Winning Philosophies in Basketball

Last Sunday I watched Regatas Corrientes (Argentina) blow out the Arecibo Captains (Puerto Rico) 89-73 to become the 2011 FIBA America League Champions.

Arecibo was the clear favorite, arriving undefeated for the final game with a loaded team (Daniel Santiago, Larry Ayuso and Danilo Pinnock) against a Regatas team that had lost their previous game and had only a known international star (Federico Kammerichs). It was the first final four appearance for Puerto Rico while Argentina has won 3 of the 4 tournaments (Brazil won the other).

It’s not the first time (nor the last) that the least talented team ends up beating the clear favorite.

To better understand this occurrence, I would like to explain some of the philosophies that winning teams apply.

The Ultimatum Game

Dean Oliver, in his book, Basketball on Paper, writes about the economic experiment known as The Ultimatum Game, to explain how wining teams work together:
In basketball, 5 players try to win a game, and although they could split the credit for a victory evenly, they choose not to. The average team looses as much as it wins, and the players are constantly fighting to take credit in victory or assign blame in defeat. Teamwork starts to deteriorate when teammates (role players) feel that a few players (stars) are being unfairly rewarded. Good coaches know how to recognize this and how to reward those teammates so that they can continue to give their full effort.

According to the book, “Phil Jackson has made a living out of being able to make great talents cooperate fairly with supporting players”, and looking at his career, there is plenty of evidence of why he has mastered such a concept:

As a player, he won two championships with the Knicks in 1970 and 1973; so from an early stage in his professional career, he understood how to develop a winning atmosphere (It didn’t hurt that he learned from one of the greatest coaches, Red Holzman, and from some of the great unselfish winners in Willis Reed, Walt Frazier and Bill Bradley).

As a coach, his philosophy, according to Jerry West in Roland Lazenby’s book The Show, is “to get players really to trust themselves, how to get everyone to share the ball. And in the offense he plans to run, everyone has to do that, or no one’s ever going to score”. Jackson elaborates: “When you have a system of offense, you can’t be a person that just is taking the basketball trying to score. You have to move the basketball, because…you have to share the basketball with everybody. And when you do that, you’re sharing the game, and that makes a big difference”.

According to the book, the Triangle Offense “is a system of team basketball that required stars to share the ball with lesser players”. But Jackson was not the only coach who successfully used that offense.

Tex Winter, Jackson’s long time assistant, is perhaps the person who most understands the Triangle. His Kansas State teams of the late 1950s and ’60s where some of the best teams in the nation (one of his star players from 1954-56 was Puertorrican great Juan “Pachin” Vicens). According to the book, “it was Winter’s K State team that defeated Wilt Chamberlain’s team in the Big Eight Conference in 1958, leaving the gifted giant so frustrated that he decided to leave Kansas early to play with the Globetrotters. For Winter, it was the ultimate victory of team basketball over the brilliance of an individual player”.

But it is not just the Triangle Offense that enables Phil to master The Ultimatum Game; it is also how he deals with his players, as best told by John Salley: “Phil understands the game better than most people. And he expects certain things that he knows his guys can give him. He knows when to push his players, when not to push’em. He knows who to yell at, who not to yell at. He knows who can take it. And he treats you like a man, as opposed to downplaying you, or talking to you like you’re less than him because of his position. He’s a great coach”.

The Secret

In non economic terms, Bill Simmons, in The Book of Basketball, has another theory on how teams win games. According to Isiah Thomas (from the book The Franchise, which chronicles the 1988-89Detroit season):

“It’s not about physical skills. Goes far beyond that. When I first came here, McCloskey (Detroit’s GM at the time) took a lot of heat for drafting a small guy. But he knew that the only way our team would rise to the top would be by mental skills, not size or talent. He knew the only way we could acquire those skills was by watching the Celtics and Lakers, because those where the teams winning year in and year out”.

“I read Pat Riley’s book Show Time and he talks about the disease of more. A team wins it one year and the next year every player wants more minutes, more money, more shots. And it kills them (sounds a lot like The Ultimatum Game). Our team has been up at the Championship level four years now. We could have easily self-destructed. So I read what Riley was saying and I learned. But it’s hard not to be selfish. The art of winning is complicated by statistics, which for us becomes money. Well, you gotta fight that, find a way around it. And I think we have. If we win this, we’ll be the first team in history to win it without a single player averaging 20 points (Adrian Dantley averaged the most points that season, 18.2, and just played 42 games before being traded). We got 12 guys who are totally committed to winning. Every night we found a different person to win it for us”.

“Look at our team statistically. We’re one of the worst teams in the league. So now you have to find a new formula to judge basketball (These formulas now exist: that Piston’s team ranked 7^th in Offensive Rating, 3^rd in Defensive Rating and were ranked 4^th overall according to Simple Rating System {stats courtesy of Basketball-reference.com}so statistically the Pistons weren’t one of the worst teams in the league). There were a lot of times I had my doubts about this approach, because all of you kept telling me it could never be done this way. Statistically, it made me look horrible. But I kept looking at the won-loss record and how we kept improving, and I kept saying to myself, Isiah, you’re doing the right thing, so be stubborn, and one day people will find a different way to judge a player (They already have with advanced stats like Wins Produced, Win Shares and PER). They won’t just pick up the newspaper and say, oh, this guy was 9 for 12 with 8 rebounds so he was the best player in the game. Lot’s of times on our team, you can’t tell who the best player in the game was. ’Cause everybody did something good. That’s what makes us so good. The other team has to worry about stopping eight or nine people instead of two or three (That Detroit team had 5 players averaging between 13.7 and 18.2 points per game). It’s the only way to win. That’s the way the game was invented. But there’s more to that. You also got to create an environment that won’t accept losing (Between 1988-90 that Detroit team went to 3 straight finals and won back-to-back championships)”.

Simmons understood that the statement made by Isiah revealed the secret of winning basketball (apparently not many people were interested in learning it). When asked by Simmons to reveal to him what the secret was, Isiah told him:

“The secret of basketball is that is not about basketball”.

As an example of how the secret works, Simmons discusses the Adrian Dantley trade. During that 1989 season, Dennis Rodman needed more playing time because of his versatility to play any style and guard any player; but Dantley was not willing to give up some of his minutes.

There was already a precedent on the team of veterans giving up minutes to younger players. When Dantley began withdrawing from the team and complaining to the press, the team traded him for Mark Aguirre. Dantley was at the time the leading scorer for the team and a better player, but Aguirre fit better with The Secret. Suffice is to say that Detroit ended up winning their first championship by sweeping the Lakers (although LA had a lot of injuries in that series).

Based on those Isiah Detroit teams, as well as Tim Duncan’s Spurs and Bill Russell’s Celtics, among many other deserving champions, Simmons concludes that to win an NBA championship a team must have:

1. One great player who raises the competitive nature of his teammates and lifts the team to a better place;
2. One or two elite sidekicks who understand their place in the team’s hierarchy and fill in every blank they can;
3. Top notch role players and/or character guys that don’t make mistakes and won’t threaten the team’s unselfish culture, as well as a coaching staff that keeps those team-ahead-of-individual values in place (again, Phil Jackson and The Ultimatum Game);
4. Stay healthy in the playoffs and maybe catch one or two breaks (this is the most difficult factor).

The Choice

The 1977 Blazers offer another great example of The Ultimatum Game and The Secret. After being in the league for only 7 years, they reached the finals and beat a heavily favored Philadelphia team that was loaded with very talented players like Dr. J, Darryll Dawkins and Doug Collins.

Bill Walton, the MVP of that team as well as the 6^th man of one of the greatest teams ever, the 1986 Celtics, has a great perspective on The Secret. As he tells Simmons in the last chapter of the book:

“It’s not a secret as much as a choice. Look at the forces fighting against that choice. Look at the forces pushing you to make the other choice. It’s all about you. It’s all about material acquisitions, physical gratification, stats and highlights. Everywhere you go, you’re bombarded with the opposite message of what really matters. And you wouldn’t even know otherwise unless you played with the right player or right coach: the Woodens, the Auerbachs, the Ramseys, the Rusells, the Birds. How many people get that lucky? With a truly great coach, it’s not about a diagram, it’s not about a play, it’s not about a practice, it’s the course of time over history. It’s the impact a coach has on the lives around him. The history of life is that most people figure it out. Most of the time it’s too late. That’s the real frustrating part-the squandered opportunities that you can’t get back”.

Conclusion

No matter the concept, there is a proven way for teams to win.

It probably was naive of my part to underestimate an Argentinean team, when they have made the choice over the last decade of using these wining philosophies, while Puerto Rico has not.