Al-anwar Newspaper English news in Australia
The N.B.A. Global Academy has developed a reputation for training elite young passers, including Josh Giddey, the sixth overall pick in last year’s draft.
Last July, a group of tall and excited teenagers gathered in a conference room in Canberra, Australia, to watch the N.B.A. draft on television. As the technical director of the N.B.A. Global Academy, Marty Clarke was responsible for getting them out of class on a school day so they could watch as a former teammate, Josh Giddey, achieved his dream.
“I called the school and said, ‘Look, can we take the third lesson off, and we’ll bus the kids back?’ ” Clarke recalled. “As you get older, you appreciate this stuff more. You want to celebrate successes.”
The team’s reaction when the Oklahoma City Thunder selected Giddey, a 6-foot-8 point guard, with the sixth overall pick was something that approximated pandemonium. “Pizza was flying everywhere,” Clarke recalled.
The N.B.A. Global Academy, which opened in 2017 as the league sought additional ways to grow the game abroad and to develop high school-age prospects from around the world, has quickly honed a reputation for grooming a certain type of elite young player: point guards from Australia. Among those watching when Giddey was drafted were Dyson Daniels, 19, and Tyrese Proctor, 17. Daniels has spent this season playing with the G League Ignite as he prepares for the draft this summer, and Proctor is considering college scholarship offers from high-level programs like Duke and Arizona while he continues to train at the academy.
“It was eye-opening seeing Giddey get picked,” said Proctor, who stands 6-foot-4 and is from Sydney. “It shows that if you put in the hard work and follow the guide that the academy gives you, you can make it.”
The N.B.A. has never been more international, with a record 121 players from outside of the United States — including seven from Australia — on opening night rosters this season. And, in its own way, the academy is a microcosm of that trend. Its roster is populated with players from countries like China, Indonesia, Qatar and, of course, Australia.
But the academy is perhaps most notable for its pipeline of N.B.A.-ready point guards, a phenomenon that those in the program say is likely as much nature as nurture.
“At the academy, we never played isolation ball or went one-on-one,” Giddey said. “It was always a team-oriented type of system, and I think that’s the unselfish brand of basketball that Australians thrive on.”
Clarke, 54, described the distinctly Australian concept of “mateship,” which prioritizes teamwork, selflessness and loyalty.
“Culturally, it’s instilled in us from a young age, that it’s more about the team or the family or the business than it is about the individual,” Clarke said. “And if you work in that direction, you’ll be rewarded.”
