Locker room talk: rolling basketball thread

[padraig (u.s.)]

Dinwiddie was also on the Wizards and averaged 7 less ppg than OP, I'm just sayin

I never said Dinwiddie was awesome, that's linebaugh's cross to bear

I mean at this point he's definitely much better than Porter but that wasn't the case earlier in their careers, which have trended in opposite directions

 

[linebaugh]

hes being cheeky pad pay him no mind, hes never so much as ripped a hole in his blue jeans

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

have to come to dirks defense here and say that he was always a mental killer, one of the best crunch time players of all time by pretty much all the metrics and his play off runs surrounding the 07 series, before and after, are insane- 28 points a game on historic efficiency while taking the most difficult shot profile in basketball. one of the few superstars to both increase counting stats and efficiency stats in the playoffs. 07 is rather explained by the fact that he didnt yet know how to take advantage of those 6'7-6'8 defenders and the warriors coach was don nelson the man who practically invented dirk and the mavs in a lab just 2 years prior. that and the mavs supporting cast around him was always weaker compared to his contemporaries, even for the pre super team era. His second option of offense for his entire prime was jason terry who except for '11 disappointed every year in the post season, as do many undersized guards who dont have an elite skill outside of shooting. a little like the suns team this year in that they were a well oiled machine that could put up massive win numbers in the regualr season but didnt have the talent outside of their main guy to overcome the playoff slog

that's all probably fair, tho I still think they did mentally break him to an extent in that series

I should have been more clear - I don't think he was mentally weak before that series, and to the extent they broke him it was definitely an outgrowth of his inability to take advantage of those smaller defenders. I watched that entire series closely - something I basically never do nowadays - and he spent most of it looking frustrated and semi-bewildered. and absolutely his supporting cast was never great, but a 1 should never lose to an 8 - if they'd gotten beat in the 2 Rd by that Jazz team, it would've been a disappointment, but not embarrassing.

so it was definitely partly just learning to deal with smaller but long/athletic defenders, but I think it also instilled a Never Again mentality. the Heat didn't just try to win in 2011 - another series I watched all of - they were absolutely trying to clown him (DWade and LBJ pretend coughing to make fun of him, Udonis Haslem et al bodying him up, etc ), and he just was not fucking having it. the whole stereotype of Euro guys being soft still exists to an extent but it was so much more prevalent 15 years ago and Dirk being the first Euro superstar to win a championship as a #1 guy had no small part in killing it.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Dirk's supporting cast was fucking dismal tho

tho also it's hard to compare today's NBA to even 10 years ago bc so many more players are so much more skilled

 

[IdleRich]

I agree that that seems the natural mode for any game of this kind where you have one team trying to score at one end and one at the other - you have an equal number of players and a kind of default opposite number. But it just seems insane - am I really getting this right? - that if I beat my man, then I get a free run at the goal. No-one else is allowed to stop me?
I do understand that a team could make for a tedious game by putting all of their players at the back and just - as they say in football - parking the bus. Especially if, as you say that skill levels were lower and maybe teams couldn't beat that with long range shots.
But my thoughts are as follows

1. You get so many points in an average game in basketball, it wouldn't hurt to have some lower scoring games. A bit of variety.
2. In football it's well recognised that some teams asre stronger than others. If Sheffield United play Manchester City and they go toe-to-toe with them in an open attacking game they will get thrashed ten nil, so why shouldn't be allowed to try an alternative strategy that plays to their strengths? In football it's perfectly legitimate to "park the bus" and put ten men behind the ball (or even eleven) with the idea of holding on for a draw, or even frustrating the stronger team to the extent that they lose concentration and leave the backdoor unlocked, and then Sheffield, if they can be clinical enough, manage to capitalise on the far smaller number of chances they get. In the Champions League final last week - and this is not an extreme example cos of course in the final the skill differential is not gonna be as great as it can be in a league of 22 teams - Real Madrid had one shot on target and they made it count and won.
So to me, ultra-negative defence is a way that teams can set up, and then it's a question that top teams have to answer "how do we unlock such a defence?". There are many different ways to play and win a football match and that's part of what makes the game as a whole so fascinating. Personally I wouldn't want to legislate that out of the game.
3. But if you really do want to create rules to prevent this way of playing then aren't there better ways of doing it? You could have some sort of reverse off-side rule where teams are not allowed more than three players in their D or behind that line there is (or you could draw a new one I suppose). Or maybe it could be the max they can have is the same as the attacking team plus one. Or maybe the rules should be that a team has to have three in the opponent's half at all times. Obviously you guys know better than me what formula might work here, but the point is there are vairous things that you could try and that this one-to-one rule seems weird.

Also, how did they impose this rule? Do I have to tell the ref at the start that I am marking number 23? Presumably there are circumstances when I can change marker, what circs were those how do they judge them? Aren't there moments that are kinda free for all? Does the rule get dropped then?

It seems as though the game must have changed hugely with this rule being abolished. It's not like in football when they tweak the off-side rule or bring in the backpass rule or something, it seems like an enormous structural change to the way that the game was played - not the handling and shooting skills, but the sport as a team game must have been dramatically altered.. Which season was it when this happened? Was the next season kinda shambolic with people forgetting that they were allowed to tackle people and so on?

Also guys, I asked about hand-checking, what's that?

nb I know I keep drawing comparisons with the thing I know ie football. I suppose that that does have a limited value, but I think it does have some value all the same. To me, games such as ice hockey, field hockey, basketball, football, probably some others too, have this fundamental game engine in which the same number of players line up against each other and try and get it into a hole, a goal, a basket or something. You can beat players by going round them or you can take several players out with a pass - basically someone who is familiar with watching one of these sports can watch another one and see to some extent what is going on. Interested to hear if people agree with me there and whether you think that you can kinda adapt things that you have learned watching one to one of the others.

 

[linebaugh]

that's all probably fair, tho I still think they did mentally break him to an extent in that series

I should have been more clear - I don't think he was mentally weak before that series, and to the extent they broke him it was definitely an outgrowth of his inability to take advantage of those smaller defenders. I watched that entire series closely - something I basically never do nowadays - and he spent most of it looking frustrated and semi-bewildered. and absolutely his supporting cast was never great, but a 1 should never lose to an 8 - if they'd gotten beat in the 2 Rd by that Jazz team, it would've been a disappointment, but not embarrassing.

so it was definitely partly just learning to deal with smaller but long/athletic defenders, but I think it also instilled a Never Again mentality. the Heat didn't just try to win in 2011 - another series I watched all of - they were absolutely trying to clown him (DWade and LBJ pretend coughing to make fun of him, Udonis Haslem et al bodying him up, etc ), and he just was not fucking having it. the whole stereotype of Euro guys being soft still exists to an extent but it was so much more prevalent 15 years ago and Dirk being the first Euro superstar to win a championship as a #1 guy had no small part in killing it.

ya thats fair. I beleive it was after 07 that dirk and his shooting coach holger went on some spiritual journey in Australia where they traveled around the outback sleeping in cars which is pretty wild considering that dirk is 7 ft tall and worth 100 million and holger a geriatric.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Also guys, I asked about hand-checking, what's that?

it's not complicated or anything, it's just when you physically place and leave a hand (or forearm etc) on someone while you're guarding them

you can still do it but only when you're guarding someone near the basket with their back to the basket, i.e. posted up

the reason the NBA got rid of it was not only to incentivize scoring but specifically to free up perimeter play for guards and wings

definitely in the wake of MJ but not only bc of MJ

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

the NBA meta of the last 40 years is essentially the league trying to find the right level at which to incentivize scoring

tho it's more like a dynamic back and forth between the league and things outside the league's control

the massive (can't be overstated) global popularity of MJ ushered in a whole generation of perimeter players

and it turns out people like watching more dynamic play with more scoring than they do wrestling matches with final scores like 73-68

but only to a certain level - no one wants to watch a track meet with no defense, that's what the All-Star Game is for

so recently there's swing back to defense has begun, it's first and most prominent casualty being James Harden (tho v possibly he's also just washed)

the influence of analytics on shot selection cannot be overstated here

at the time - mid-00s - the 7 Seconds or Less Suns were an exhilarating innovation/bizarre experiment/the end of days, depending on yr perspective

nowadays essentially everyone plays like that, even teams that are centered on bigs

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

go watch basketball from the mid-80s and it's almost a different game

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I think that's why it is different from soccer as well

in soccer, scoring is rare and even with "negative defending" what people like is the run of play of which goals are an end result

in basketball the run of play and scoring are inseparable - each possession is a self-contained unit with a literal shot clock

there is no such thing as time of possession, Spain's tiki-taka or whatever

and every game has many possessions, so if most of them are boring, the game is unwatchable

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

and basketball without a shot clock is truly, truly unwatchable

here's Dean Smith's infamous 4 corners offense trying to stall out a superior Duke team back in 1979

can you imagine trying to watch that for 5 minutes, let alone an entire game? I'm amazed people didn't go mad.

the score was 7-0 at the end of the first half! 7. to 0. it forced the NCAA to implement a shot clock.

(incidentally Duke-UNC is the most insufferable sports rivalry on Earth. you'd think it was Yankees-Red Sox, but no, this is somehow worse.)

 

[IdleRich]

Yeah this is what I'm learning from readingg a few things.
I totally get this about the rules being tweaked and so on to make the game... as good as it can be (though of course that in itself raises the question of what "good" is).

But two things I didn't realise - how many rules there were in basketball, I'd always thought it simpler than, say, the apparently byzantine American Football, I'd never dreamed that there was all this stuff about technical fouls for defending in the wrong way, standing in the wrong place etc and secondly, as you say, how much it had changd.

This has come up for me particularly cos I seem to have suddenly started getting some newsletter in my email which among things contains a lot of basketball talk and I've been clicking on it. Funny that a lot of it seems to be about how players these days wouldn't have lasted in "real basketball" in the 90s cos all these pretty boys now would have started crying after one hand-check. I have to admit I was suspicious, it sounded a lot like the "but could Messi do it on a wet Wednesday in Stoke?" talk. So the fact that you lot seem to agree that that is a load of bollocks and, like virtually all sports, basketball skill levels have improved in the last 25 to 30 years.

 

[IdleRich]

and basketball without a shot clock is truly, truly unwatchable

here's Dean Smith's infamous 4 corners offense trying to stall out a superior Duke team back in 1979

can you imagine trying to watch that for 5 minutes, let alone an entire game? I'm amazed people didn't go mad.

the score was 7-0 at the end of the first half! 7. to 0. it forced the NCAA to implement a shot clock.

(incidentally Duke-UNC is the most insufferable sports rivalry on Earth. you'd think it was Yankees-Red Sox, but no, this is somehow worse.)

Ah took me a second to grasp, but the team with the ball is the weaker one, and with no shot clock they are not forced to take risks and so they can hold on to the ball very easily? In theory you could go a tiny number of points ahead and then hold on to the ball for the remaining 56 minutes for the most tedious win in history.

 

[sus]

Feeling very inspired by Padraig's analysis right now... Linebaugh has some points but the level of abstraction, philosophy, and systems understanding that Padraig (US) deploys is undeniable

 

[IdleRich]

Reading that article that @luka linked to.

So this is the rule in outline I suppose

For years, the NBA outlawed zones, forcing players to either guard their man or double the man with the ball. Any player caught guarding an area and not a man would elicit a technical foul shot.

I still don't understand how it was enforced but it does say this

These days, all that remains of the once byzantine illegal defense rules is a stricture against standing in the lane without guarding a man for more than three seconds.

So clearly it was complicated. I mean I still don't understand what they mean by "the lane" here but it seems as though they pared down the rules and that is normally a good thing. A sport that has countless laws saying where player X can stand depending on where P, Q and R are and how long they can stand there for has got problems I reckon. Before I asked to what extent your average American Player knew the whole rule book versus just knowing that his role was to stand here and run there or whatever and I think that the same question might be relevant here. Presumably players had an intuitve understanding of what they could and couldn't do at least but with this sort of thing I wonder how precisely they knew the whole set of rules from a) i) to z) ix subsection 4 clause note kappa or whatever.

But in the 1990s, coaches developed strategies to abuse the man-to-man. Teams would isolate their best scorer in the post with his teammates as far away on the other side of the court as possible, to make it hard to double. “People used to put guys in the parking lot,” Fisher jokes.

From this I am understanding that if I beat my man, then other people could stop me - but the attacking team could move their players really far apart which meant that other defenders would have to be attached to someone miles away and, if it was done right, they would have no chance of getting near me in time to take up a decent defensive position and, ultimately, stop me scoring. And this was obviously done cynically, the other players were not being placed to aid the attack themselves but more to draw the other guy out of position. I had absolutely no idea about this.

the NBA long looked down their nose at zone defense, seeing it as a tacit admission of inferior talent.

Also interesting to me. In my example above with Shefflield United v Man City it's obvious that the former has inferior talent - City have individual players that cost more than their entire team. So they admit they have less talent from the start and set up in the only way that gives them a chance even so. This is claiming that a basketball team would rather just set up to lose than admit that - which I find hard to believe.

 

[IdleRich]

Thank you for taking the time to explain guys. Finding basketball way more interesting than I have ever done before simply due to the greater (than zero admittedly) understanding I am gaining here.
I wonder how much the average young basketball fan who has only watched during the zonal era appreciates how much things have changed.

 

[luka]

american leagues are more even than our cos of their salary capping and draft system etc. australian sport follows the same model and it doesnt preclude teams being dominant for multiple seasons but it cuts down on the massive differences in talent. people like to talk about how ironic it is that american sport is so anti capitalist in this way

 

[IdleRich]

OK, now looking at that reddit thread

NBA got tired of games with scores of like 89-83.

Interesting, what is a typical score now? I have to say that it was that sort of score that made the game seem boring to me as whenever I tried to watch when young I got the impression that teams scored with almost every possession - one team scores, other team gets the ball and scores, other team starts and scores... repeat until there are about three minutes left and then the game is decided during that bit which was the only exciting part.

The other option being when one team is just a bit better and scores with nine possessions out of ten, while the other only manages eighty-three times from a hundred. Meaning that the better team leads by ten points or so after one quarter, twenty-one points at half-time, and by the final quarter is more than thirty points ahead and a guaranteed winner without their being any particularly exciting moments at all.

 

[IdleRich]

Also

As an aside it was really frustrating as a fan whenever there was an Illegal Defense whistle. It was hard to see and not always consistently applied, but what else is new in the NBA?

If I'm understanding correctly this could be committed by someone not even involved in the action, so as a fan you're watching an exciting bit of play and suddenly the whistle goes cos that guy miles away was standing in the wrong place for too long - is that right?

 

[luka]

OK, now looking at that reddit thread



Interesting, what is a typical score now? I have to say that it was that sort of score that made the game seem boring to me as whenever I tried to watch when young I got the impression that teams scored with almost every possession - one team scores, other team gets the ball and scores, other team starts and scores... repeat until there are about three minutes left and then the game is decided during that bit which was the only exciting part.

The other option being when one team is just a bit better and scores with nine possessions out of ten, while the other only manages eighty-three times from a hundred. Meaning that the better team leads by ten points or so after one quarter, twenty-one points at half-time, and by the final quarter is more than thirty points ahead and a guaranteed winner without their being any particularly exciting moments at all.

rugby league is the same. it means it only gets exciting once you get towards the last ten, fifteen minutes cos its all turn based.