GuyFawkes38
05-13-2009, 01:08 PM
I keep hearing about the brilliance of Malcolm Gladwell. And then I stumbled on this article by him on the equalizing force of the full court press:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?printable=true
Gladwell centers his argument on a grade school girls basketball team and their brilliant, inexperienced basketball coach:
The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?
So Gladwell decides to extrapolate the effectiveness of the full court press from one girls basketball team and declares that if coaches embraced the full court press, they could beat more talented teams? Ugghhhhhhh
Anybody who watches basketball understands that the opposite is true. Less talented teams must slow down the tempo to limit the opposing teams' possession count (that still probably won't work...but there is hope that the opposing team might choke on those fewer possessions).
Gladwell is an idiot. I won't read his books.
On a side note, although Pete Gillen and Skip Prosser were great coaches who built the X program into a powerhouse, I never liked their full court style of play. I considered Matta and Miller's half court offenses an improvement. I'm hearing that Mack will embrace a more full court style and that worries me a bit.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?printable=true
Gladwell centers his argument on a grade school girls basketball team and their brilliant, inexperienced basketball coach:
The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?
So Gladwell decides to extrapolate the effectiveness of the full court press from one girls basketball team and declares that if coaches embraced the full court press, they could beat more talented teams? Ugghhhhhhh
Anybody who watches basketball understands that the opposite is true. Less talented teams must slow down the tempo to limit the opposing teams' possession count (that still probably won't work...but there is hope that the opposing team might choke on those fewer possessions).
Gladwell is an idiot. I won't read his books.
On a side note, although Pete Gillen and Skip Prosser were great coaches who built the X program into a powerhouse, I never liked their full court style of play. I considered Matta and Miller's half court offenses an improvement. I'm hearing that Mack will embrace a more full court style and that worries me a bit.