Mea Culpa — More On Gladwell And Girls’ Basketball
There has been quite a backlash against the story by Malcolm Gladwell that I praised on Thursday.
Perhaps the real lesson is this one: Woe unto him who cites Malcolm Gladwell as an authority on any subject without some serious fact-checking first.
Most of it has focused on Gladwell’s profound misunderstanding of basketball and reckless generalization about basketball strategy based on the example of one junior girls team. Rush the Court explains:
Gladwell completely misses the mark on this one – the full court press as a strategy works great when you’re dealing with 12-yr old girls whose teams are generally all at roughly the same skill and confidence levels (i.e., not very good), but as you climb the ladder and start to see the filtration of elite talent develop in the high schools, it actually becomes a weapon that favors the really good teams, the Goliaths, more than that of the underdogs.
This point is similar to my earlier comment (second from the top) that even if Gladwell is seriously wrong about basketball writ large, the success of the 12-year-olds in his story illustrates how underdogs can exploit the unspoken rules of any game — whether it’s basketball or guerrilla warfare — when the overdogs are trapped by their own assumptions.
For more commentary, check out these posts by Chad Orzel and Steve Sailer. And there’s more here and here and here.
But what if Gladwell is completely wrong even about the 12-year-old girls in question? One commenter suggested that the story of Vivek Ranadive’s team is simply false, because one of the girls was a actually a ringer who went on to play college ball at Duke. So far, I can’t find any validation of that. As Gladwell notes, one of the team’s assistant coaches had played at Duke, but that’s different than having a ringer. If anyone out there can clarify the situation, please help me out with a comment and a link.
Cross-posted at Conventional Folly
3 Responses to “Mea Culpa — More On Gladwell And Girls’ Basketball”
My impression is the same as yours I think. The article was not about the merits of the full court press. That was intended to be an example of much more important points: playing to your strengths, constant effort, questioning the unspoken rules.
It is true that the article was not about the benefits of the full court press, as pacatrue says. But, if what you are saying it true that the full-court press does not work as well at higher-levels (and I believe that, otherwise don't you think we'd be seeing it a lot more at the professional level? I don't believe for a second that this coach, as good as he might be, has discovered some “new” basketball strategy), then isn't the coach doing them a disservice, at least in some sense, by not teaching the girls the skills that will help them in the future, and instead focusing on winning now? It could be argued that it would have been better for the girls to have a losing season, but improve in their fundamental basketball skills that would help them later, and teach them the lesson that sometimes they need to build on the knowledge of the past, rather than assuming that they know better because what they are doing is benefiting them now.
So you can frame this either way. Either the coach is teaching them the lesson that one should “play to your strengths and questions the rules, etc.”, which are good things. Or you could argue that he is teaching them the lesson of “don't worry about the future. Do what benefits you now. Instant gratification is the way to go, etc.”
It's an interesting question. I'm not trying to take sides. Just trying to point out the counter-argument.
I remember Rometra Craig. As an aside, I watched her play in a game at USC. She entered college (Duke) in 200, then transferred to USC and graduated in 2004.
The New Yorker article in infuriatingly devoid of dates for the basketball aspect of the story, but unless it was early 90's, if Rometra was involved, she was a coach, not a ringer.
http://usctrojans.cstv.com/sports/w-baskbl/mtt/…