Full Court Press

Malcolm Gladwell has written a New Yorker article on: How David Beats Goliath. More on the larger topic later, but his featured example is that of supposedly untalented 12 year girls league team that got to the nationals on the strength of its unconventional tactic: a full-court press.

Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.

The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?

There is more, of course, but the story is that the full-court press, executed by what he called his "little blond girls," with the aid of some coaching help from expert ringers, tore the opposition apart. They panicked, got demoralized, and gave up steal after steal for easy baskets.

The usual suspects chimed in: Kevin Drum thinks it was:

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.

I've got to call bullshit on Chad and Kevin here. The full-court press is not only exciting basketball, but it's also a very good test of basketball fundamentals. You can't play the press without good teamwork, and you can't beat it without the same.

Most junior basketball is dominated by a few superior athletes who do most of the ball handling and most of the shooting, with their teammates serving mainly as decoys. The press attacks this tactic directly. The way to beat the press is to move without the ball and pass to the open girl (or man).

Because the press is relatively rare, it's also often an effective surprise. Surprise or not, however, the poorly coached team won't be able to cope. If you beat the press you usually get a fast break. If the press gets the ball, the defender gets a similar transition position. Either way, it's exciting basketball, and not "unfair" in anyway. What I think is a lot more unfair is a game where 9 girls stand around watching the one 5' 11" coordinated girl shoot baskets.