screen, the purposeful movement away from the ball, the well-executed boxout, the deflected pass. Statistics don’t always measure teamwork; holding the person you’re guarding scoreless doesn’t show up in your stats. But when you’re “taking care of business,” you’re working to produce a championship team, and “We won” comes to mean more and lasts longer than the ephemeral “I scored.” Solidarity becomes an essential part of your professionalism.
The society we live in glorifies individualism, what Ross Perot used to champion with the expression “eagles don’t flock.” Basketball teaches a different lesson: that untrammeled individualism destroys the chance for achieving victory. Players must have sufficient self-knowledge to take the long view—to see that what any one player can do alone will never equal what a team can do together.
All players, even the greatest, sometimes get out of sync with the rhythm and purpose of the team. By the time Michael Jordan came back to basketball from his year of baseball, the Chicago Bulls had hired nine new players. Michael didn’t have time to synchronize his game with theirs. In the 1995 playoffs, he tried to do it all himself, and the new guys were content to watch “The Michael Show.” The result was convincing proof that one man can’t beat five. Usually, the problem on a team is not the one great player trying to shoulder the entire load but the average-to-good player trying to get attention. You see it in high school games, even in college. Most kids want to shoot; not many want to pass. Too few see selflessness as a goal.
Defense is where team basketball begins. When Red Holzman took over as coach of the New York Knicks in the winter of 1967, he made the point clearly by calling twenty-three practices in twenty-three days, and two thirds of that time was taken up by defense. This was his way of bringing some unity to a group of very disparate individuals. “See the ball!” he would shout—in other words, don’t be so absorbed in guarding your own man that you don’t see when a teammate needs assistance guarding his. Phil Jackson had similar concerns when he took over as coach of the Bulls in 1989. By getting his players to keep the ball in sight at the same time they overplayed their men, he was able to move help from the weak side whenever it was needed. Slowly he got them to realize how much better they were as a group when they helped each other. By emphasizing defense as the core strength of the team, he was able to show the other players that Michael Jordan was only one fifth of the effort (even if Jordan’s fifth was spectacular).
There is nothing as exciting in basketball as a team that knows how to apply defensive pressure, either through a full-court press or a trapping half-court press. That’s when offense flows out of defense, when a few steals, turnovers, or intercepted passes can change the whole momentum of a game. The University of Kentucky won the NCAA tournament in 1998 in part because it was a team that knew how to press. During the 1970 championship season, in a regular season game against the Cincinnati Royals, the Knicks were behind 5 points with seventeen seconds to go in the fourth quarter. Willis Reed hit two foul shots. Suddenly DeBusschere intercepted an inbounds pass and dunked the ball for 2 points. Then Frazier recovered a loose ball, was fouled, and hit two foul shots for our eighteenth win in a row.
On offense, there are three unselfish team actions that make all the difference. The first is passing. Bob Cousy, the great guard on the Boston Celtics in the fifties and sixties, filled the center lane on a fast break with such textbook simplicity that you wanted to replay it over and over so kids could learn their fundamentals. Cousy took the ball to the middle of the court with two of his teammates filling the lanes on his right and left and a third teammate trailing to pick up the easy eighteen-footer if a layup
The society we live in glorifies individualism, what Ross Perot used to champion with the expression “eagles don’t flock.” Basketball teaches a different lesson: that untrammeled individualism destroys the chance for achieving victory. Players must have sufficient self-knowledge to take the long view—to see that what any one player can do alone will never equal what a team can do together.
All players, even the greatest, sometimes get out of sync with the rhythm and purpose of the team. By the time Michael Jordan came back to basketball from his year of baseball, the Chicago Bulls had hired nine new players. Michael didn’t have time to synchronize his game with theirs. In the 1995 playoffs, he tried to do it all himself, and the new guys were content to watch “The Michael Show.” The result was convincing proof that one man can’t beat five. Usually, the problem on a team is not the one great player trying to shoulder the entire load but the average-to-good player trying to get attention. You see it in high school games, even in college. Most kids want to shoot; not many want to pass. Too few see selflessness as a goal.
Defense is where team basketball begins. When Red Holzman took over as coach of the New York Knicks in the winter of 1967, he made the point clearly by calling twenty-three practices in twenty-three days, and two thirds of that time was taken up by defense. This was his way of bringing some unity to a group of very disparate individuals. “See the ball!” he would shout—in other words, don’t be so absorbed in guarding your own man that you don’t see when a teammate needs assistance guarding his. Phil Jackson had similar concerns when he took over as coach of the Bulls in 1989. By getting his players to keep the ball in sight at the same time they overplayed their men, he was able to move help from the weak side whenever it was needed. Slowly he got them to realize how much better they were as a group when they helped each other. By emphasizing defense as the core strength of the team, he was able to show the other players that Michael Jordan was only one fifth of the effort (even if Jordan’s fifth was spectacular).
There is nothing as exciting in basketball as a team that knows how to apply defensive pressure, either through a full-court press or a trapping half-court press. That’s when offense flows out of defense, when a few steals, turnovers, or intercepted passes can change the whole momentum of a game. The University of Kentucky won the NCAA tournament in 1998 in part because it was a team that knew how to press. During the 1970 championship season, in a regular season game against the Cincinnati Royals, the Knicks were behind 5 points with seventeen seconds to go in the fourth quarter. Willis Reed hit two foul shots. Suddenly DeBusschere intercepted an inbounds pass and dunked the ball for 2 points. Then Frazier recovered a loose ball, was fouled, and hit two foul shots for our eighteenth win in a row.
On offense, there are three unselfish team actions that make all the difference. The first is passing. Bob Cousy, the great guard on the Boston Celtics in the fifties and sixties, filled the center lane on a fast break with such textbook simplicity that you wanted to replay it over and over so kids could learn their fundamentals. Cousy took the ball to the middle of the court with two of his teammates filling the lanes on his right and left and a third teammate trailing to pick up the easy eighteen-footer if a layup
Similar Books
Bird Watching
Larry Bird, Jackie Macmullan
Dreams for Stones
Ann Warner
Mysterium
Robert Charles Wilson
Cracking Up
Harry Crooks
The Angel
Uri Bar-Joseph
Forever Black
Sandi Lynn
Before the Rain
JoAnne Kenrick
