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Too Good to Check
In the current issue of the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has an article about how scrappy underdogs using insurgent tactics can beat the big guys, and the whole piece is wrapped around the story of a kids' basketball team that did really well using a full court press against better teams. So why doesn't every underdog basketball team use a full court press? Huh?
Reading this, I got sort of interested because I've wondered more or less the same thing from time to time. 
It seems to me that the full court press is pretty effective. On the other hand, I don't know squat about basketball, and I sort of vaguely figured that professional basketball coaches do, which means there's probably a pretty good reason that the press isn't ubiquitous. Chad Orzel provides the answer:
The press works, as long as the other team isn't ready for it. The idea of a full-court press is to force the opponent into a rushed and frenetic game and get them out of their routine. A team that's ready for it, though, and has skilled and disciplined players, won't get rattled by the press, and can pick the press apart for lots of easy baskets. You can use the full-court press to rattle a superior team that isn't expecting it, but if they know it's coming, there are a lot of ways that pressure defense can fall apart — missed traps in the back court lead to two- or three-on-one breaks, over-aggressive defense leads to fouls, etc. The teams that have won titles using pressure basketball have also had lots of talent, because you need something to fall back on if the press doesn't work.
Like Chad, it's stuff like this that makes me wonder about Gladwell. He's an engaging writer and he picks interesting subjects, but there are really only two alternatives here. Either (a) he wrote this piece without bothering to learn enough about basketball to understand why the press isn't used much above the kiddie league level or (b) he knew the answer but chose not to share it with his readers because it would wreck his story. Unfortunately, I suspect the answer is (b). He seems like a guy who sometimes decides not to let the facts get in his way once he's settled on a good narrative.
Plus, as Chad says, Gladwell seems oddly insensitive to the criticism that "playing '40 Minutes of Hell' is kind of a dick move in a league of twelve-year-old girls." But, really, it is. The coach who did this isn't a brilliant innovator, he's kind of a dick.
in fairness
the team's strategy seemed to be more concerned about denying the inbounds pass than the press itself, in particular pulling the defender off the passer and having her double-team one of the opposing players.
Still, Gladwell does seem to oddly discount the idea of talented players being able to break a trap. Also, there are plenty of other ways for a less talented team to compete - see Princeton in the Pete Carril years, which wasn't about pressing but backdoor plays and crisp passing and outside shooting. Picking out 2 or 3 teams that press to "prove" the theory doesn't hold.
It's also a little
It's also a little incongruous to use a team that did the same thing every game for a year to make the point that Davids can win when they catch Goliaths off guard.
And great point about that coach, Kevin. Way to make basketball miserable for a bunch of 12-year-olds, guy.
He seems like a guy who
He seems like a guy who sometimes decides not to let the facts get in his way once he's settled on a good narrative.
Gladwell has a reputation for this.
another problem
Another problem is conditioning, talent and depth. You can't full court press all the time unless you have a lot of depth, and there are lots of opportunities created by smarter, more talented teams who are ready to deal with the press, especially if they know it's coming. Especially in younger leagues, depth isn't always a premium, and talent is a wider divide, so going full-time full-court press just betrays a lack of wisdom about basketball, not an insurgent repeatable strategy.
The bigger picture
Gladwell does indeed have a reputation for this. The fact is, coming up with really good insights is *hard*. (I believe David Brooks comes from this tradition, too.) The problem is that once you get the reputation for being the Big Picture guy, you have to write these Big Picture pieces, and the insights that make for good ones just don't drop by on schedule. Thus, you have to force them, and you end up with stories like this, or like "I *literally couldn't* spend $20 on dinner!!1!" from Brooks.
Sad, really. But I imagine the temptation is hard to resist.
--biff3000
OK, I'll defend Gladwell a bit here...
He is a bit glib and shallow most of the time, but Chad and Kevin miss the point. Sure, the better team won't be rattled if they're ready for the press, but who's going to be ready in junior league? In general, they aren't advance scouting the opposition until late in the playoffs, and by then it's often too late to effectively plan. And note that this Cinderella team didn't win the championship, they just got to the national playoffs (I'm not sure how many teams get there).
It doesn't seem all that controversial that a weaker team can increase its odds by doing something different and surprising. And that's really all Gladwell is saying here. And I'm honestly a bit shocked to read here that somehow the fact that the players are girls should affect how tough the team should play. What, do people here think the press just not lady-like?
Anyway, the other, and probably main, reason you don't see the full-court press that often? Its effectiveness drops tremendously as the skill level of players go up. Players that know the fundamentals well, pretty much the entire NBA and most of Division 1, can break a press easily. At lower levels, though, it can be very effective. But the press requires that you use the bench heavily, which goes against the star system that most coaches instinctively adopt. And, also, I guess some people think you're a dick if you use it.
unacceptable
hey, kevin, i'm not an apologist for gladwell, but " He seems like a guy who sometimes decides not to let the facts get in his way once he's settled on a good narrative." is a bit much
attacking someone's integrity without argument or evidence; sloppy writing on your part and gratuitous libel to boot. you know i can read powerline when i want this kind of writing. i don't want to find it in mojo.
There's actually an
There's actually an interesting answer to the question "why not always a press" that is well-known to people like Dean Oliver (the sort-of Bill James of basketball). Might even be due to Dean Oliver, I don't know.
The point is, pressing increases the variability, or fluctuations, or randomness. More often than not, the stronger team facing the press will come out ahead for the tactic. But, not paradoxically, the poorer team can at the same time increase its chance of winning by implementing the press, or so the theory goes. The "shaking things up" effect can turn a clockwork certain loss into a possible win. Even though a majority of the time it actually yields an ever greater loss.
With this viewpoint, you can see why the press is a favorite tactic for underdogs, the Loyola-Marymounts playing against the Pac-10 giants, and why it sometimes works and gets great press. But for a team that is expected to defeat nearly all their opponents like clockwork, say UNC, then it's not a great idea.
One interesting exception is Missouri this year, who is coached by Mike Anderson, a protege of Nolan Richardson of Arkansas fame. These two coaches made pressing-while-favored a cornerstone to their teams. But both coaches talk about the need to recruit the right kind of players for this strategy, including players who don't mind limited playing time, because the strategy requires a lot of bench rotation.
Contrarian or Obvious
He has his thing. Take a point that, depending on how you push it, is either too obvious to worry about or too counter-intuitive to be true. Build a huge generality on it. Voila. You're a contrarian. The media and the public eat it up. He does it in book after book.
The comments aren't even noting how he characteristically links a dubious example to a couple of others -- David and Goliath, T. E. Lawrence -- to reach for a generalization that vanishes the harder you press it. Perhaps a full-court press isn't the magic answer, which is why another underdog, Princeton, long succeeded by the opposite, slowing the game down. Perhaps it's a high-risk strategy suited for fast teams good at defense, with the game that better ball handlers will get pat you and score twice as much.
Perhaps David is an example of war shifted by technological change, like the defeat of the Maginot line. Perhaps he's just a Biblical parable of underdog and God's chosen national hero. (Both inspire Shakespeare's Henry V.) Perhaps it all never happened. Perhaps Lawrence better suited combat to the desert. Perhaps he shows what we've learned, that the populace on defense (or capable of "terror') as in Afghanistan or Vietnam has a built-in advantage. Perhaps he shows weakness in the Ottoman Empire Gladwell actually points out.
But press it all, and what do you get? That any and all unconventional strategy wins? Nope. That if what you normally would do surely loses, try something else? Well, duh. Just forget it? Maybe so. His other books are the same. Yes, first novels and first albums are often brilliant and the person never does better. No, no amount of practice will make you a genius. And maybe in some areas maturing and practice together can allow technical abilities and emotional experience to gel, just as an older Mozart has emotional depths that the child didn't. And the generalization? Forget it. And don't even go near "The Tipping Point."
It's never about the system,
It's never about the system, and only rarely about the coach. It's always about the players and their willingness to work together. If your twelve year olds have relatively good fitness, active feet and long arms, a press will work. Oh, and agressive attitudes. I loved it. A lot of players hate it.
A friend of mine changes her approach with her girls, depending on their skills. Which gets to what annoys me about Gladwell. There's so much variation in the world. There is no overarching explanation worth anything that is simple enough to explain in a magazine article.
re: unacceptable
Hey pudentilla: if you think Kevin's mild criticism makes him as bad as Powerline, then you really need to spend some time reading Powerline...
Gopkin
Incidentally, Gopnik in the next article does the same contrarian generalizing, and it's at least as bad. People didn't overthrow monarchies when it was hard, he says, even when they'd benefit. Species don't, despite what biologists say, evolve to overcome the toughest of circumstances. And this all has a lesson for new product development.
Except that it's all false. It wasn't simply about will power that monarchies persisted, and I'll let you discover their ideological and brute force advantages. Revolution does occur in times of scarcity and turmoil (not against Louis XIV but later, in Russia during WWI). Any biologist will tell you that the incremental changes of evolution will be snuffed out most readily in conditions of extreme scarcity, although some remarkable changes will take place as well. And so on.
In the 1990s...
...on one of those great Bulls teams Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen had a contest for awhile between them to see who could get the most steals. They'd come out and press the opposing point guard and disrupt the other team's offense so bad the game would essentially be over by halftime. Phil Jackson made 'em knock it off because he figured it wasn't sustainable over the long season and would wear his team out.
Your claim that it's a "dick
Your claim that it's a "dick move" nicely explains why we won the revolutionary war, among other underdog victories. Anyway, I don't think it's a dick move at all. Those girls had no hope to compete without a defensive strategy. They came up with one that worked. That's sports. NBA teams frequently use the press (see the last 7 minutes of Lakers-Rockets, Game 1), they just don't do it all game because it's way too exhausting and the skill level of the point guards is too high (well, not the Laker's point guards). But no one ever calls it a dick move when they do get into the press because it's an ever present facet of the game.
Sure, Gladwell could have included more background information, but was it really necessary for his argument? I mean, he mentioned that some teams do use the press as an effective weapon and that seems to suggest that more teams could use it. Really, he's attacking convention, that the press is a dick move, that it can't work, etc. He's not suggesting that the press works every time or its some magic silver bullet. His argument is that insurgent tactics work 30% of the time and he equates the press to an insurgent tactic.
Anyway, Chad's argument that it only works when teams aren't ready for it is factually inaccurate. Arkansas built its reputation as a full court press team and had years of success with it, even with lesser talent. Kentucky is mentioned in the article as well. What Chad is espousing is the very convention that Gladwell is attacking and you fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Good work.
I thought the rules in
I thought the rules in professional basketball basically discourage agressive defense.
In college ball you see a few high ranked teams use the press a lot (i.e. after every made basket) and you see many teams at least try it to disrupt a better offensive team. Depending on the refs and the player by player matchups it can work. Defense is one of the things that makes college basketball a bit more volatile and interesting.
You mistake lesser talent,
You mistake lesser talent, poor spacing, and favorable rules for defense. College ball may be more volatile, but it's not more interesting.
Ben V-L is on the right track concerning the press.
Pressing is a risky strategy, as Dean Oliver would point out, and leads to greater variability, which can benefit an underdog. This excellent post on the Section Six blog addressed Gladwell's story Tuesday:
http://sectionsix.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-goliath-and-full-court-press.html
Big Picture
I tend to agree with the commenter above - Gladwell is a big picture guy and I think he tends to succumb at times to the pressure to keep rolling out big picture insights, even when none are in the offing. Not unlike most bloggers are under pressure to keep hitting the "submit" button even when they don't have a whole lot to say and it's a slow news day.
When you pull back from the basketball team minutia, the real thing to take away is that disrupting the routine and the element of surprise are good ways to change a game...any game.
to be fair...
I think he did, at some point in the article, spell out that full-court press has the disadvantage of being exhausting.
Pitino's University of Kentucky Cagers
played full court press more or less full time back in the 1990s.
The Press
John Wooden and Rick Pitino are two examples of coaches who have used a press very effectively, and they both had players who tended to be more talented than most of their opponents (I'm thinking of Pitino's Kentucky teams more than later at Louisville). They didn't necessarily use the press all the time, but used it for brief stretches VERY effectively.
On the other hand, I coached a boys church team at the high school level for ten years, and it wasn't until year ten that I had guys who were aggressive enough to press effectively. They weren't necessarily talented basketball players, but they were aggressive, athletic, and had the right attitude. There's really nothing more effective when the opposition is neither talented enough or prepared enough to face the full court press.
We won the championship that year, finally, and I retired.
All this talk of basketball reminds me that for the last eight years we had a former CHEERLEADER as president. How stupid can a nation be?
Gladwell's point was
Gladwell's point was well-taken in this era of guerrilla warfare and "terrorism". Those who need to win can't afford to concern themselves with the sportsmanship of the tactics. You think outside the box and attack the opposition's weaknesses, which include the conformist thinking that there are appropriate ways to deal with a situation. Lt. General Paul Van Riper, put in charge of commanding the "enemy" in the 2002 war games Millennium Challenge, proceeded to blow the U.S. forces off the map so badly that the the American forces decided to just resurrect their sunken fleet and start play all over again. How did Van Riper do it? "Unconventional methods", including a pre-emptive cruise missile attack that was widely criticized. Here is what he said:
"My belief at the outset of Millennium Challenge was that Blue believed it had a monopoly on preemption, and it would strike first. And, of course, in any war game I was familiar with up to that point, that had never been the case. The U.S. had only gone to war as a result of some aggression by an enemy, and so always had to react. Now that it was announced policy that we reserved the right to do that, the Blue force was going to take full advantage of it and plan to strike first.
So I simply stepped back and said, "What advantage is there for Red to wait for Blue to strike?" There was none. And that lead to the natural conclusion that if they're coming, and we can't persuade them not to diplomatically, then we will strike.
As I looked at an ultimatum that gave me less than 24 hours to respond to what literally was a surrender document, it was clear to me that there was no advantage in any of this diplomacy. I was very surprised that the Joint Forces Command personnel who had argued for using all of the elements of national power—the economic, the diplomatic, the political information—in some sort of coherent fashion, really came at Red with a blunt military instrument. So it was clear to me that this was not going to be negotiated, this was going to be a fight. And if it was going to be a fight, I was going to get in the first blow."
But of course, those who write the history get to frame it, don't they?
Really big guys don't have a
Really big guys don't have a lot of endurance either. Playing big guys in tennis, oftentimes I'd get slaughtered in the first set from big serves, but I would try to just hang in and run the big guys side to side and to and fro with drop shots and lobs. If I could hold out for the second set, the third set was usually pretty easy to take. I played a former pro basketball player in tennis one time (6'6"), and his left-handed serve was very difficult to handle since he had extraordinarily long arms and the serve seemed to come out of the sky and bounce very high, but toward the end of the first set he was winded to the point where he had to quit. Playing on clay helped since you keep the points going much longer than on fast surfaces.
I played on a basketball team in an industrial league, and in theory we should have dominated with a 6'8" college star center and a college all star guard, but our results were mediocre, and I recall one game where a gang of high school kids whipped us. With no set strategy, seems like everybody was embarrassed to do anything but rely on the big center, and he couldn't do it all by himself.
I'm a big fan of yours,
I'm a big fan of yours, Kevin, but I think you're really wrong to call this coach a dick. My thoughts here:
http://backporch.fanhouse.com/2009/05/07/malcolm-gladwell-on-the-full-court-press-in-12-year-old-girls-b/
Guys, this team had big
Guys, this team had big athletic girls. The whole concept of this team as weak little nerdy underdog is false.
Talk about missing the
Talk about missing the point. The article wasn't about basketball and the full-court press, it was about not accepting the power-structure's rules. When you can't compete with the big-boys (or big 12-year-old girls) you make them compete with you.
Gladwell's problem here might be that he focused so much on the basketball team that readers forget his basketball story was meant as an illustration of a surprising statistical anomaly. It's telling that all the comments so far are about basketball -- nobody addresses the "battleship" story, which is probably a better example of Gladwell's theory (but it lacks the "human interest" angle).
The real lesson I took away from the piece was that if you consistently win by playing in an exceptionally unorthodox way, but well within the rules -- people will accuse you of cheating.
Revolutionary War
Incidentally, the story that we won the Revolutionary War by something akin to guerrilla tactics is also a myth, although we did have the important surprise coup in New Jersey (which, strictly speaking, is itself not out of character of traditional warfare then, which relied on moving arrays of men quickly). Rather, it took quite some time before Washington's army made a real dent because it took time to get the army through something resembling professional combat training. Washington's insistence helped, as did Lafayette. Of course, the idea of a defensive war supported by the populace still links it to the advantage of modern irregulars defying an empire, tactics aside.
A rule againt the press
As a guy who has actually recently coached in girls leagues, I can tell you that it is common to limit a full-court press to the last two minutes of each half. Otherwise, the result is a technical foul against the coach.
does this happen in boys'
does this happen in boys' leagues too? if not, seems pretty blatantly sexist
Alternative Strategies
Every down and out team in any sport is going to be tempted to try alternative strategies because a) they have nothing to lose, b) they might catch the opposition unprepared and c) they just might get lucky and stumble onto a new strategy (or more often, rediscover an old strategy) that really works. The occasional upsetting of the conventional wisdom is one of the things that makes sports interesting.
I am old enough to remember UCLA winning national championships with the full time press, but they were very fast and had a deep bench.
He's neither.
The coach who did this isn't a brilliant innovator, he's kind of a dick.
His job is help his team win the game, not worry the other team's feelings. The press is a perfectly legitimate (if sometimes overvalued) tactic at any level of play where the players can execute it. Jeebus, Kevin.
No, he's a dick AND he's not
No, he's a dick AND he's not neccessarily a good coach for young players. At 12 years old, it's better to lose the game while getting better at the fundamental skills of the sport. You can overwhelm at lot of young teams with the press, and then your players never develop the skills to play the game when the press stops working.
Mike
point missed?
I'm disappointed, Mr. Drum. You seem not to have paid much attention to the second half of Gladwell's article, in which he already addressed many of the points you make in your response.
And certainly, you missed the point of Gladwell's article, which is that innovation and outside-of-the-box thinking are the best tools at an underdog's disposal. Would you also disagree with a baseball team shifting its outfield or bringing in a new pitcher to accommodate a left-handed hitter? How about lacrosse teams running faceoff specialists? I'me sure there are equivalents in every sport - all the result of creative thinking by some underdog at some point, trying to squeeze out an advantage to overcome a technically stronger team. These innovations permanently raise the level of the whole game.
Gladwell's other insight was that outsiders - free of preconceptions and an ingrained, traditionalist's approach to the contest - are best posed to think outside the box and upset the tables. ("You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way.")
I'm not Gladwell's biggest fan, and find his generalizations and stretches a bit more than I can believe sometimes, but I think he was on the mark here. So how about some respect for the innovators out there, who constantly rethink their game to try and outwit the Goliaths?
"The article wasn't about
"The article wasn't about basketball and the full-court press, it was about not accepting the power-structure's rules. "
cf Mike Davis' book on car bombs that dubs them "the poor man's air force".
And, of course, we see exactly Karl's point in this case. To hear the story from the US (or Israeli, or white South African) media, the use of an air force is perfectly legitimate strategy and tactics, but the use of a car bomb is a heinous crime against man, nature, and god.
And, of course, let's not get started on Osama Bin Laden's incredibly successful scheme to get the US to substantially destroy itself, or Iran's successful scheme to get the US to dispatch Iran's biggest enemy, a country of no threat and little consequence to the use, at massive cost to the US and no cost to Iran.
The word is still out on how Israel's attempt to play that same game will turn out --- Obama may not be stupid enough to fall for it, but the rest of Congress seems quite happy to get the US involved in a THIRD fscking Middle Eastern war with no sane point to it.
@Matt F "Gladwell has a
@Matt F
"Gladwell has a reputation for this."
You might want to point out, since you are such a fair guy, dedicated to full exposure of every relevant fact, rather than shading detail to press an agenda, that the Slate article you refer to is about a STORY Gladwell told at a Moth slam, not about anything he set down in print.
The author of the piece seems to get the vapors at the idea that people are not telling the truth at Moth slams, which to me suggests mainly that said author has never actually listened to Moth material. It's ALL exaggerated, and I am sure that half of it has zero basis in reality --- no-one at any stage in the Moth process claims otherwise --- it's a freaking STORY-TELLING contest, not a journalism contest. You win by how much you engage the crowd and stir their feelings, not by how accurately you summarize a body of facts.
A small point
I should point out, Kevin, that no where in my piece do I suggest that the full court press cannot be beaten. In fact, I quite explictly say that it can be beaten by well coached teams with good point guards. It is not a fail-safe strategy for winning. It is simply a means by which underdogs can improve their chances of winning, and what interests me is why so many underdogs are reluctant to pursue strategies that push their chances of success from zero to something closer to even odds. That's all. I actually agree with almost everything that Chad Orzel says about the press, only he doesn't seem to have read my article closely enough to realize this.
Remember the "Grits Blitz?"
Same thing.
Gladwell never impressed me. He's very superficial in stuff I know about, so I'm skeptical in the areas I don't know about.
heck, we girls use the element of surprise all of the time
What is so astounding is that most people (err, men) are so socialized to believe that we either won't or can't do something as mundane but situationally effective as a full court press that we can continue to use the same "element of surprise" tactics over and over again.
Duh.
Not Guilty
I agree with the post from (real?) Malcom Gladwell - Chad Orszel doesn't seem to have read the article closely enough. I have it right in front of me. Page 46, at the top of column 1:
"Basketball sages point out that the press can be beaten by a well-coached team with adept ball handlers and astute passers - and that is true."
At any rate, that point seemed clear to me. I liked the piece.
Primitive war
Much of what Gladwell says (beyond the specifics of the situations he discusses) should be familiar to readers of Lawrence H. Keeley's "War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage."
I'm not sure this is the best proof of Gladwell's shortcomings.
Like you, I suspect that Gladwell may have a tendency to collect facts that support his pre-determined thesis. But your criticism of the full court press story doesn't make sense. Gladwell says up front that the only reason it works is that it's unexpected. Ranadivé admits that his team doesn't have the skills to match another team should they decide to press back.
The article reminded me of Michael Lewis' Moneyball, in that it's a story of sports teams playing based on conventions and laziness. There's only one way to do it and that's the way everybody does it and always has. Coming up with something new would just be too hard.
As for the criticism of dickishness, as long as one doesn't cheat, isn't the ultimate goal to win? Are you suggesting it's wrong to push twelve-year-old girls to be as competitive as, say, boys?
OY!! I like Gladwell, but
OY!! I like Gladwell, but this NYer article is like a flat-out parody of a geek writing about sports! Besides the fact that a LOT of his facts are wrong (about the composition & talent of some of the "scrappy" teams he discusses), none of the stuff he happens to be right about is even interesting. Like: you play to your strengths and away from your weaknesses -- wow, that's a eureka moment!
And his pal the Indian software developer/coach beaming that the reason the other team hated him because his team was "little blond girls." God, make me puke! We're talking about coaches trying to teach 12-y.o. girls how to actually play. The way I see it, he's VERY lucky one of the other coaches didn't beat the shit out of him.
thnks for your post. it's
thnks for your post. it's wonderful.....At any rate, that point seemed clear to me. I liked the piece.
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thnks for your post. it's
thnks for your post. it's wonderful.....At any rate, that point seemed clear to me. I liked the piece.
this NYer article is like a flat-out parody
this NYer article is like a flat-out parody of a geek writing about sports! Besides the fact that a LOT of his facts are wrong (about the composition & talent of some of the "scrappy" teams he discusses), none of the stuff he happens to be right about is even interesting. Like: you play to your strengths and away from your weaknesses -- wow, that's a eureka moment!
ya, it's funny for wholesale. I like your comments of trainers.
And his pal the Indian software developer/coach beaming that the reason the other team hated him because his team was "little blond girls." God, make me puke! We're talking about coaches trying to teach 12-y.o. girls how to actually play.
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