Gladwell's generalizations
Malcolm Gladwell’s recent David and Goliath essay at the New Yorker has created the kind of buzz that Gladwell’s articles usually do — but this time, unusually, from a lot of basketball fans. Gladwell’s thesis, or the basketball portion thereof, goes like this: Based on watching a girl’s basketball team and teams coached by Rick Pitino, all of which make heavy use of the full-court press, I have concluded that the full-court press is a highly effective strategy which basketball coaches do not employ because they are locked into old bad habits that they lack the imagination or courage to break. (Seriously. “The coaches who came to Louisville [to see Pitino’s team practice] sat in the stands and watched that ceaseless activity and despaired. The prospect of playing by David’s rules was too daunting. They would rather lose.”)
Many, many basketball fans have responded by saying that Gladwell is full of shit. (Sometimes — not always — they use other words too.) Several commentators have pointed out that one of Pitino’s Kentucky teams that Gladwell singles out as made up of undertalented overachievers ended up sending nine players to the NBA. Gladwell has now responded on his blog:
The press is not for everyone. But then the piece never claimed that it was. I simply pointed out that insurgent strategies (substituting effort for ability and challenging conventions) represent one of David's only chances of competing successfully against Goliath, so it's surprising that more underdogs don't use them. The data on underdogs in war is quite compelling in this regard. But it's also true on the basketball court. The press isn't perfect. But given its track record, surely it is under-utilized.
But Gladwell never cites the “track record” of the full-court press. He offers no evidence that coaches who use the press prosper more than coaches who don't. The plural of anecdote is not data, especially when the anecdotes can be counted on the fingers of one hand. He goes on to cite all the success Pitino has had with what he calls “untalented teams” and then concludes:
And by the way the nine players who got drafted into the NBA off that anomalous 1996 Kentucky squad [note that he now acknowledges it as “anomalous,” whereas before he characterized it as typical] consisted of eight journeymen and one, marginal star — Antoine Walker. Pitino has had a fraction of the talent that his contemporaries at Kansas, Carolina, Duke or Connecticut have had.
(It turns out that when his prose isn't scoured by the New Yorker’s master editors Gladwell isn't so good with commas. But I digress.) To this I have several responses:
I will make no comment about Antoine Walker.
Producing eight NBA “journeymen” from one team is not something that Kansas, Carolina, Duke, or Connecticut has done recently. An NBA journeyman is by any reasonable measure one of the best basketball players in the world.
Define “talent.”
You can't measure the overall talent of a team by the number of players it sends to the NBA. (See #2 above.) To take just one example, Gonzaga has been quite successful in recent years not because it has had NBA-quality players — I’m looking at you, Adam Morrison — but because it has consistently had four to seven very, very good college players who have been coached to play well together. One could also mention Duke in this regard: if you just looked at that program’s record over the years, you would assume that it has produced far more significant NBA contributors than in fact it has.
Above all: Gladwell is simply assuming that the success of Pitino’s teams has been attributable to his use of the press. He doesn't mention anything else that Pitino does. If you asked Gladwell what kind of offense Pitino’s teams run, and what they do to make themselves hard to defend, I guarantee you he would have no idea. And if you asked Gladwell how often Pitino’s teams press — what percentage of opposing possessions he presses against in a given year — and to compare that ratio to those of other successful teams, I bet he wouldn't know that either.
Gladwell is always fun to read, but he invariably commits one of the sins we English teachers most warn against when we’re teaching freshman writing: he loves to make vast generalizations from one or two particular cases.
— Gherald L · May 14, 09:23 PM · #
Pressing teams are the Mike Tysons of basketball. They are fun to watch and can be devastating when they are on their game, especially if they meet an unprepared or overmatched opponent. They may have the puncher’s chance against a superior opponent. But put them up against a good opponent who is prepared for them and equally or more talented, and they’ll get beat at least as often as they’ll win. And the press is just one approach among many that underdogs (or others) can utilize. How about Rollie Massimino’s Villanova team taking the air out of the ball against Georgetown? How about Princeton’s Pete Carril’s back-door, motion offense upsetting UCLA?
What a load of crap. Gladwell doesn’t even deserve the effort of a full and thorough refutation.
— Karl · May 14, 09:23 PM · #
Check out Gladwell’s recent e-mail exchange with Bill Simmons over at espn.com; he discusses this, and it’s pretty entertaining to boot.
— jacobus · May 14, 09:39 PM · #
John Cheney’s matchup zone at Temple did more “more with less” than anyone else.
— Andrew Fly · May 14, 11:40 PM · #
jacobus, I just can’t deal with two of the most annoying people in the world on a single webpage. My head might explode.
— Alan Jacobs · May 14, 11:40 PM · #
Why don’t more teams run the press? Maybe it’s the same reason there aren’t more knuckleballers in Major League Baseball.
Also, has Gladwell considered that the very rarity of the press might contribute to its success? If more team used the press, then other teams would spend more time practicing how to defeat it. That’s fairly simple game theory.
A press really is fun to watch. Missouri’s this year took them much farther than anyone expected them to go into the tournament.
A very interesting case study: the Missouri-Memphis 3rd round game this year. Two pressing teams, both renowned for their relentless defense.
Final score: 102-91, Missouri. An NBA-style score. So whom did the press help more? :)
— Ethan C. · May 15, 12:37 AM · #
Karl,
Your making the same mistake Gladwell’s commenters were.
He isn’t saying a press will always work, he is saying a bad team has a better chance if they press plus they have nothing to lose, take The Clippers as an example. They aren’t going to beat The Spurs playing straight up vs them. If they press they probably still lose but they have a better chance.
— eric k · May 15, 03:05 AM · #
But that’s just not true, is it? A disciplined team like San Antonio would slaughter anyone who tried to press them …
— John Schwenkler · May 15, 03:11 AM · #
This is one of Gladwell’s most careless essays, and that’s saying something. It throws into sharp relief a potential lack of trustworthiness that’s characteristic of all of his work, although I think he used to be at least a bit more careful.
He’s also really overconfident — this article showed time and again that he really knows nothing at all about basketball, yet he’s happy to expound sweeping theories based on a wholly imaginary foundation.
The other thing about this essay that bothered me (and yes, I really really didn’t like it) was how blasé he was about that girls’ team’s lack of sportsmanship. I mean, come on — what are sports for at that age? You learn to play the game, you enjoy yourself, you learn to be a good sport, and you do your best to win. Gladwell seems to assume that winning via ‘gaming the game’ is unremarkable, and possibly admirable, even for little kids. I have a great deal of sympathy for coaches whose teams opposed Gladwell’s exemplars, as well as for the girls on the team itself, who learned that pedantic legality trumps the spirit of the game and good sportsmanship.
— mr tall · May 15, 03:57 AM · #
Wow, thanks for this comment and thread. I have read a couple of Gladwell’s books and I find myself questioning his generalizations a lot. In fact, I have given the practice of casual, overconfident non sequiturs a name: “Gladwelling.”
— scott · May 15, 10:57 AM · #
Wouldn’t it be fair to acknowledge Steve Sailer as the source of the observation re: nine NBA stars? Giving credit where it is due is also something taught by English teachers, no?
— ooga · May 15, 11:36 AM · #
I just read the epic email exchange between Gladwell and Simmons (who I think is very good, FWIW). Gladwell comes off sounding much less pompous than in his NYer article (not surprising) and maybe a bit more knowledgeable. Who knows; he probably got edited by a total sportsophobe at the magazine.
But Simmons just runs circles around him, and has to keep reining in and refocusing Gladwell’s off-the-wall over-generalized ‘solutions’ to problems he again doesn’t fully grasp. For example, he suggests simply dumping the NBA draft altogether, which is a pretty stupid idea, since it’s one of the league’s few events nearly all of its fans care about. So Simmons has to pat Gladwell on the back — ‘Now you’re triggering parts of my brain i didn’t even know existed’ (ugh!) and then gently redirect the notion into something that might make actual sense. Can’t blame Simmons for being mildly obsequious, I guess; he’s very successful, but Gladwell’s in a different league, little as he deserves to be.
I wonder if Gladwell spent 10,000 hours practicing making sweeping generalizations based on half-baked casual observations . . . .
— mr tall · May 15, 12:48 PM · #
eric k: there’s good reason to think that, once a certain level of skill is reached, a poorer team reduces its chances of winning by pressing a better team. The more rational approach — and the one more commonly used — is to slow the game down to reduce the number of overall possessions. See here.
ooga: It would totally be fair to give Steve the credit if he’s the one who first made the point. Is he? I have no idea.
— Alan Jacobs · May 15, 01:02 PM · #
Th press works sometimes in college but it wouldn’t work in the pros because the players there are too fast and too skilled (think about Chris Paul or Arron Brooks. Your going to press them?). Beating the press is actually pretty easy, unless the pressing team is exceptional. And once you beat a press you have an easy fast break basket.
Plus, pressing is very fatuiging. You have to double and run all over the court while the offense just makes passes. So you either have very tired first team players or you have to use your deep bench. So when the pressing team has the ball, you’re playing either very tired first team guys or deep bench. It’s big disadvantage offensivly.
It is possible in college to put together a team with 10-12 pretty good players so that you didn’t have that big offensve drop off, but the salary cap in the pros makes that really hard. Plus, the coach has to get the team to buy into the press. It’s hard work. The pros are much less coachabl
— cw · May 15, 02:35 PM · #
Re: “It would totally be fair to give Steve the credit if he’s the one who first made the point.”
Sailer published his rebuttal of Gladwell’s full-court-press idea on May 6th (no timestamp).
— AMac · May 15, 02:58 PM · #
— Tickletext · May 15, 03:15 PM · #
eric k, Alan said it above more concisely than I could. I did mention that occasionally a pressing team might have a puncher’s chance against superior competition. Especially if they are a close match speed-wise to the superior team, and even more so if they shoot a lot of 3’s like the Loyola Marymount teams with Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble in the late 80’s. They just might fluster the superior team, or get hot from long range and pull the upset. But that is far from arguing (as Gladwell apparently does) that the press offers the best opportunity for an inferior team to upset a superior team. I gave the counterexamples of Villanova/Georgetown and Princeton/UCLA. In his initial piece anyway, Gladwell doesn’t even offer any evidence for the press being a superior approach for underdogs, as opposed to those types of approaches. As the article Alan links points out, one reason the shot clock was adopted in college ball was that in addition to teams going to a 4 corners offense to preserve a lead (hello, Dean Smith), poorer teams often played a stall game in an effort to stay close to a superior opponent, hoping to eke out a narrow victory in a low scoring game.
— Karl · May 15, 03:34 PM · #
Sorry for the double post but after reading in full the article linked by Alan, I have to say it accurately reflects my personal experience as a high school point guard some 20 years ago (20 years? Yikes!). I was an above average ball handler for the small school league that we played in; our press breaker consisted of get the ball inbounds to me and get out of the way. Against competition typical to our league, the result was usually a broken press leading to a layup or easy open shot for one of my teammates on the other end. My eyes lit up when an opposing team would press us, and they didn’t usually press us for long. *Especially” if it was an inferior opposing team. Their pressing just played into our/my hands. But when we played opponents with superior skill and athleticism, it was a different story. I couldn’t break the press by myself consistently and if I persisted in trying to do so, the result was a bad assist-to-turnover ratio and a blowout loss. The press only became problematic against superior opponents, as it enhanced the advantage they already had over us.
— Karl · May 15, 03:56 PM · #
I think Gladwell just has Michael Lewis envy.
— Erik Siegrist · May 16, 04:51 AM · #
I don’t know how many times I’ve read somebody saying something like: “I love Malcolm Gladwell’s articles and books, but his latest essay is on a field that I know a lot about and it’s not up to the quality of his previous work.”
It doesn’t matter what Gladwell’s topic is, the more you know about what he’s writing about, the less impressed you are with him.
In truth, no print journalist in America makes a fool of himself more often than Gladwell. He has zero critical thinking ability. He gets infatuated with ideas and is unwilling or unable to run simple reality checks on them.
And that’s what make him probably the highest paid print journalist in America.
— Steve Sailer · May 16, 09:31 PM · #
If Gladwell knew anything about basketball, he’d realize that the full court press was traditionally the overdog’s strategy: e.g., Red Auerbach’s Boston Celtics and John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins.
— Steve Sailer · May 16, 09:32 PM · #
Though his approach is now (finally) drawing some adverse reaction, Gladwell is laughing all the way to the bank. Last I knew, his speaking fee was $45k per. When Blink came out, the I bank I worked at had at least 4 or 5 different groups—that I was aware of—who hired him for a talk. That’s one company. Lord knows how many others were on that bandwagon, or how many are following the current Outliers tour bus. Who says ‘journalism’ doesn’t pay?
— Jeff · May 16, 11:34 PM · #