Possibly the hardest thing to understand about the game of basketball is that it’s really a very simple game. You pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense. If you watch too much of the NBA, or sloppy college teams, or “Street Ball” on ESPN2 in the wee hours of the morning, you can get confused, and start to think it’s a complicated game. It’s not. You pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense. <\/p>\n
My best game is really as a post player, where I depend on other people to get me the ball, so I confront this a lot in pick-up games. Guys who have been playing ball a lot longer than I have struggle to grasp the essential simplicity of the game. When I put my left hand up and call for the ball, I want you to throw it to my left side, now. I don’t want you to stare at me for three seconds, and then float a lob pass in the general direction of my head. I don’t want you to throw a pass that leads me four feet out into the corner. I certainly don’t want you to bounce the ball between the legs of the guy guarding you two feet to my right. It doesn’t have to be a fancy pass, it doesn’t have to look pretty– you just need to throw the ball to my left hand, now.<\/p>\n
If you’re good at the simple things– pass and catch, give and go, pick and roll– you can start to get fancy, but you don’t need<\/STRONG> to get fancy. It’s a simple game: you pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense. If you do the simple things, and do them well, you will win. If you attempt fancy things, and do them badly, you will lose. <\/p>\n It’s a simple game that way. The true essence of basketball lies in the Zen-like perfection of Pete Carrill’s best Princeton teams, not the idiot showboating of those “Mix Tape” shows.<\/p>\n For a contemporary example, you need look no farther than Maryland’s loss to Temple this afternoon. And not even the whole game– just a short stretch in the mid-to-late second half.<\/p>\n With about eight minutes to go, my Terps had built a small lead– four points or so. And on the next three possessions, Temple ran one play: they brought the ball down the court in the hands of their best guard, who made a simple bounce pass in to their center in the post. He made a strong move, and scored. Three baskets, just like that.<\/p>\n In the same stretch, Maryland turned the ball over three times, with guys trying to sneak a bounce pass through four defenders (it was stolen), trying to float a lob pass to a guy who wasn’t looking for it (it went out of bounds), and trying to one-touch a bounce pass to a guy cutting along the baseline (it went out of bounds). <\/p>\n That’s your ball game right there. Temple went from four down to two up. Maryland fell apart. Game over.<\/p>\n It wasn’t like that was an anomalous stretch in the game, either– Maryland turned the ball over something like twenty times, the vast majority of them on stupid passes. There were dumb passes in traffic, slow lobs across the court, passes to guys who weren’t ready, you name it. It wasn’t even an anomaly for the season as a whole– the same thing did them in against Duke a few weeks ago– they had guys passing up decent shots to attempt bizarre and difficult passes to other players who weren’t open. And it’s not like the lesson isn’t there to be learned– if you look at the tape of Georgetown’s win over Duke, you’ll see that they won by playing simple basketball, and playing it well.<\/p>\n The problem this Maryland team has is they’ve forgotten that it’s a simple game: You pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense. You do those things simply, and do them well, and you will win. You try to show off, and do it badly, and you will lose.<\/p>\n It’s a simple game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Possibly the hardest thing to understand about the game of basketball is that it’s really a very simple game. You pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense. If you watch too much of the NBA, or sloppy college teams, or “Street Ball” on ESPN2 in the… Continue reading A Simple Game<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-basketball","category-sports","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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