Recreation Basketball League: Fill & Download for Free

Thanks for the A2A Michael. YMCA, Parks and Recreation departments, street games, office buildings sometimes offer leagues between firms, gyms, and private sports facilities are a good place to start your search.Youth players can also do club and AAU ball, as well as in their schools. Good luck in your search!Basketball leagues in NYCAndrew LanceClick to Follow Me!

Who says there aren’t?There’s plenty of ‘low rim’ basketball leagues. A few years ago, there was the Mini Basketball League. Today, there’s the Legacy Leagues. There’s also any number of recreational tournaments like Low Hoop Slama Jama. Kids 12 and under often compete in leagues on shorter rims too.The problem isn’t that they don’t exist.The problem is that no one cares.Most low rim leagues are designed so that shorter and less athletic recreational players can enjoy the experience of dunking like the professional players they enjoy watching.You can be sure if low rim basketball was attractive, some of these league would be far more popular than they are and eventually, the lowered rim variant of basketball gain more legitimacy.But it hasn’t.Low rim basketball, if played as a full scale professional league, would be nothing more than a novelty like Slam Ball, the short lived variant of basketball played with trampolines on the floor. So, less people would care and so less people would watch.Besides, most elite athletes don’t care. They play just fine on 10 foot rims. Many of the point guards in the NBA these days can dunk. They have no desire to play a unrecognized and obscure variant.

An average NBA player, discounting for size, is much, much better than the average person. Here's how I know:I never played recreational basketball as a kid, but once I started playing in about 7th grade, I never stopped. I was cut from the HS basketball team, so I joined a church league where I scored 22-24 points a game and won a championship. This is the underwhelming pinnacle of my basketball accolades. I'm only 5'10" and while I'm probably slightly more athletic than the average person, it is by a very small margin.I never stopped playing. I'm thirty now, and I still play a few times a week with various groups. On Saturday mornings, I play pickup basketball with a group of guys a little older than me. I'm easily the best or second best player there every week. Most weeks, I score at least 50% of my teams' total points across all games, and assist on most of the others. I get rebounds and steals and the occasional block and typically hold my opponent to fewer points than they'd like, even though I'm a decidedly lousy defender.BUT...I also play with some friends from high school. One of them was a DI college sprinter. He's not an incredibly skilled player, but he's always been the most athletic person I know, and at 6'2" he's not exactly small. I can't stress enough how badly he locks me down. I can't do anything, offensively or defensively, when we guard eachother. He's on such a different level than me that it's actually hard to pin down why my human body can't do the same things his can.He plays with a group of people in a nearby college town against a number of guys who were average DI and DII players. He gets utterly destroyed every single week. He can't dribble or shoot because of the defense, and even though he hangs in with good defense and gets an occasional fast break dunk, he's way out of his league. (I played with this group a few times. It might as well have been 4 on 5 every time).One day, Ronnie Price (NBA journeyman point guard) joined one of their games. While he sat and watched these guys that routinely made him feel like the worst ball player ever, Ronnie proceeded to score every single point and make most of the key defensive plays en route to number of successive blowouts. Ronnie made these skilled DII and DI players look like novices for two hours.I think you can see where this is going: Ronnie Price is not by any standard among the "average NBA" players. In terms of pure talent, most NBA players are far better than him. Even among the NBA elite, there are definite strata of talent. That is what is so amazing about what Steph and Lebron represent. The pinnacle of basketball; just two people out of an elite group of 450 out of 7 billion people in the world.Full circle, I'm pretty good in the right group. But my friend, far more skilled than me, gets beaten down by some DII walk-ons in a small college gym. And those DII kids cower in fear whenever Ronnie Price steps into the gym.The average person is so far worse than an NBA player his same size that unless you have experienced the strata of skill levels for yourself, it is almost impossible to fully comprehend.