Basketball in mourning in PH and elsewhere

SACRAMENTO, California—Episodes of grief punctuated the basketball universe in September.
The National Basketball Association and its players’ union, led by recent Manila visitor Derek Fisher of the Los Angeles Lakers, will meet again in New York today. Their elusive target: end the three-month old players’ lockout sparked by dispute over the distribution of the league’s $4.1 billion annual revenue.
The lockout has started to alter the NBA calendar. Since the parties failed to agree on a new labor deal last week, the league has canceled training camps and 43 preseason games. It has also declined to schedule exhibition matches overseas for the first time since 2005.
Boo-hoo! Income from the preseason is history. And NBA followers won’t see new draft picks play until the regular season next month—if it starts on time.
The last time the NBA scrapped preseason games in 2008, the regular schedule was reduced to 50 games, turning the league’s worldwide devotees, Filipinos included, into unhappy campers.
Closer to home, fanatics and bankrollers of the fancied Smart Gilas Pilipinas team are grieving over the untimely demise of the squad in Wuhan, China, last week.
The Philippines’ semifinal appearance in the Fiba Asia Championship was the country’s first in 24 years. But a fourth place finish was not good enough for Asia’s only automatic basketball berth to the 2012 London Olympics.
Host China won that berth with a one-point victory over Jordan in the thrilling Zonal finals.  South Korea squeaked past PH for the bronze medal. Unlike the Filipinos, the Jordanians and the Koreans still have a chance to qualify for London during next year’s last Olympic qualifying tournament at a still unknown venue. There, the fight will be fierce for the last three slots of the Summer Games’ basketball competition.
Defending champion United States—bannered by NBA superstars—leads teams already booked for the tournament proper. The others are the host country Great Britain, Tunisia, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Spain, France and China—whose mainstays also populate the NBA or have trained with players of the toughest hoops league on earth.
China has won 14 Asian basketball championships and represented the Asian region at every Olympiad since 1976. The last Philippine Olympic basketball stint was in the 1972 Munich Olympics after six prior Olympic appearances.
The truth hurts. But we are no longer the undisputed basketball power in Asia.
The sport has literally grown taller and bigger, and the training has gone more hi-tech through the years, leaving talent-laden but height-disadvantaged Filipino players at the mercy of behemoths on basketball’s universal stage. Yet, our overemphasis on the game, at the expense of other sports, remains unabated.
Boo-hoo!
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Elsewhere in basketball, Dirk Nowitzki will not be in London next year. The German national team led by Nowitzki—the NBA Finals series MVP—did not even reach the quarterfinals of the punishing European Championship won by Spain and the dominating play of the NBA’s Gasol brothers—Pau and Mark.
Boo-hoo! London would have been Dirk’s second Olympic trip after the 2008 Beijing Games—where he was among the most recognizable athletes in the world, including our boxing icon Manny Pacquiao, who carried their respective national flags during the opening ceremonies.