Possibly the hardest thing to understand about the game of basketball is that it's really a very simple game. You pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense. If you watch too much of the NBA, or sloppy college teams, or "Street Ball" on ESPN2 in the wee hours of the morning, you can get confused, and start to think it's a complicated game. It's not. You pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense.
My best game is really as a post player, where I depend on other people to get me the ball, so I confront this a lot in pick-up games. Guys who have been playing ball a lot longer than I have struggle to grasp the essential simplicity of the game. When I put my left hand up and call for the ball, I want you to throw it to my left side, now. I don't want you to stare at me for three seconds, and then float a lob pass in the general direction of my head. I don't want you to throw a pass that leads me four feet out into the corner. I certainly don't want you to bounce the ball between the legs of the guy guarding you two feet to my right. It doesn't have to be a fancy pass, it doesn't have to look pretty-- you just need to throw the ball to my left hand, now.
If you're good at the simple things-- pass and catch, give and go, pick and roll-- you can start to get fancy, but you don't need to get fancy. It's a simple game: you pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense. If you do the simple things, and do them well, you will win. If you attempt fancy things, and do them badly, you will lose.
It's a simple game that way. The true essence of basketball lies in the Zen-like perfection of Pete Carrill's best Princeton teams, not the idiot showboating of those "Mix Tape" shows.
For a contemporary example, you need look no farther than Maryland's loss to Temple this afternoon. And not even the whole game-- just a short stretch in the mid-to-late second half.
With about eight minutes to go, my Terps had built a small lead-- four points or so. And on the next three possessions, Temple ran one play: they brought the ball down the court in the hands of their best guard, who made a simple bounce pass in to their center in the post. He made a strong move, and scored. Three baskets, just like that.
In the same stretch, Maryland turned the ball over three times, with guys trying to sneak a bounce pass through four defenders (it was stolen), trying to float a lob pass to a guy who wasn't looking for it (it went out of bounds), and trying to one-touch a bounce pass to a guy cutting along the baseline (it went out of bounds).
That's your ball game right there. Temple went from four down to two up. Maryland fell apart. Game over.
It wasn't like that was an anomalous stretch in the game, either-- Maryland turned the ball over something like twenty times, the vast majority of them on stupid passes. There were dumb passes in traffic, slow lobs across the court, passes to guys who weren't ready, you name it. It wasn't even an anomaly for the season as a whole-- the same thing did them in against Duke a few weeks ago-- they had guys passing up decent shots to attempt bizarre and difficult passes to other players who weren't open. And it's not like the lesson isn't there to be learned-- if you look at the tape of Georgetown's win over Duke, you'll see that they won by playing simple basketball, and playing it well.
The problem this Maryland team has is they've forgotten that it's a simple game: You pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense. You do those things simply, and do them well, and you will win. You try to show off, and do it badly, and you will lose.
It's a simple game.
- Log in to post comments
Right on! I am sending this to my son's feeder team coach right now! He will probably frame your post, because this is exactly what he tells the kids (and parents too!). Good work, thanks! You should probably send this to Ed Brayton at Dispatches From The Culture Wars too!
Hey, great to see another basketball fan among the ScienceBloggers. I didn't watch that game, but I'm a big fan of Temple coach John Cheney's coaching. His teams have consistently overachieved for their talent level by doing exactly what you're talking about, taking care of the fundamental aspects of the game. And to be honest, I think Gary Williams has done similar things at Maryland, but this team is really missing a point guard to direct things on the court. When his senior class came in, I really thought that by their junior and senior years they would be challenging for a national championship, but Gilchrist turned out to be a poison pill and the big men have just never developed. Contrast that with the team that won the championship for him, where he took players that were not highly recruited and made them overachieve, now he has a group of highly rated players who have never really gelled. I really thought Mike Jones was going to be a stud for him too, and he's never become the player he should have been.
The Georgetown game was painful to watch (I'm a big Duke fan), but that game showed what you can do with Pete Carrill's Princeton system when you put some real athletes in it. That's also a very young team that is still learning the system. Next year they're gonna be really tough. Jeff Green is such a smooth player, he's fun to watch.
Hey, great to see another basketball fan among the ScienceBloggers. I didn't watch that game, but I'm a big fan of Temple coach John Cheney's coaching. His teams have consistently overachieved for their talent level by doing exactly what you're talking about, taking care of the fundamental aspects of the game. And to be honest, I think Gary Williams has done similar things at Maryland, but this team is really missing a point guard to direct things on the court.
I think their bigger problem is actually the lack of a solid inside player. Gary Williams's best teams at Maryland have all had one guy who could be counted on to more or less hold down the middle on his own-- Joe Smith, Keith Booth, Obinna Ekezie, Lonny Baxter. They freed up the rest of the team to run around like crazy, because they could rely on having a good big guy to clean up after them-- someone who would get rebounds both on defense and on offense, and provide a credible post threat as a bail-out option.
They haven't had that sort of player for the past couple of years, and they've suffered for it. They consistently get killed off the glass, giving up huge numbers of offensive rebounds for their opponents, while getting very few of their own. And the guys they have working the paint just aren't very threatening on defense, or much of an offensive option down in the post-- Travis Garrison in particular would rather float around the three-point line and shoot jumpers than get down in the lane and bang.
They don't have a great point guard, it's true, but the only great point guard they've had under Gary Williams was Steve Blake-- the other guys who have run the point in the past ten or twelve years have all been head cases of one sort or another. The Strawberry/ Ledbetter/ Brown tag-team is about as competent as, say, Dwayne Simpkins. Their problem is, they don't have a consistent guy to run the offense through once they get it set, so they tend to founder.
Of course, as a post player myself, I would say that...