How David Beats Goliath
When underdogs break the rules
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| A non-stop full-court press gives weak basketball teams a chance against far stronger teams. Why have so few adopted it? | | |
When 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?
Ranadivé
looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players.
But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali,
had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They
couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were
not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening.
Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, “little blond girls” from Menlo
Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley. These were the
daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. They
worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations
with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine
biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if
they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without
opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom
basketball was a passion.
Link to full article in the New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
Interesting article from Gladwell about what I like to call Uncubed Thought. (Outside the box - well that needed reinvention too.)
Thanks, Perry
