homegame

The Last Fundamental

Kentucky had, by far, the highest amount of individual basketball talent on its roster of any team in the NCAA tournament. Many of them were freshman, but next year, several of those freshmen will be rookies -- starting rookies -- in the NBA.

Kentucky, however, is gone from said tournament. It lost to West Virginia yesterday in a textbook example of how "talent" in sports is a concept which takes in much more than what's visible to the naked eye or what can be quantified by a scout with a notebook computer or stat wizards with access to servers occupying entire city blocks.

As authorities I respect in several sports, Bill Belichick and John Wooden among them, have said (not in the words I will now use) in my hearing, ADAPTABILITY is a talent as real as and more valuable than physical skills. Sports contain a huge of number of variables. The athlete/team best able to assess and react to those variables is most likely to win the game.

Simply put, the real test of an athlete/team's ability is what he/she/they do when a dependable talent fails. What happens when Roger Federer's serve goes wonky, or a pitcher's stuff just isn't there one summer evening. How do they cope?

Shooting is the primal basketball talent. Putting the ball through the basket is the game's object, after all. Kentucky couldn't shoot yesterday. Not a lick. It could dunk, it could make layups, but by the time it went to three-point range, the hoop was a moving target.

There are two schools of thought about what to do when shots don't drop. One, endorsed by gunners since time immemorial, is what we might call the John Starks school. Its remedy for a cold spell is to keep on chucking 'em up there. It's easy to make fun of this theory, but it is soundly grounded in mathematical probability. I (we) am basically a good shooter, so this next shot has the same chance of going in as any other shot I've ever taken. Over the long run, this is true, and a shooter who gets gun shy is of questionable value to his team.

As a strategy in a one-and-done situation, however, the "tryin' another one" idea has obvious risks. With about 15 minutes to go in the second half, those risks should have been REALLY obvious to Kentucky. It was time for theory two -- if you're not shooting, do more of everything else.

A supremely gifted collection of athletes such as the Wildcats could have coped in an infinite number of ways. They DID pound the boards. They DID try to drive more and get to the line, but of course, they couldn't shoot there, either. But they never stopped taking the three-pointers which had become their worst enemy.

The better the team, the harder it is to react to an unexpected struggle to do what usually comes naturally. The phrase "this can't be happening to us" is probably the root cause of more so-called upsets in sports than any other possible factor. Kentucky never quite stopped thinking that, and so they never quite changed their play enough to cope. John Wall, who's going to be an NBA All-Star before very long, performed like a man in shock -- which he was.

Since they are exceptional basketball talents, I have no doubt that Kentucky's players will absorb this bitter lesson and be the better for it. As a group and as individuals, they are still learning the game, after all. Success in any discipline requires previous failures as part of the package.

Of course, the Kentucky team won't be doing its learning as the same classroom unit next season. Wall in particular will likely be doing postgraduate work in some NBA location where adaptability is a requirement for survival, not just success.

As a member of, say, the Timberwolves, developing a coping strategy for failure becomes a course where the classroom hours are 24/7.

posted by Michael Gee @ 8:47 AM