I see "talent" as a natural affinity for an activity or type of knowledge, and could be a factor in the speed of acquiring any of the advantages discussed. A person with a talent for strength fnds it easy to put on muscle, a person with a talent for shooting develops agood form easily and quickly starts hitting a high percentage, a perso with a talent for court vision starting making the right pass quickly.
I'm not sure how his body was better than Ostertag's for an NBA center. They were of comparable size, and Ostertag probably had even longer arms. Fesenko is certainly larger than Okur.
You don't have to be a physiologist to look at Fesenko and see has at least a modestly better build than Osterblob, even before he lost the weight. His agility is OK, not great; I don't remember Ostertag being very good at all at agility. Fes's speed is OK, not great; most 7-footers' speed aren't great. He was out of shape before, but he wasn't even playing enough time to test that.
I accept that this is your opinion. I saw him as needed to improve his endurance, mobility, shooting, and footwork. You can't improve those in-game to the same degree you can improve them in a structured environment.
His mobility was OK; he wasn't getting beaten nearly as much as Okur (and Boozer) was on the floor, and often--even now--he is getting beaten often because of not having a feel for defense.
His free-throw shooting was not good, but this is a combination of off-court practice and on-court experience; as I have stated for your convenience repeatedly, multiple players on the Jazz--not to mention on other teams--. But except possibly in the last few minutes of games,
It's not a stretch to argue that Fesenko's defensive footwork is already better than Okur's and Boozer's, and he has room to improve.
He's fouling too much, but this is one of the clearest examples of a skill that is best developed in games than in practice, which falls far short from simulateing a real game. I remember a guy named Millsap who fouled too much in his first year or two also (and when I say "year", I mean one in which he got more than scraps of minutes. In Millsap's first year, he had more than twice as many minutes than Fesenko did, and Millsap was still pretty raw at the end of his rookie season, and he's probably one of those players whom you claim is working hard in practice. Yet another example that while some off-court development is usually necessary, there is no substitute for in-game experience.)
Confirmation bias. You interpret everything you see in this regard under the initial assumption that the most important development factor is playing time, rather than allow for the evidence to dictate the importance of playing time. To demonstrate my point, please answer this: what sort of observation would be needed to demonstrate that players can improve even without receiving playing time? I fully expect the answer, if there is one at all, to be essentially unfulfillable.
Well, it's usually your job to prove your point, and I've noticed that you provide very few examples, unlike me, probably because you have none. As for Allen Iverson, I'll grant you that he probably was a gym rat, but the fact that he was checking out at least mentally from practice when he was a vet still supports the notion that practice falls short of in-game experience when at least some your veterans / starters / first 7 or 8 in the rotation are not going at it 100%. They might be tired, the could be nursing aches or injuries, and they don't want to be injured further. I continue to add to the evidence that in-game experience is a necessary condition for player development. Again, the onus is on you to find basis for your argument.
