by T.A. O'Malley

Created on: June 13, 2008

There are more dunks attempted, now. The celebration of a blocked shot is greater, especially if it sails into the stands, and there is certainly more posing in basketball than there once was.

Television normalizes the spectacular.

Television has changed basketball players. It has made them honogenous, corporate party-line toers who take few political risks.
But, ultimately, the game is won and lost on the same principle upon which it was won and lost in the 1940s - pass the ball to the open man, set a screen, make the shot, help on defense and, if it's the Finals, clothesline your opponent rather than give him a layup.

Television gets blamed, and it deserves some blame, for the perceived proliferation of one-on-one play, and certainly the SportsCenter highlight and the And1 Mix Tapes have contributed to that. But we can't ignore the other contributing factors.
For example, the NBA's 24-second shot clock has done as much to dumb down offensive basketball as ESPN has. Most NBA teams run almost exclusively some variation of two plays, 1) a post-man, cutter offense, and 2) the pick-and-roll. They do this because most traditional basketball offenses require too much time to reliably get an open shot within 24 seconds. Bobby Knight's motion offense wouldn't work in the NBA, because it requires too much precision to be consistently executed within 24 seconds.

Instead, NBA teams chose to play what amounts to a two-man game on one side of the floor. You take your best post player and your best wing player and run some kind of action with them on the same side (commonly a pick-and-roll) and you trust them to make a play for themselves or a teammate spotting up or cutting to the basket. Executed correctly, there is no more difficult play in basketball to defend than the pick-and-roll.
But kids don't have the capacity to understand the play's complexities, all the quick decisions that must be made. Kids just see a guy driving into the lane and (hopefully) dunking, so that's what they emulate.

Obviously, without the television medium, this would be impossible. The point is that it is a collaborative effect.

Another major contributor is college recruiting and summer basketball. Here's how it works: You join an AAU team, which will play about 100 games over the course of the summer. If you have the potential to play in college and/or the NBA, you will play on an All-Star team of sorts, joining other players who are approximately as good as you are. There will be dozens of teams like

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