SBNation simply had a huge amount of great content this week, with two really great articles to which I want to draw attention.
The first was Doug Eberhardt’s must read guide to NBA screens. It’s helpful as a guide—along with his mid-April article on the various ways NBA teams defend the pick and roll. But it’s also helpful for the tone in which it is discussing the intricacies of basketball. It’s a progressive tone. It’s a tone that is on the lookout for novelty. It looks at what’s happening, and goes, hey maybe we’re all wrong in looking at this and comparing it to what we already know: something new is here, let’s make sense of it. And it reminds us that it is possible to see these things from a more conservative angle too, and why that doesn’t tell us anything:
“I always hear that NBA players just don't know how to set a solid screen anymore. A lack of old-school fundamentals, they say. Damn that AAU basketball!” Eberthardt says. “In reality, the nature of setting screens has changed along with the style of NBA offenses.”
As he explains: "you don't always want to stop the on-ball defender. Sometimes, you want to force the defender to actually get over the screen and trigger the rest of the defense to react to your action. Rather than a lower-value medium-range jumper, you want to end up with a strong roll to the rim, a free throw, a pop for a jumper or a drive-and-kick pass for an uncontested three. Points per possession, kids."
That last remark is an invocation of “analytics,” but the division between a progressive and conservative look at basketball goes deeper than that and moves along different lines. I have the suspicion that in many ways what is being talked about when analytics is invoked is one which trusts in the skill of the NBA player and is comfortable with ignorance in the face of it. Instead of explaining things in terms of expectations based on experience, it analogizes to past experience in order to ask whether we might generate new expectations—whether we can expect anything new from what is happening.
Of course you need both approaches. But it’s helpful to analyze from a position that understands that the NBA is a black-box: we don’t know what’s inside it unless we talk about it from the inside. We can try and open it—by talking to former-players-become-analysts, being on the beat and getting inside scoops, or by analysis of stats—but the important thing to remember is sometimes we don’t need to open it to speculate on what is being done. We don’t need to know the intentions behind a strategy to understand what the strategy does. That’s the perspective with which this article views its subject (though the intricacies and details themselves came to be known through from Eberhardt's experience and his more intimate, inside view of NBA coaching), and it’s the perspective from which it teaches readers about strategy.
--
I bring all this up because the other article that was rewarding to read this week revolved around it also. David Roth also at SBNation wrote an amazing piece trying to appreciate the Spurs, and to explain why he never did appreciate them. He explains his relationship to the Spurs as a form of growing up, of, in a way, learning how to watch the game observantly.
It is a piece trying to put the nail in the coffin of “the Spurs are boring” argument, by saying this is an immature way to judge them. He says that, as a kid, he used to cheer for the Nets and their very individualistic team, rooting for them to do more and more amazing individual feats. Accordingly, he hated the Spurs precisely for their consistency.
He didn’t envy Spurs fans: he had a blast rooting for a team that wasn’t really as team-centered. But… "But while it served its purpose," he goes on to say, "I missed a great many things by making this team so thoroughly my own and myself so thoroughly its. I told myself lies about Derrick Coleman's potential, and I made Kenny Anderson into something he couldn't possibly have been. I saw Michael Jordan play at his very best and did nothing but curse the slack, goofy, inevitably-overmatched Chris Morris for not being able to stop him. I screamed myself blind. I was a fan, forgive me. I was not nearly grown."
Essentially what he’s explaining is what I’m trying to say about evaluating without expectations. I myself wouldn’t call that view childish, or exempt professions (non-fans) from it. But it is a great statement about how that view is blinkered. And it is apt because it also points to the possible origin of that more demanding, more close-minded analytic approach.
For the mention of Jordan isn’t coincidental. I’m currently making my way through Roland Lazenby’s wonderful new life of Michael Jordan, and one thing I find myself wondering is whether watching basketball can ever be the same after seeing him challenge opponents like he did with Chris Morris here.
That is, I find myself wondering about his effect on the game—and whether it was good. One thing that wasn’t, I’m speculating, may have been what it did to us watching them. He taught us to expect more. To raise our expectations higher of what a basketball player can do. And to look at other players as insufficient performers, as people—quite simply—you should ask more from.
It’s not Jordan’s fault he accomplished this, if this is so. And it couldn’t be intentional, though it surely also came out of the immense drive that motivated him. We might say he introduced into the analysis and evaluation of basketball a quantitative idea of qualitative excellence: the idea that the best is the most perfect. This would be opposed to the right kind of perfect: a purely qualitative idea, a holism. And in a way our fascination with the former may have blinded us to the latter.
This might be a typically “soft” approach to basketball, one that enjoys the “new” NBA and analyzing with “analytics” rather than on guts and the eye-test and memories of the Bad Boys and Bird (for the record, I’m actually quite a believer in the eye-test as the only real test, but that’s for another day). It’s the view that would see holes in what Jordan does, that would see something wrong with his game, and that ultimately wants to say other people are better than him—people like Lebron.
In truth, I’m probably more of the school of Bill Simmons (on this point, at least), who spends pages and pages precisely saying that we can’t go down these lines, and compare Lebron to Jordan: that Jordan is the best, the most perfect, that we’ll never again see anything like him. But I also think that in a way all this does is say that the most perfect is the most perfect, when there are also other kinds of perfect—the kinds that are the right kind at the right moment. Jordan, in short, won the entire game of basketball. But perhaps—here’d be the furthest reach of this argument—he also was only the right kind of perfect for the right moment.
If that’s the case, then it’s possible also to appreciate the Spurs, right now, as the best. Because we wouldn’t be expecting more than our previous notions of the best from them, so much as simply looking for what they do. "Some of these players did more than others," Roth says, "but the defining characteristic of the various and oddly-similar championship teams on which they [the Spurs players] played was that none were asked to do things they could not do. This was true of the team's stars, too, who could of course do so much more."
We wouldn’t be evaluating with expectations: we wouldn't be asking them to do anything more than what they do either. Instead, we might be participating in a kind of discovery of new things to do with a ball and a hoop.
And yet, this is also ultimately what I find a little problematic about what Roth goes on to say: because he doesn’t quite go on to say what is so right right now about this kind of basketball, what makes it a new and appropriate kind of excellence for this moment, and within the history of the game.
"The Spurs have not changed,” Roth says, "and that is the essence of what makes and keeps them great. They have found a way to do things that work well and maintained the humility to work that way for a shared end. For all the reasons we might watch a game, this more modest transcendence -- individuals into a whole, faith in a process made legible and even beautiful -- is not nearly the most vivid."
That’s true, but it would seem from what he says that it’s a tradeoff between the amount of excellence we can see in a player, and the type of excellence the Spurs display. That it isn't a bad thing to leave the one behind and go on to understand and appreciate the other, just as growing up isn't a bad thing. It’s the difference, as he'd more particularly characterize it, between rooting for best that an individual can accomplish, and merely appreciating the beauty of what a team does—team basketball.
But it feels less like holism and maturity than a sweet fondness, a different kind of fandom (one better than a thousand analyses): it's an evaluation that hasn't come to its end yet, that is waiting for an even better way to explain how good they are. Because it’s not true that the Spurs haven’t changed. What is most impressive about these Spurs, and what makes their basketball so interesting, is their adaptability, is their immense flexibility. It is, in other words, the sort of ability to how players can "fit" which Roth points out, only with the flip side of this acknowledged: that it is also ability to expand into new dimensions as a unit, to do new and weird things.
This would be the area to expand upon if we were really to try and see what is right about this team; it seems not only to prove the excellence Jordan’s era gave us as something that blinded us to what the Spurs have been so good at doing, but also to show what they have been doing is something precise that they are supremely, historically excellent at.
No comments:
Post a Comment