And what you wish could be the case, just as a fan of the sport of basketball, is for there to be a traveling circuit for the best high-school aged kids to play against one another with elite coaching in a skill development-focused environment. That is the way to make the best basketball players, not the playground hype video stuff that top level "showcase" AAU ball tends to be. But these AAU coaches did not create the perverse incentive structure present in the US basketball developmental pipeline. They are just doing their best for their players within that structure, which is what is most important.
The NBA and NCAA could work collaboratively with the shoe companies and major agencies to make an AAU infrastructure that developed better basketball players if they really wanted to. But there's no real incentive to do that when America already produces the best players in the world. In soccer, by contrast, those kinds of development pipelines are very carefully managed, because the arms race for a country's overall talent is so important for so many stakeholders.
