Do you think the talent pool is thin in sports

[Guest Still Fly]

I think the thinning of the talent pool is serious very thing especially in hockey and baseball.

 

In hockey there are so many damn teams now its ridiculous. Does Southern Florida need two hockey teams. Does Los Angeles need 2? I mean Nashville and Atlanta? WHY? Its damaging hockey!

 

In baseball you have teams already that are done for the year. The Tigers started 0-11 for crying out loud. The talnet is beig spread way too thin and its damaging baseball. Teams arent even competive anymore!

[Guest Lethargic]

Granted I'm a bit biased because I live in Nashville and the Predators are my team. My #1 team out of every sport there is. But even before they came here, I still found this talent/expansion argument to be retarded. Do I think the leagues should expand MORE? No. Do I think they should fold teams? HELL NO!

 

You wanna blame expansion for the reason that Detroit is 0-11?? Detroit SUCKS. They'd suck if there was 20 teams, they'd suck if there was 10. No matter how many teams are in the league, some are gonna win, some are gonna lose. The problem with most sports, most notably baseball, is that teams like New York and Boston are gonna spend gigantic amounts of money to win, and teams like Detroit are not. Bad managment and cheapskate owners are the reasons for bad teams, not expansion and not a lack of talent.

 

Look at the NBA. If they had been talking about shutting down teams in the NBA, just a few years ago, Sacramento and Dallas were in the basement and would've been two candidates for contraction. But they were only bad because of poor ownership. As soon as the Maloofs and Cuban took those teams over and spent some money, bam, they're both contenders and two of the most popular franchises in the league.

 

NHL is the same way as baseball. The only problem with those two sports are they have horrible CBAs. Both leagues HAVE to have some sort of changes that allow teams that aren't in the major markets to be competitive. You could close down 3 or 4 teams in baseball and it wouldn't make a difference cause the good players would still end up going to those same 4 or 5 teams that is willing to spend the cash. You could close teams down in the NHL but it'd still be the Red Wings and the Avalanche making blockbuster deadline deals every year. They both need a hard salary cap and they both need a hard minimum salary cap. That alone would give every team a shot at being competitive. I'd also make it possible for the league to take a team away from an owner. Everybody sick of Donald Sterling being a cheapskate? Buy him out and sell the team to a owner who willing to put forth the effort to win.

 

Another problem with sports, mostly the NBA, is the underclassmen/high school problem. The reason teams are lacking in talent is because they don't draft talent anymore. They draft potential. Instead of drafting college seniors that have a much better shot at being able to contribute right away, they draft kids that they think, in 3 or 4 years, maybe, they'll be able to contribute.

 

And let's look at the teams that are bad. In the NBA, do you really think that cutting out the last 2 or 3 expansion teams would turn the Nuggets and Cavs into competitive teams? Would cutting Nashville and Atlanta out of the NHL make Pittsburgh and Florida better? Would cutting Cleveland, Jacksonville, Carolina and Houston out of the NFL make the Bengals competitive? Of course it wouldn't. It wouldn't make a difference. The only way contraction would every really make a difference is if you did it in a drastic way. Yeah, if we went back to 10 teams in a league, every time would have talent from top to bottom. But even then, what would that accomplish? There will ALWAYS be one or two teams that dominate, a bunch of middle of the road teams and then one or two really bad teams. There are always winners and losers no matter how many teams you have.

[Guest razazteca]

Nothing can make the Bengals or the Clippers into a winning team, nothing beyond a miracle. And I am still waiting to see if the Vikings will be moving south to SA.

[Guest Vern Gagne]

I would thought the same thing about the Sacramento Kings 10 years ago.

 

Do I think the talent pool is thin? Yes, but I think with a good front office, and good scouting you can continue to compete. Look at the A's and Twins.

[Guest alkeiper]

In baseball you have teams already that are done for the year. The Tigers started 0-11 for crying out loud. The talnet is beig spread way too thin and its damaging baseball. Teams arent even competive anymore!

 

Bullshit. Teams have sucked for a hundred years. In any case, I don't think talent is spread too thin. In the past 15-20 years, there's been a huge influx of international talent in sports. The Latin American players in baseball, the Europeans in basketball, and the Eastern Bloc players in hockey. There's no reason why these players aren't sufficient to cover 4 teams or so.

[Guest gthureson]

I'll agree with the fact that their is a larger talent pool to draw from, but the problem with the NHL is that they didn't expand by four teams. They expanded by nine.

 

There may have been enough European talent to stock four NHL quality teams. But not twice that many, and as people are finding out, there actually are crappy players produced in Russia and the Czech Republic. They all aren't highly skilled. It was just an easy illusion to keep selling people because the NHL skimmed the cream first. You can convince people that everybody is a superstar when you are just plucking the Mogilnys, Fedorovs and Bures off the top. When you start getting into the Igor Korolevs, Oleg Kvashas and Aki Bergs, you start to figure out that you could have found players just as crappy as them in Canada and the States.