The guys told me they wanted to try running the triangle offense in basketball this year so I bought a copy of Tex Winter's book on the triangle and studied it for an average of about an hour a day over winter break, about 20 hours total. This is probably more time than I've spent studying for literally any academic class I've ever taken in my life. These guys are my friends and doing my part, however small, to help them succeed just feels like way stronger of an imperative on my time than studying Regulation A limited offering exemptions to the reporting requirements of the Securities Act of 1933.
Sadly, the old bit of folk wisdom about the triangle being nearly impossible to teach or learn within a reasonable period of time is more or less proving true and as the complexities of the offense become more and more apparent, the guys seem to be losing interest in running it. Welp.
Anyway, league play began last week and unfortunately we started the season with a tough loss to a team against which I think we have a pretty solid edge. We played pretty awful defense all game, giving up tons of open shots, and ran really bad with our own shooting and ended up losing a game where I think we are something like a 65-35 favorite.
Last night we had our second game of the season against probably the strongest team in our league. We were missing our second best player and we figured ourselves to be pretty bad dogs in this spot, but far from drawing dead. Well, as if to make up for last week, we came out shooting hotter than the sun and built a 15-point lead within the first ten minutes of the game and held for game. We basically did to these guys what the team that beat us last week did to us - played smart, patient basketball, taking advantage of the seams in their passive 2-3 zone defense with aggressive shooting, taking calculated risks in order to invite the variance in our favor that we knew we would need to win, and building an early advantage that ended up putting a better team in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar situation where they were psychologically weakest.
Basically, we ran really good, but our entire gameplan was keyed toward maximizing the possible potential benefits of running good and inviting rungood in crucial spots where we could leverage it best if it occurred. Thinking about the factors that went into our win last night, I couldn't help but recall the advice that tournament poker players often repeat about success in tournaments (yep, here comes the implausible weak poker tie-in for this post). I don't really know anything about tournament play, but it seems like I constantly hear about the importance of taking risks to accumulate chips early in order to survive potentially costlier late-game variance, the importance of identifying the weaknesses in other players' games and pushing thin edges, and coming to terms with the reality that in order to win giant variancetrap situations like MTTs, you will have to get lucky. Competitive sports games are some of the biggest variancetraps of all, so it's not surprising that a lot of the same insights are applicable. For more on this topic, I would suggest reading this excellent post by nachos on the badbeatscrew blog.
Looking over that post reminds me of another way I've tried to link poker wisdom with sports, and that is my ongoing quest not to be results-oriented in possibly the most results-oriented subculture of which I am a part. Whenever I'm talking to my team about strategy, I always try to emphasize being process-oriented and decision-oriented, and focusing on making the play that gives us the best chance of winning regardless of whether or not it ends up being successful as a matter of fact. One of my heroes with respect to this is Shane Battier, who has been my favorite NBA player ever since I read that famous New York Times Magazine article by Michael Lewis from about a year ago about his approach to basketball. Battier's whole approach to defending sick monsters like Kobe who are +ev in literally every spot is to spend hours analyzing their games to find the particular spots in which they are the least +ev and orient his entire game to forcing them into those spots. A good percentage of the time, Kobe will still drop 30 on him, but he is okay with that as long as he knows that he forced Kobe into comparatively bad spots all game long. This is the most he can do, and even if he loses he can be confident in the knowledge that he played optimally.
One final thing - Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about the full court press for the New Yorker a few months ago in which he concluded that a weaker team can gain an advantage over a stronger team by using the full court press. Like lots of things that he writes, this is a really cool and interesting idea on its face, but pretty much everyone I know who knows anything about basketball agrees that it is wrong.
The basic idea of the press is to exploit poor ballhandling and ball movement in the open court, poor conditioning, and psychological weakness and unpreparedness in the face of an aggressive nonstandard strategy. These are huge leaks that are common in lots of weak teams but nearly no strong teams. Gladwell's main example for how the press is a good tool for weak teams to employ against strong teams was how the worst team in a middle school girls league used it to beat all the best middle school girls teams. The problem with his reasoning is that even the best middle school girls team is pretty bad in absolute terms, and can be expected to suffer from the embarassing defects that make the press effective.
Even at the college intramural level, a fairly good percentage of teams are good enough to render the press ineffective. At every level of play beyond middle school girls, the press is primarily a tool used by good teams to push their edge and minimize variance against bad teams. As Tex Winter writes and I paraphrase, the press is basically an insult to the team being pressed. Toward the beginning of the season, I was hoping that we would run into some team during the season that had read the Gladwell article and was going to try to run the press against us so that we could punish them for this insult.
This ended up being way longer than I thought it was going to be - congratulations if you somehow made it all the way to the end of this. Depending on what people want, I can post more or less about sports in the future. Please comment if you can.
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