Re: Easterbrook on NBA "Strategy"

[Andy Shaw <shaw@transmeta.com>]

|   Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2000 10:32:15 +0200
|   From: Joe Hironaka <j.hironaka@unesco.org>
|   
|   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.
                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Is this true?  Do the Celtics have an "inches-thick" playbook?

My impression was that the Celtics (before Pitino) actually had
relatively few set plays which they had been running for years -- I
recall McHale joking about opposition teams "stealing" the play calls
for plays they had been running for decades.


In the end, if the two best teams in the NBA don't run plays, what
does that say about the effectiveness of running plays?  You'd think
that if running plays would give a team a big advantage, that the best
teams would do it, right?  If Utah is so great, how come they never
win the big one?

-Andy