In any given year, there are more than 500,000 American boys playing on almost 20,000 high school basketball teams, and fewer than 2% of them will make it to March Madness. Only 60 young men get drafted by an NBA team each summer, and in the most recent draft, a third of those spots went to international players.

The numbers suggest that the funnel from the Amateur Athletic Union into the NBA is one of the narrowest in all of sports. And we used to talk about the game with the reverence that exclusivity implies. The numbers are how we decide who is an All-Star or a Hall of Famer. The numbers are how we determine — or debate — the greatest.

Gambling and cheating scandals are not the only threats to sports. Because of the economic gravity of fantasy sports leagues and legal gambling, the n

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