross on the rings?)

If it's a combination of speed, agility, power, and strength, then perhaps NBA players are it.

What if it's pure skill? Golfers? Bowlers? NASCAR drivers?

Personally I don't go with the skill sports, because if we do that, then maybe we need to add Speed Cubing and Cup Stacking to the list. Lots of others can make a legitimate claim though.

Chess players. End of discussion.