Easterbrook on NBA "Strategy"

[Joe Hironaka <j.hironaka@unesco.org>]

Hi List:
    The following interesting or at least debate-provoking article about
the NBA comes, of all places, from a Senior Editor at the left-leaning
political mag The New Republic.

Joe

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Anarchy in the NBA
By Gregg Easterbrook

Teams barely even use plays. Watch the Indiana Pacers in the finals, and
try to detect a strategy, any strategy, other than move and shoot.

Indiana endlessly runs "curls"—modified screens in which a man without
the ball sprints past a teammate, hoping his defender will be "rubbed
off" by the teammate's defender (ideally, they'll collide). Reggie
Miller loves to curl along the baseline or at the top angle of the key.
He loves to curl so much he does it on almost every possession—and he
might as well, because the Pacers don't run any kind of offense that
anyone has been able to detect. They just shuffle and curl, jog and
weave, which is exactly what playground players do when they've just
formed a team. And the Pacers are coached by Larry Bird, who carries the
mantle of the Boston Celtics, the all-time fundamentals franchise
winner, with an inches-thick playbook. Bird openly complains that his
Pacers are erratic and unmotivated. But if he ever tried to teach them
Celtics-style coordinated movement, he's given up and now just tosses
out the ball. In the age of the guaranteed salary and the shoe-contract
ego, maybe that's all a coach can do.

Consider a Pacers play called "C-5." You're sure to hear the announcers
use this term during the series, since everybody (including the
opposition scouts, of course) heard Mark Jackson shouting it out over
and over against the Knicks. On C-5, Rik Smits, the Indiana center, goes
to the low post and takes an entry pass. He either turns to shoot a hook
or flips it back to a guard, while the other players weave around trying
to get open. That's it, that's the play. No coordinated screen-and-roll,
no backdoor, nobody cutting to the basket as in Celtics lore. Playground
pickup teams that have been together for five minutes swing the ball low
to whoever the tallest guy is, then wait for him to kick it back.

Or consider the Lakers' vaunted triangle offense. You often hear
announcers speak in hushed tones of the "intricate triangle offense," as
if it were developed by human genome researchers. Announcers gush that
the triangle is complex because they don't understand how little is
happening.

In the Lakers' triangle, someone heads to the far corner as a "point
forward." A guard brings the ball to that side, and one of the big men
comes to a high post on the same side. Now there's three of them there,
and they form a—triangle! Usually the guard will pass to the point
forward, who will either shoot or pass back. If that's not open, the off
guard will come around to take the ball, or the near-side big man will
exchange positions with the off-side big man. There. Now you've mastered
the triangle offense. Watch any basketball team at any level, and tell
me when the three guys closest to the ball aren't forming a triangle.

The triangle acquired its mystical reputation when the Bulls ran it in
Chicago with Michael Jordan, but it was Jordan, not the formation, that
was great. As a practical matter, when the Lakers call the triangle,
what usually results is a "swing around"—players pass the ball from side
to side around the perimeter until someone is open or the clock runs
down. Swing-around is basketball's most rudimentary form of motion,
happening on about 50 percent of possessions by all NBA teams, to say
nothing of junior-high teams. Swing-around requires little coordination,
other than that players observe the tenet of never dribbling more than
three times before they pick up and pass. (Only really good players like
Jackson and Bryant can get away with dribbling more than that; the rule
is that the longer you hold the ball, the more trouble you're in.) Yet
by current NBA standards, swing-around looks like a play, because teams
are using so little strategy that any motion requiring players to
cooperate seems impressive.

Swing-around certainly looks like a play compared with, say, "clear," in
which four players get out of the way while the guy with the ball goes
one-on-one. Clear plays, which don't deserve to be called plays, can be
run by five guys who have never even met, let alone practiced. When the
Bulls were calling clear plays for Jordan, it was beautiful to watch.
But that was because Michael was Michael—at North Carolina he even made
the four corners, normally basketball's most tiresome strategy, exciting
to watch. Today, when Philadelphia calls the clear for Allen Iverson,
for humanitarian reasons the networks should pan their cameras away.

Years ago, the NBA essentially banned strategy on defense by banning the
zone. This guaranteed simplistic action, since the offense always knows
where the defenders will be. (If zones were legal, the 24-second clock
would still ensure a fast pace, while coaches would sometimes use man
defenses anyway; that is to say, there'd be a battle of wits.) Now
strategy is falling out of fashion on offense too, other than the use of
elementary instructions such as "swing it down to the post." It's an
indication of the low, low state to which the league has shriveled when
it comes to fundamentals that today whenever a guard and forward
exchange the ball on one side of the key, some announcer will mumble,
"two-man game." To the extent this cliché means anything, two-man game
means the guard and the forward actually have something in mind, like a
give and go. This has become sufficiently rare in the NBA that it gets
remarked on.

Speaking of the two-man game, for years now NBA coaches, fans, and
commentators have been expressing amazement that the aging, creaking
Karl Malone and John Stockton have kept the aging, creaking and
talent-thin Utah Jazz in the league's elite. The Jazz remain in the
league's elite mainly because they are the last NBA team that runs a
real play on almost every possession—that actually executes a
pick-and-roll or backdoor cut or the like. Other NBA teams continue to
be amazed by how well the Jazz do this, but not a one tries to emulate
Utah, because that would require strategy and discipline. No doubt the
NBA is eager for Malone and Stockton to retire so that tactics can
vanish from the league entirely, and there will be no one left reminding
fans of what thinking-player's basketball can be like as every team
endlessly clears, curls, or swings around.