Matt Yglesias wants to know why Lithuania (population 3.8million) is so good at basketball:
As everyone knows, to succeed at basketball you need tall people. Not only do even your backcourt players need to be tall, but you need to be able to pull several freakishly tall big men together. It seems inconceivable that such a tiny country could manage to field so many quality basketball players consistently over an extended period of time no matter how basketball-mad the country may be. Is Vilnius just full of people 6′8″ and taller?
I don’t know very much about basketball, let alone eastern european basketball, but I’d guess that these factors (some of which Matt alludes to) probably have something to do with it:
- Basketball is Lithuania’s national sport and has been for a long time. As Matt notes, most of the best Soviet players were Lithuanian.
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