Separate but equal in the NBA?

By J.C. Arenas

The NBA recently announced an outreach plan to market the league to Latinos. Fine, but why is the NBA's partner ESPN now taking players of various Latin American nationalities and comparing them solely to each other?

I fail to see what this accomplishes. An NBA player from Brazil and an NBA player from Lithuania are both NBA players, where they are from is rather irrelevant. As fans of the game do we care more about where they are from than their performance on the court? If Leandro Barbosa, for example, is considered the best Latino player in the league, what if out of the 450 players in total in the league, he's the 400^th best? Ultimately, that's how these players are judged, especially within the league. If a team is looking to sign a guard, they are going to compare Barbosa to the other guard talent that is available. They're not going to divide the guards into different ethnic groups and then choose a particular player because he's viewed as the best in his group.

While I appreciate the league's outreach as a business proposition, where does it end? And why doesn't ESPN have an European, Asian, or African player ranking system? The league is represented by players from all over the world, so let's just appreciate that basketball is a global sport and celebrate it as such. I don't see the game of soccer conducting business in this manner.