Seattle is a basketball hotbed

So how has Seattle developed into a fertile territory for top level high school, college and NBA ballers?

Here's a Sports Illustrated feature that covers just such territory -- who is replicating this in the Bay Area or northern California? Anyone?

Brand Of Brothers
Kelli Anderson
Sports Illustrated
February 22, 2010

 The first game of the Adonai Hood Classic basketball tournament is over, and the victorious alums of Rainier Beach High have retreated from the August heat into the subterranean locker room of their old rival Garfield High. New York Knicks guard Nate Robinson is searching for a particular tattoo on his sweaty and extravagantly decorated limbs. There it is: a 206 inked on his right wrist. Terrence Williams, the New Jersey Nets' most recent lottery pick, counters by showing off the Space Needle etched into his left forearm. Atlanta Hawks guard Jamal Crawford doesn't have a tattoo of either Seattle's area code or its most famous landmark, but, he says almost apologetically, "I do have a mural of Seattle in my house!"

Dallas Mavericks guard Jason Terry, Franklin High '95, strolls in to say hello before he joins a squad of his school's alums in a game against Garfield's. He thinks he might have started the branding craze. "One day I came home from college," he says, "and I had the 206 tattooed on my chest, and everyone was like, Oh, that's cool!"

The Hood Classic, a more-or-less annual alumni tournament among three Seattle inner-city public high schools and a nearby Catholic school, O'Dea, has no agenda other than to entertain friends and neighbors. There is no prize, apart from bragging rights. But the NBA players who are alums wouldn't miss it. Rockets guard Aaron Brooks (Franklin '03), whose tattoo of a 206 overlaying the Space Needle takes up most of his left arm, flew in from an endorsement appearance in China on the second day of the event. Jet lag be damned, he drove in straight from the airport to play in the second half of the Quakers' game against O'Dea. He entered the stifling gym in a baggy black-green-and-white uniform, waved to the crowd and then made a flurry of pinpoint passes and launched a cluster of cold-blooded bombs as fans oohed and the Quakers crushed the only team in the field without a player earning an NBA paycheck. Brooks, his eyelids drooping, stuck around for the three-point shooting contest before departing to grab a nap. "I am so tired," he told a friend as he left.

Such are the sacrifices you make when you belong to the hottest fraternity in basketball: hoopsters from the Emerald City. The Seattle area has 13 players in the NBA, tied for fifth among the country's metro areas even though it's only 15th in population. Instead of wearing letter sweaters, brothers display their affiliation on their skin, on their walls, even around their ankles. "Guys wear 206 socks," says Garfield point guard Tony Wroten Jr., who was a top five recruit in the class of 2011 until he tore his right ACL in September...

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