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So you're saying people misinterpreted Gladwell's argument? So his argument was unclear?

ahoyhere 17y ago
I read it while suffering from the flu, meaning I was a bit out ofit, and that is the takeaway I had - not just the full court press, but the training, and the wearing the other team out. He says it explicitly. The guy who trained his girls to do it says it explicitly. "I have them running around for hours" etc. and that other coaches A) don't train their kids to have that level of athletic endurance, and B) don't respond to the use of the strategy by changing their routines. If people miss it, they are either bad at reading comprehension or deliberately wanting to misunderstand to lampoon Gladwell. I'm not a huge Gladwell fan. I felt totally ripped off by Blink. But I was pleasantly surprised by the essay.
anamax 17y ago
> So his argument was unclear? I didn't think so. Then again, I read the story as written instead of treating it as a basketball lesson and changing the facts to fit my world view. I've no doubt that a full court press can be broken with sufficient skill and althetic ability and that a broken press is worse than no press. (I suspect that that's why NBA teams rarely use the press.) However, if your opponents don't have that skill/ability, using the press apparently does put them at a disadvantage. That disadvantage may be sufficient to make up for other advantages that they have. I find the "optimal" talk somewhat amusing. We're talking about playing an opponent that has made certain decisions. You can win by taking advantage of those decisions. It doesn't matter what would happen against a different opponent until you run into said opponent. That's especially true of perfect opponents. The fact that one strategy would fail worse than another against a perfect opponent doesn't matter unless you're playing a perfect opponent. Since they rarely exist and you're going to lose anyway, worrying about them seems dumb. In some sense, there are no points for approximating optimality. You're rarely playing an optimal opponent and there are no points for "optimality".
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

I read it while suffering from the flu, meaning I was a bit out ofit, and that is the takeaway I had - not just the full court press, but the training, and the wearing the other team out. He says it explicitly. The guy who trained his girls to do it says it explicitly. "I have them running around for hours" etc. and that other coaches A) don't train their kids to have that level of athletic endurance, and B) don't respond to the use of the strategy by changing their routines. If people miss it, they are either bad at reading comprehension or deliberately wanting to misunderstand to lampoon Gladwell. I'm not a huge Gladwell fan. I felt totally ripped off by Blink. But I was pleasantly surprised by the essay.

anamax 17y ago

> So his argument was unclear? I didn't think so. Then again, I read the story as written instead of treating it as a basketball lesson and changing the facts to fit my world view. I've no doubt that a full court press can be broken with sufficient skill and althetic ability and that a broken press is worse than no press. (I suspect that that's why NBA teams rarely use the press.) However, if your opponents don't have that skill/ability, using the press apparently does put them at a disadvantage. That disadvantage may be sufficient to make up for other advantages that they have. I find the "optimal" talk somewhat amusing. We're talking about playing an opponent that has made certain decisions. You can win by taking advantage of those decisions. It doesn't matter what would happen against a different opponent until you run into said opponent. That's especially true of perfect opponents. The fact that one strategy would fail worse than another against a perfect opponent doesn't matter unless you're playing a perfect opponent. Since they rarely exist and you're going to lose anyway, worrying about them seems dumb. In some sense, there are no points for approximating optimality. You're rarely playing an optimal opponent and there are no points for "optimality".

deleted 17y ago

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