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NBA Needs Own Hall of Fame

The Professional Football and Baseball Halls of Fame are dominated, as one might expect, by the National Football League and Major League Baseball, respectively. After all, they represent the elite level of their sports. Basketball, on the other hand, has invented a system where high school players, women, and stars of overseas minor leagues are more likely to get in than the National Basketball Association elite. ESPN’s Mark Stein:

The NBA’s dwindling representation in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the growing frustration in response have prompted increasing calls for the league to break away and start its own Hall of Fame. But that’s not David Stern’s answer.

Stern himself voiced pointed displeasure earlier this year with the downward trend but has shown no interest in an NBA-only Hall. The league’s commissioner prefers to push for a revamped and more “transparent” selection process with the 48-year-old Basketball Hall of Fame based in Springfield, Mass., which will induct a 2007 class this weekend that features no NBA players and only two honorees with NBA ties: Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson and legendary referee Mendy Rudolph. “We have always been supportive of the Hall of Fame,” Stern told ESPN.com. “Among the constituent groups, we are its largest financial backer. We were persuaded early on that an all-encompassing Hall of Fame was good for our sport — men, women, high school, college, pro, international and media.”

Questions about a selection process that has historically favored college coaches have grown louder over the past three years, starting in 2005 when neither Joe Dumars (a former NBA Finals MVP who has won championships as a player and executive with the Detroit Pistons) nor Dominique Wilkins (the NBA’s ninth all-time leading scorer) was selected as a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Longtime coach and television analyst Hubie Brown was the only NBA representative in a 2005 class that featured college coaching titans Jim Boeheim and Jim Calhoun, former LSU women’s coach Sue Gunter and Hortencia Marcari, who is considered Brazil’s best-ever female player.

Dumars and Wilkins joined first-ballot inductee Charles Barkley in 2006, but the 2007 class continued a 10-year pattern of NBA slights, with Adrian Dantley and Chris Mullin among the players nominated but not selected. Joining Jackson and Randolph in Friday night’s ceremony are North Carolina coach Roy Williams, four-time WNBA championship coach Van Chancellor, two international coaches (Spain’s Pedro Ferrandiz and Mirko Novosel from the former Yugoslavia) and the 1966 Texas Western team that beat Kentucky to become the first school to win the NCAA title by starting five African-American players.

In the past decade, 25 coaches and nine contributors have been inducted into the Hall of Fame compared to only 20 players … and only four of those 25 coaches were from the NBA. In the same span that Jackson, Larry Brown, Alex Hannum and Bill Sharman were selected, Springfield has inducted eight NCAA women’s coaches, four international coaches and one high school coach. Of the 20 players chosen in that span, only 14 were NBA alumni.

Frustrated by the repeated snubbing of Golden State Warriors coach Don Nelson, who won five rings as a player with the Boston Celtics and ranks third all-time in coaching victories with 1,232, Stern told the New York Daily News in May: “It’s absolutely unacceptable, the [selection] process. It’s troublesome. It doesn’t even bring the NBA in in a rational way.”

Perhaps the biggest source of contention in that process is the fact that Springfield inductees are chosen by committee as opposed to, say, a vote of tenured media members as seen in baseball.

In basketball, there are four separate committees that screen and nominate candidates, one each for North American candidates, females, veterans who have been retired for at least 35 years before being nominated and internationals. NBA players and coaches can thus qualify in only the first of those four categories, giving women and international candidates an advantage because their pools are much smaller on the first step to enshrinement.

It’s simply idiotic to have women and high schoolers in the same Hall of Fame as Michael Jordan and Larry Bird. I’m sorry, championships in the WNBA or women’s college hoops or high school or Venezuela. It ain’t the same ballpark, ain’t the same league, ain’t even the same sport. It’s like comparing the Special Olympics to the Olympics.

 
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Comments
 

I understand the point, I just don’t agree that the NBA should start their own hall of fame. That said there is an enormous flaw in how inductees are selected. If, and only if, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame is unwilling to address this issue should the NBA seek to set up a separate entity.

Posted by --Fin | September 9, 2007 | 11:23 pm | Permalink
 

What is a shame is that Artis Gilmore is not in the Hall. How could an eleven time all star not be in the hall?

Posted by Mark Beyke | September 10, 2007 | 08:04 am | Permalink
 

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