They arrived in Indianapolis recently from nearly every corner of the basketball community, presumably bringing only their best intentions. As basketball summits go, this was a whopper, uniting the NBA, USA Basketball, the NCAA and some of its coaches and commissioners, the National Federation of State High School Associations, AAU coaches, even the shoe companies.

Oh, there were some notable omissions, such as Sonny Vaccaro.  I wasn’t the only basketball writer to notice that he was missing from this discussion, just months after calling for such a meeting in several media forums, announcing his plans to build a developmental basketball academy. Say what you will about our friend, Sonny, but if our country’s greatest hoops minds want to re-examine and possibly overhaul the game’s current structure without even bothering to consult with the godfather of grassroots basketball, well, good luck with that.

Still, the concept of such a summit is a good one, long overdue. We’ve had other gatherings of basketball’s brightest – the NCAA coaches’ summit of October 2003 and another wide-ranging coalition – though nothing memorable really came of them. They lacked this one’s clout. This is a group that should be able to get something done.

Everyone knows the past decade’s developments that have our jockstraps tied in a knot:
• the exposure of basketball factories posing as prep schools;
• the perception of the summer game as a cesspool that has created a nation of self-obsessed teen-agers who wouldn’t know a pick from a roll;
• the proliferation of players entering the NBA each season before putting in four full seasons at Alma Mater U;
• those lesser-tinted medals being added to the United States’ international trophy case.

The fact that the U.S. stopped winning gold medals in our game became the barometer that supported the opinions behind the other examples, particularly 2 and 3. For example, it became harder and harder to defend the notion that the summer game still is a meaningful time for young players who seek a higher level of competition than can be found in their own cities. And the NBA and its Players Association satisfied few with its middle-ground position of a 19-year age limit before entering the draft.

But we already knew that.

Many of us knew these things so well, they became cliché. We said and wrote them and said and wrote them – and then we said and wrote them some more – until even these “truths” that we could all once agree upon no longer resemble anything close to my reality.

One wrote that the American game already had been “ruined” by those who were gathering to fix it. Ruined? That seems strong. Another writer surmised that Larry Bird and Magic Johnson sure didn’t need summer basketball, apparently forgetting that LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony were hardly stifled by it.

It’s true, there are young players with posses and handlers and street agents and egos the size of the Georgia Dome, and there are summer-time coaches who enable their behavior. Then there are Greg Oden, Mike Conley, and Lance Thomas, just a few of the grounded, team-oriented guys to also emerge from recent summers. Even if your diploma says you attended Michigan or North Carolina, you’re going to love these guys. Yet, they get painted by the same brush strokes with these broad statements that condemn those with the posses and handlers and egos the size of the Georgia Dome.

There are knuckleheads now, just as there were knuckleheads then. And there were fundamentally flawed players back then – no matter what era of then that you explore – just as there are now.

Yet, we’re led to believe that while today’s American players only spend their practice hours flipping assists off the backboard to dunking teammates, yesterday’s Americans were a vision straight out of that 1998 movie Pleasantville, when the world existed in black-and-white and the local team made every shot and won every game. (Until the star player discovered sex, of course, and the team began to miss every shot and lose every game.)

It’s become such common knowledge that Americans are fundamentally flawed as basketball players, it must be true. And to a point, I’m not here to disagree. Yet, other than a bronze medal to a couple of countries the typical American refuses to respect as worthy adversaries, where’s the overwhelming evidence?

In the college game last season, free-throw shooting (69.1 percent) matched the second-highest percentage in 27 years. Three-point shooting (35.0) was higher than it’s been in 14 seasons. Fewer turnovers were being committed by teams (14.7 per game) than at any time since the NCAA began collecting totals 14 years ago.

In the NBA, similar cases could be made.

“If you watch the Suns play, fundamentally, they pass, they shoot, they run with out the ball,” Colangelo said. “OK, this is the highest level. This is the NBA, and these guys are pretty darned good in the fundamentals.

“It’s wrong to indict all the players’ fundamentally.”

And, certainly, fair game with others.

“When we started playing basketball above the rim in this country, rather than below the rim, that changed the game a little bit,” Colangelo said. “Many coaches were caught up with that. That’s when we lost a little bit of direction regarding fundamentals.

“Those players were great athletes and high-wire acts, but they didn’t work on their fundamentals. There were still a lot of players working on fundamentals, but there was much more of an emphasis on length and athleticism.”

Colangelo didn’t attend the Indianapolis summit, but that was no oversight. USA Basketball was represented instead by president Val Ackerman, who oversees all levels of international play.

If Colangelo had a wish list, he would like to see more player development take place during the summers at both the college level, where coaches aren’t allowed to spend time with their players, and at the grassroots level, where the emphasis is on competition.
That said, he agrees that much of the self-criticism is “overplay.”

No one’s asking me, but here’s hoping that the folks from the summit continue to explore our game’s problems, maintaining a level head as they do. The NCAA – and high schools, too – must be persuaded to give college coaches the opportunity to work with their players each summer, though there must be safeguards against those who would abuse the rule. Grassroots basketball should become more about development than competition. The NBA and its Players Association must get off the fence with the 19-year age limit and find a more reasonable agreement, perhaps one mirroring the baseball model that gives players a chance to play professionally out of high school or to make a three-year commitment to college.

If we’re truly concerned about giving the USA its best shot for international success, the group will work toward creating rules that remain uniformly the same from high school to college to the NBA to the games they play in Argentina, Lithuania and Greece.
My hope, too, is that this group studies these issues long enough and hard enough to avoid the unintended consequences that so often come from such decisions. Need anyone be reminded what happened when the NBA began giving guaranteed contracts to first-round draft picks? Or when the NCAA began to crack down on the international amateur whose crime was playing in a system other than our own? Or the NCAA’s infamous 9-5 rule?

The big news to come from the first summit was that adidas is pulling out of the elite summer camp business. A few days later, George Raveling announced on John Thompson’s radio show that Nike, too, was dropping its All-American Camp.

If this is all about changing the culture of grassroots basketball from competition to development over the course of each summer, that’s fine. If it’s about two companies dropping their high-profile, five-day camps for the good of the game, that’s just grandstanding. No one, shoe companies included, can do that much damage in such a short amount of time.

And if Nike and adidas scale back on grassroots basketball, who’ll be there to fund all of this player development? The money will have to come from somewhere. Does anyone really believe that the majority of players, unguided, will spend their summers shooting free throws and practicing the three-man weave in their own backyards or on playgrounds, like some scene from Pleasantville?

Meanwhile, the only elite camp among the Big Three that will remain in its present form – and that will probably grow as a result of the news from the summit – is the one run by the guy who wasn’t invited.

Now, surely that wasn’t the intended consequence.