May 13 2009
Gladwell v. McMillan
In a recent piece in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell, the author of sociology hits (if that is possible) The Tipping Point and Outliers, took on the question of how David beats Goliath in so many fields, be it sports, war, or religion, and how it happens so relatively often. He brings up crazy statistics about how a group that is overpowered by more than ten times still can win a third of the time. To start his piece, though, he begins with a story about basketball.
In this story, a girls youth basketball team that consists of the daughters of software developers from Silicon Valley with relatively little athletic ability make it all the way to the state championships. They’re physically outmatched every time they play, but they win nonetheless. The way they win? A relentless full-court press. They set up the press for every inbound with the girl throwing it in being unguarded, so that defender can play a rover position, taking any ball that gets thrown in the air. With this strategy, the girls were running up the score on teams that were much “better” than them, as they plucked the ball away early and made easy lay-ins.
From here Gladwell extrapolates this into several other fields, including higher levels of basketball. He talks about Lawrence of Arabia and how he steered his Bedouins four hundred miles out of the way to attack Aqaba from the desert instead of from the sea as expected, or how they took out the supply chain of the Ottomans in Medina instead of attacking Medina. He mentions how David beats Goliath by playing by his own rules; instead of using a sword he uses a sling, a weapon he’s much more proficient with.
However, I’m more interested in the basketball examples. The two big ones come from the college ranks with Digger Phelps’ Fordham team beating the Dr. J-led UMass team back in the ‘70-’71 season and the success of Rick Pitino’s pressing teams. With most of these squads, the lack of strength is compensated by the press. Under Pitino, many programs that had no chance at winning anything became contenders within two years.
Let’s extrapolate it one step further now. This strategy has produced winners at the lowest levels of the game. As has been evidenced many times before, it’s the amateur levels where the newest and boldest strategies are invented, whether it’s the relentless presses in basketball or no-punt offenses in high school football that resemble the spread in college football. Once these strategies try to make the leap to the big stage, things change a bit.
The first key to a successful press is will. To press you need to want it. You need to have a zealot-like faith in its ability to work. This can either come from oneself or from a messianic basketball figure which inspires devotion to the system. The great college coaches have this mastered. They’re the alphas and omegas of their systems, smiting any player that tries to talk back. In the professional game, things are different. Coaches aren’t Jesuses or even Francises of Assisi; they’re Sunday school teachers. They goad their players in the right direction and try to help them, but ultimately their power is limited. The players who have been conditioned their entire lives to play basketball one way will butt heads, and for the most part, win any argument about pressing. A multi-millionaire professional athlete’s will is much harder to inspire than a 12-year-old girl’s.
Legs are another issue. The press requires constant movement, meaning it’s important to have either a deep bench or superhuman marathoners that can run without fatigue. In the lower levels, this isn’t nearly as much of an issue because games just aren’t as frequent. At the longest, a college season lasts around 30 games. An NBA team can play almost a hundred games including a long playoffs. They have to deal with back to backs and long road trips. No matter what kind of will a coach or player can inspire, the legs will not let a press happen night in and night out in the NBA.
A possible exception: if a team is constructed exclusively from players with strong endurance from 1 through 12, all with a similar level of skill, this could work. Then again, this brings up the issue of will. What professional athlete would sublimate themselves and their statistics and livelihood for the good of the team? You can think of a few? Well, think of 12 and see if they could be put on the same team. A little harder.
Finally, there’s the simple issue of dimensions and skill. Middle school girls and even college players take up less space than NBA players. They can’t range quite as quickly, and they aren’t as tall (deep insight, I know). It’s much easier to defend someone who can’t move very quickly, even if you can’t move quickly yourself. It’s someone’s ability to change directions which makes them difficult to defend off the ball, and most amateur players aren’t that strong in that department. Most NBA players are extremely agile. Also, a press works in lower levels because most of the players aren’t familiar with it. They panic and throw the ball away. In the NBA, this is different. Almost every player has seen some version of the press (except Travis Outlaw, which has resulted in hilariously inept turnovers in past seasons) and they know how to beat it through short passes or bombs to an athletic center for an easy fast break.
Even as I’ve been trying to shoot down the idea of the press in the NBA throughout this, I would like to say something, it could work in the NBA, and it could work with the Blazers. The Blazers are one of a couple of teams in the league that could theoretically run this (others include young lineups such as the Thunder or Grizzlies). This strategy could never work game in and game out throughout an NBA season, but it could work every couple of games, the equivalent of having a knuckleballer in a baseball rotation to confuse an opposing offense. It’s a beautiful compromise. Teams would have to prepare for both, which would lead to wasted practice and preparation time, and the Blazers would be in the driver’s seat for every game before it even started. The personnel they have is well-known for putting the interest of the team first, and rangy chaos guys like Bayless, Batum, and Fernandez are built for a system like this.
The best example I can think of at the moment is that Rockets playoffs series. Their advantage was a roster of bruisers that could overpower our guys. Ours was quickness. We could have pressed them every single game. Fatigue wasn’t an issue because games were three days apart. Individual statistics go out the window because winning means everything in the playoffs. With a Goliath on their team like Yao, wouldn’t it have made sense to play the part of David?
Gladwell ends the story with the end of the girls’ basketball season, where they lose in the state championship game. At a hostile gym with a referee hired by the other team, ticky tack fouls start getting called all over the place. The girls are forced to stop pressing, and they lose when they play conventionally. Honestly, this would happen in the NBA too. There is no way the dark overlords of the NBA would ever let a press dominate the game. Basically, for all the theoretical junk in this post, the Blazers pressing comes down to this statement: “It’s possible, but.”
