I know this is pedantic, but the article starts off with a poor example. The reason full-court presses aren't used in basketball is because they are easily beaten, especially when the team using them is smaller and slower than the other team.
But aside from that point.. I find this article to be too light on hard statistical evidence of the points being made. There's like one % thrown out near the beginning, but the rest is anecdotes, historical one-shots, etc. Very similar to the hand-wavy strategies used by Gladwell et al.
One of the points of the article was that, due to its incessant running practice, the full-court press team was in better cardiovascular shape than the other team, able to pull off the constant movement required for a full-court press. Whereas the other team generally wasn't in that kind of running shape. They might have been faster in some sense, but simply weren't up to the constant movement required.
Clearly, the other team could easily have beaten the full-court press team, had it put a similar amount of preparatory effort into running. But generally, the other team did not. In this way effort trumped skill.
I realize the article was largely anecdotal, except for the study of wars fought over the last 200 years. This makes its conclusions suspect, but not necessarily invalid. Perhaps a full-court press only works when the weaker team has put in a huge amount of endurance practice in preparation, and the stronger team has not.
While I think conditioning plays a role the real value is taking the other team out of their rhythm. If you practice a game a certain way for years and then someone changes the rules on you all your experience is moot.
At least this time it was posted after it was possible to have read it in the actual magazine. I always cringe when I see news.yc threads around articles for WIRED and The New Yorker a week before I have my hard copy.
A whole week? Interesting. I didn't know the lag time was that long - I thought the newsstand date was just so the magazine wouldn't look out-of-date until the day the next issue hit. For what it's worth, I posted the original submission after reading the article on my Kindle.
"'In the beginning, everyone laughed at our fleet,' Lenat said. 'It was really embarrassing. People felt sorry for us. But somewhere around the third round they stopped laughing, and some time around the fourth round they started complaining to the judges. When we won again, some people got very angry, and the tournament directors basically said that it was not really in the spirit of the tournament to have these weird computer-designed fleets winning. They said that if we entered again they would stop having the tournament. I decided the best thing to do was to graciously bow out.'
It isn’t surprising that the tournament directors found Eurisko’s strategies beyond the pale. It’s wrong to sink your own ships, they believed. And they were right. But let’s remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let’s remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins."
My reaction was similar to jdrock's. Full-court presses aren't always used in basketball because they are risky and easily beaten by a skilled team. The opponents of the team profiled in the article were young and inexperienced. That's why this worked.
There is a lesson to be learned here, but it's about outthinking your opponent, not that NBA coaches are all idiots.
Michael Lewis showed that big-league baseball coaches and general managers are nearly all idiots (or at least were until he wrote his book exposing them, at which point a few non-idiots got hired, but most idiots kept their jobs), so it's not necessarily totally implausible that NBA coaches are all idiots.
Out of curiosity, since I don't know anything about basketball, how do you beat a full-court press, and why isn't it a good idea to at least try to stop people from getting down the court?
Like Gladwell points out, you have to be extremely well-conditioned to press for a whole game. It takes a lot out of you. So it could be counter-productive if your team isn't in excellent shape, because a poorly executed press (say, if your team is tired) makes it easy for the offense to just blow by you and hit layups.
That said, a team of good ball-handlers can beat a strong press if they stay calm and pass well. Patience and poise.
(Which is probably why the press is so effective in younger leagues: players at that age get frantic under pressure and just don't have the dexterity/skill to keep the ball under control)
NBA coaches could all be idiots, but my point is that this article doesn't show it.
One way to think of a full-court press is as a way of spreading resources thinly. You can beat it by handling and passing the ball well. On a thinly defended court, this leads to a lot of easy baskets because there's so much open space.
That seems to be the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom is probably right for teams that haven't specifically prepared to constantly press.
Are there any statistics on the effectiveness of a full-game full-court press done by a team that has conditioned itself to press for the entire game? I'd love to see some actual data on this.
The key here is that the data must be only from those (few) teams that have conditioned themselves appropriately. Otherwise, it's measuring the wrong thing.
I didn't get that much out of this article. It's inspiring, but ultimately comes down to something trite like "never give up, and break all the rules!"
Find some way to get the whole New Yorker issue, if you can. It's the annual "Innovators" issue, so this is the right audience, and all the full-length articles are at least as good as this one.
Gladwell is only using the basketball story as an example; whether or not "the press" works is irrelevant. He is saying: look at the game differently. Approach your competition from another angle. The Redwood City team was successful because they looked at basketball differently and took another approach. If they hadn't played 'untraditionally' they would have failed and that's all we need to take away from this article.
I keep looking at the girls basketball team pressing as a bad example. Girls at that age, by and large, don't have the muscle to throw over a press. Certainly, if I was a coach in that league, the moment I knew there was a pressing team I'd have them doing pushups and long pass drills. I'd just hope it would be enough.
At that age and league, however, a press should be illegal.
There would also be nothing to prevent you, as a coach, from applying the same full-court press strategy back to the pressing team. Even the coaches of the team in the article conceded that this would have defeated them. So the interesting question is why nobody did this...
It's not about fairness, however. The game would turn into a game of "press" rather than a game of "basketball." At that age, the strategy that wins is not as important as developing basic skills that can be used later, such as in high school where the players are physically developed enough to throw over a press.
The problem is the physical limitation of how far the girl can throw a ball. If you tell NBA players they can't pass more than seven feet, the press would be a dominant strategy.
But aside from that point.. I find this article to be too light on hard statistical evidence of the points being made. There's like one % thrown out near the beginning, but the rest is anecdotes, historical one-shots, etc. Very similar to the hand-wavy strategies used by Gladwell et al.