Shoebotage?

[DFDubb]

Guys who won't put it on the line in college won't in the pros either. They'd be the type to get a big long-term contract and coast. If I've got the choice between drafting someone who'd play in a bowl or tournament and someone who won't, I'll pick the player.

LOL

Fortunately for him, there is only one of him so it's a non issue.

 

[Nick12]

Guys who won't put it on the line in college won't in the pros either. They'd be the type to get a big long-term contract and coast. If I've got the choice between drafting someone who'd play in a bowl or tournament and someone who won't, I'll pick the player.

+100 / if you want to coast, don't waste our time and pretend to play and represent your school to win championships. I agree, the player afraid to get hurt in college and not give his 100% will get eaten alive in the pros. Give me a hungry player willing to do anything legal to be a team player and represent your school 100%. I think there is some sort of insurance policy college players can take in case they get hurt during their college playing days. Championships are everything in college and not only rich alumni boosters want you to win , it's your fellow student peers cheering you on to give it your all.

 

[Sunset]

..
Why don't we see these failures in run-of-the-mill teams and run-of-the-mill players?

....

Because they are not on TV and not famous people.

 

[harllee]

I live in Chapel Hill, NC and am a huge UNC Tar Heel fan. I love the UNC/Duke rivalry and I hate that Zion was injured. The Tar Heel fans I know wanted to win the game but they wanted to do it against Duke's best, including Zion. What I am hearing that the shoes Zion were wearing were Zion's favorite pair and had been worn quite a bit. Possible the shoe was worn out and simply failed. Zion is a big guy, weighs 285 pounds so think of the pressure on the shoe when he runs and makes a quick turn.

 

[Brat]

Actually, this is a "no excuses" event. NIKE will want those shoes and send them to product design/engineering. There is no way they want this to happen again.

 

[Nick12]

Nah, that's just silly talk. Let me see, risk a career ending injury playing for $0 in college or try to remain healthy for the start of my professional career? Nobody, and I mean nobody, would think that way about any other career. He's sitting on a literal gold mine, why chance it? So some alumni fans can get "their" championship? Pass.

Basketball is religion at DUKE. Members of my family went there. 100% and nothing less. Go DUKE! Get better Zion!

 

[harllee]

Local Raleigh TV news just had a feature on shoe "blowouts". Evidently this happens quite frequently in the NBA.

 

[sengsational]

Because they are not on TV and not famous people.

I just went to the NCAA college basketball page on CBS sports and there are 38 televised games tonight! So "not on TV" doesn't quite fly. I bet every NBA game is televised so that's probably a couple hundred games (I really don't know...don't watch sports on TV). Maybe "nobody watches" or maybe there are catastrophic shoe failures "all the time", but go unnoticed because the player is not famous. I'm basing my position that a failure like this is a very rare occurrence based on discussions with a couple of people that watch basketball constantly and have never seen it. Micheal's post with the few documented failures in 2014 is all I've seen of similar issues. The shoe manufacturers in question probably figured they had better get their act together or be out of business!

 

[sengsational]

Local Raleigh TV news just had a feature on shoe "blowouts". Evidently this happens quite frequently in the NBA.

Micheal's post early on in the thread had a link that covered a spate of failures a few years back.



I'm waiting for the video with clips showing many of this type of failure. Hard to believe that manufacturers would sit still for a level of quality where their "best sales people" (the athletes) were continually proving how poor their products were.

 

[zinger1457]

I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often, someone who is Zion's size (285 lbs) and moves as fast as he does has to put enormous forces on shoe seams when making sudden cuts and coming to a quick stop.

 

[redduck]

Zion may be in luck:
From the Nike website:
"If your Nike shoes or apparel have a material or workmanship flaw, we want to make it right and get you back in the game. ... Nike Authorized Store: Please return your shoes to the original place of purchase. We work with authorized retailers to accept returns for products with a material or workmanship flaw."

note: none of the bolding by redduck

 

[Nick12]

Even President Obama who was near courtside during the game saw King Zion's Nike shoe split open. Nike stock already down 1.73%. And top tickets according to media for the game were selling on black market for $3k each? Some savvy college kids made some extra cash for beer money.

 

[MichaelB]

Thanks for that link. I didn't do any research on other blowouts. This makes shoebotage a bit less likely, but still, as the article says:
Why don't we see these failures in run-of-the-mill teams and run-of-the-mill players?

The WSJ coverage of this story today includes this snippet.

We are talkiing, of course, about Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge’s experience at the Berlin Marathon in 2015. When the insoles on his custom Nike sneakers came out, he was denied a world record he almost certainly would have gotten if his shoes had remained intact.

Not run-of-the-mill, but also not the high stress basketball player. A runner.

This happens to us non-athletes as well. My shoe broke one night and I posted about it here. http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f27/funny-thing-happened-last-night-59665.html

 

[harllee]

One thing that may come from Zion's shoe blowout is that the NBA may lower the age these players can enter the draft to age 18, which makes some sense. Why should a big talented kid like Zion be required to go to college a year and give up a year's salary while risking injury? I say if the player is ready for the NBA straight out of high school they should be allowed to go. Only a few talented players would be ready to go to the NBA at 18 but they should have that option. LeBron James was only 18 when he went to the NBA.

 

[DFDubb]

Basketball is religion at DUKE. Members of my family went there. 100% and nothing less. Go DUKE! Get better Zion!

That's all super cool for your family and all, but the triangle will be nothing more than a speed bump in this kids distant memory. He has no loyalty to Duke, nor should he. The whole 1 and done before being eligible for the draft is stupid, for this very reason.

 

[zinger1457]

That's all super cool for your family and all, but the triangle will be nothing more than a speed bump in this kids distant memory. He has no loyalty to Duke, nor should he. The whole 1 and done before being eligible for the draft is stupid, for this very reason.

Even if with Duke just 1 year his position in the NBA draft and value has gone up because of it. I doubt he would have been the #1 pick if he had jumped straight to the NBA from high school. There's enough of a difference in salary between the #1 and #10 picks that could make waiting a year pay off. Of course it is a gamble and its possible that your position could drop. Look what happened to Duke player Grayson Allen, after his sophomore season averaging 21 points a game it was projected he would have gone near the top 10, instead he stuck around 4 years and ended up getting drafted 21.

 

[davebarnes]

Shoebotage is silly when sabotage contains the word word "sabot".

 

[sengsational]

The WSJ coverage of this story today includes this snippet.

More of these stories will be coming up, I'm sure. I guess when there's some big prize on the line, like for this runner, it will have received attention. If I dawn my tinfoil hat, there's no proof that these historical instances didn't also involve hanky-panky My position is based on the statistical likelihood that none of the people I know who have watched basketball incessantly for decades have ever seen this kind of failure on the court. And I have confidence that they would have noticed and remembered, although I admit that some may argue with this confidence. People are nuts about sports, nuts about winning, nuts about their team winning, nuts about betting on sports, nuts about cashing in on sports. I don't think anyone will argue that there are a lot of extremes in sports business. With extremes come fringe actions. It would be great if sports were "pure", but who doesn't think that in the myriad thousands of games the occasional player won't 'take a fall' for money or other reason, or that an official, for money or bias or something, doesn't come up with calls that are not fair, and not fair beyond simple human imperfection. There's a lot of pressure with the fame and money, and that's probably why so many people gravitate to sports.

This happens to us non-athletes as well. My shoe broke one night and I posted about it here. http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f27/funny-thing-happened-last-night-59665.html

First-hand experience! Did you have any enemies at the time? I've had a few failures, but they were in old shoes, and the failure wasn't a surprise.

Shoebotage is silly when sabotage contains the word word "sabot".

It's supposed to be silly. But you recognized it as I intended.

One thing that may come from Zion's shoe blowout is that the NBA may lower the age these players can enter the draft to age 18, which makes some sense. Why should a big talented kid like Zion be required to go to college a year and give up a year's salary while risking injury? I say if the player is ready for the NBA straight out of high school they should be allowed to go. Only a few talented players would be ready to go to the NBA at 18 but they should have that option. LeBron James was only 18 when he went to the NBA.

I also disagree with this system; it's goes against a free market.

 

[ziggy29]

One thing that may come from Zion's shoe blowout is that the NBA may lower the age these players can enter the draft to age 18, which makes some sense. Why should a big talented kid like Zion be required to go to college a year and give up a year's salary while risking injury? I say if the player is ready for the NBA straight out of high school they should be allowed to go. Only a few talented players would be ready to go to the NBA at 18 but they should have that option. LeBron James was only 18 when he went to the NBA.

An 18-year-old can't enter the NBA or NFL. They can't (in the USA) drink a beer or (increasingly) have a cigarette. But they can join the military, strap a prolific killing machine to their back and kill or be killed for their country.

The bottom line is that colleges felt threatened by losing the most talented players out of high school and hurting their cash cow (nothing at all about education). So they pressured the NBA to make these changes so places like Duke and Kentucky can become "one and done" factories.

 

[sengsational]

I changed my mind

Sometimes a failed shoe is just a failed shoe. So although I wouldn't send Zion back on the court without at least a quick inspection of his other shoes, I've come down on the side of the more common thinking that there was no hanky-panky with the failed shoe; the tinfoil hat goes back on the shelf, for the time being.



DW read me a story from a "sneaker expert" that, after learning some things from the posters in this thread and not hearing anything out of Nike, I figured I had to be wrong. The shoe expert said that even though he's not that much bigger (on a percentage basis), Zion an energetic player, so maybe a bit more rough on the shoes. The combination might have simply sent the shoe over the edge. Seems kind of crazy that shoes can't last through three games if the player is a little bigger and a little rougher, but that's a criticism against Nike.

 

[harllee]

Word around Chapel Hill is that Zion wore that same pair of shoes since the beginning of the season which certainly is not the norm. In the NBA most players change shoes every game or 2. In college basketball at the elite programs players don't change shoes every game but pretty frequently. If you look at the close up pictures of Zion's shoes, the soles look pretty worn. Zion may have simply worn the shoes out.

 

[DFDubb]

Sometimes a failed shoe is just a failed shoe. So although I wouldn't send Zion back on the court without at least a quick inspection of his other shoes, I've come down on the side of the more common thinking that there was no hanky-panky with the failed shoe; the tinfoil hat goes back on the shelf, for the time being.

Thank goodness, I heard rumors your skeptical thread here was about to trigger a congressional investigation. I do genuinely wonder though, how people do come up with all of these conspiracy theories. Do you just walk around not believing the things that you see with your own 2 eyes? Is it a paranoia thing? Guy breaks shoe, luckily isn't hurt, and your natural reaction is that there is some evil doer hiding in the shadows trying to ruin the kids career. It just seems like a depressing way to look at other people and life in general.

You mentioned several times that this never happens, but oops, it happened just a week later. Different player, different brand of shoe, etc........It could be a serial shoe saboteur, might be time to break out the tin foil hat again.

https://bleacherreport.com/articles...om&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=editorial

 

[sengsational]

Word around Chapel Hill is that Zion wore that same pair of shoes since the beginning of the season which certainly is not the norm. In the NBA most players change shoes every game or 2.

One of my most powerful reasons for my initial thoughts on the topic was based on the (possibly erroneous) information that this pair of shoes had only been worn in only 2 previous games. If that's true, it's a sad state of affairs that shoes don't last longer than that without the risk of catastrophic failure. I can see if your sponsor is giving you shoes as part of the contract, sure, why not wear them once and throw them out. But outside of the NBA and men's division 1 college, who can afford to throw out a (supposedly) perfectly good pair of shoes after a couple of games? This over-use theory would suggest that if we looked at money-starved leagues, we'd see shoe blow-outs "all the time". But of course, besides the manufacturers, there's nobody that has those stats, and blowouts on the non-televised circuits simply go unnoticed.

 

[Nick12]

Word around Chapel Hill is that Zion wore that same pair of shoes since the beginning of the season which certainly is not the norm. In the NBA most players change shoes every game or 2. In college basketball at the elite programs players don't change shoes every game but pretty frequently. If you look at the close up pictures of Zion's shoes, the soles look pretty worn. Zion may have simply worn the shoes out.

Nike pays DUKE basketball program millions of dollars every year to promote and wear their products including shoes for the players. For Zion supposedly to wear the same pair of shoes since game 1? That's seems very strange..

 

[kgtest]

Nah, that's just silly talk. Let me see, risk a career ending injury playing for $0 in college or try to remain healthy for the start of my professional career? Nobody, and I mean nobody, would think that way about any other career. He's sitting on a literal gold mine, why chance it? So some alumni fans can get "their" championship? Pass.

One of the NFL team's just told there QB to stop playing any pickup basketball. The pressure to WIN is real and competitive.


These guys destroy there bodies for pay, it's part of being "competitive" . Lindsey Vonn said her body is shot because of pro skiing, and she is like 40, what a shame.