Is your claim that effective practice is meaningless? Or just that it's not sufficient on its own to always overcome certain other advantages? I'm not convince

Is your claim that effective practice is meaningless? Or just that it's not sufficient on its own to always overcome certain other advantages? I'm not convinced this is survivorship bias. This isn't "they used to build them better (but all the ones they didn't fell apart ages ago)." And there are far fewer Duncans than there are people who didn't touch a basketball until high school who didn't make the NBA. Studying the best players could have blindspots compared to studying the whole population, but that's impractical, and throwing out an outlier like Duncan is hardly a more rigorous argument. We also have no way to evaluate counterfactuals here - what would those players you played against be like if they hadn't spent all that time practicing? Maybe they'd be stunningly crappy instead of stunningly mediocre. And maybe Duncan could have been even better if he'd started at age 10. I'd certainly be very interested to see a study of neighborhoods, and what the kids in them did for sports and/or recreation, and their rates of generating high-level (college or low-level professional) players, though.