Are we ten to twenty years away from having an NBA championship team that isn't the world champion of professional basketball?  An article in the NY Times about basketball camp legend Sonny Vaccaro makes me wonder.

Vaccaro is a marketing and basketball legend, and it's hard to tell which order you put the two things in.  For years he ran the ABCD basketball camps where prospects worked out and played under the watchful eyes of college coaches and shoe company reps.  He's retiring and Reebok (his current employer) will fold his camp into others they are affiliated with.  It's the end of an era that has changed basketball, maybe not all to the good.

The telling quote in the article is from Fran Fraschilla, ex St. John's coach and current ESPN analyst.  Franschilla is just back from attending basketball camps in Italy and returned depressed at how poorly American players compared to Europeans:

"Hopefully, those people that wield power in the summer will understand that our game at the moment is broken at the grass-roots level," Fraschilla said. "If we get more kids worried about improving and less about where they rank, it will filter up the N.B.A. ranks."

Camps can make or break players in unofficial recruiting rankings.  Amateur scouting reports in low tech newsletters, distributed out of the writer's garages, have evolved into high tech and high dollar scouting operations that make or break a player aiming to play for a basketball power.  Camps like Vaccaro's feed off the need of high school players to get exposure and move up in the rankings.  In turn the camps are all about the individual player and their skills, mainly on the offensive end of the court.

You can make a case the Euros are learning about basketball while their high school counterparts in this country are going to camps and learning about marketing.  Call it the Vaccaro paradox.

Nike and Reebok love the American system because they can create a buzz around a young player who could turn into, in the words of LeBron James, "an international icon".  In James' case the hype has been more than justified.  But for every King James there have been numerous Sebastian Telfair's and Kwame Brown's who never developed a complete game.

In Europe, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobelli of the Spurs grew as young players outside of the scrutiny of recruiting rankings and camps.  In order to get on the court they had to learn the game of basketball while they worked on their games.  Today they are NBA champions.  Dirk Nowitzki is MVP.  If Europe is producing talent at this level, how long before the best European professional teams become legitimate challengers for the title of "world champion"?

We aren't to a point where the best European teams can take on the best NBA teams, the way the best European players have challenged America's best players.  But if the progress of European basketball continues at the current rate, and if US players spend their time in camps working on their 360's and trying to become "legends" at 17 and 18, can that day be far off?

If you think the NBA will always be basketball's highest level of competition, consider that it has been taken down once already.  The truth is the ABA, just before the merger, had better players than the older league and a more appealing game.  The infusion of life that players like Julius Erving and George Gervin brough to the NBA kept the game moving forward into the Bird and Johnson era.  That momentum is now stalled and the Euros are constantly improving. 

Can history repeat itself?  I think so.  At some point about 10 years from now, European professional  basketball may become so profitable it can afford to keep it's best players at home.   An NBA Europe of sorts may be formed by then, and once the best teams from that league capture the public's imagination it's not hard to imagine a challenge being issued.  If US basketball doesn't get out of the camps and back into the gyms, it may be a challenge some future NBA team loses.