The Golden Age of Basketball-Chapter 403 - 22: How’s the Body?
[The 1986-1987 season was a challenging year for me. For the first time in my long basketball career, I felt somewhat powerless.
Winning the championship in 1986, I had spent a beautiful summer. I traveled to many places, saw many old friends, gave media interviews, and participated in the production of a show.
For a long time, I didn’t have nightmares anymore. The cold seawater, the pitch-black night sky, the exhaustion and suffocation while swimming, and the instructor’s yelling never appeared in my dreams again.
I slept soundly every night, but I woke up feeling a bit empty, as if something was missing from my life.
When the new season began, this feeling became more pronounced. I found that my sensitivity to winning and losing, to victory and defeat, had diminished. Everyone said I was more even-tempered, and Dr. Ogilvy said my mental state was much better.
Yes, I had become normal. I no longer fell into silent brooding, speechless after losing a game, nor did my face turn red as if I were a crab.
At that moment, I understood that it was those abnormal, obsessive, and sensitive parts that constituted the majority of my coaching life. During the championship run in 1986, I used all of this as fuel and almost burned myself out.
People often criticize players for lacking the motivation to push forward after winning a championship. Before 1986, it had been more than a decade since any team had defended its title. We succumbed to injuries rather than complacency in 1978, so I had believed I wouldn’t become complacent until I experienced it myself. That exhaustion and weariness were hard to control, after all, nine years had passed since 1977 to 1986, we had gone through so much, the waiting and torment had been so prolonged.
Another bad situation was that the NBA in the 1986-1987 season had undergone major changes compared to 1977-1978. Many things had become different. The NBA was completely becoming a "player’s league," with mainstream play differing significantly from the past, more three-pointers, more isolation plays, and tighter, more meticulous defenses.
From that time, I realized that if you live long enough, you will see many strange things happen. Once valued virtues can be scorned, the scorned become touted, the beautiful things turn old-fashioned, and the once old-fashioned returns to the cutting edge of fashion. Everything is like a great cycle, all values are overturned, and everyone takes turns in the spotlight, just like the championship trophy, no one can dominate the O’Brien Trophy forever.
Perhaps realizing my weariness, the team added an assistant coach. We hired Bobby Berman, Ah Gan’s high school and college coach, who seemed like someone who could alleviate my pressure when I interviewed him.
I also sensed a coach’s ambition in him. He had left behind a lucrative, stable college position to throw himself into the NBA. He had extricated himself from a gambling scandal and could have chosen a secure life with a good reputation, but he didn’t.
I knew what was driving him, the desire for victory, for fame, for great achievements. At that time, no coach had ever won both the NCAA championship and the NBA championship. People always saw an insurmountable chasm between the NCAA and the NBA.
Beelman sought to bridge that gap with his thoughts, his efforts, and also with Ah Gan.]
————Published in 2004, excerpt from "Dr. Jack’s Leadership Lessons Learned From A Lifetime In Basketball" by Jack Ramsay.
On the flight back to Portland, Bobby Berman expounded his tactical philosophy to the coaching staff and players, and it wasn’t as simple as just giving the ball to Ah Gan.
As he had previously mentioned "taking advantage of the rules," just as the defense uses the rules in zone defense, the offense can also take advantage of the rules to circumvent these annoying illegal defenses.
The idea was actually very simple, even laughable—it was to completely clear one side, the others all stood above the free-throw line or outside the three-point line, and leave the low post entirely to Ah Gan for one-on-one isolation play against the defender.
According to the rules, the defense couldn’t double-team in advance or set up a zone defense, which meant that Gan Guoyang could get complete isolation opportunities in the low post.
If the opponent still wanted to double-team after he got the ball, because of the distance, it meant that one person would be completely left open, which was unacceptable for the defense.
And because the distance had been widened, the time it took for the help to move would be long, the defense’s double-teaming would be untimely, giving the ball-handler ample reaction time.
So why don’t other teams use such a simple strategy? The reason is simple: isolation plays are not void of defense, the isolating player still faces the defender.
If the success rate of isolation is lower than that of running a play, then naturally no team will keep letting the ball-handler isolate. Plus, continuous isolation can harm the other players’ enthusiasm for the game.
"But, Ah Gan is the strongest one-on-one player in the league, only Michael Jordan is comparable to him. I’ve studied the Bulls’ past few games, their strategy is to let Jordan isolate a lot, and it works well. Jordan’s isolation skills are exceptional, he faces defenders one-on-one as if some players were shooting unopposed. Ah Gan can do this too, and even better because he is an inside player,"
"The difference lies in the fact that Ah Gan plays in the post, and he needs more support from his teammates, with perimeter passing and conducting the ball becoming more important. Moreover, because Ah Gan is an inside player, when he isn’t playing one-on-one with the ball, he can do more in the offense than Jordan, such as setting screens and going for offensive rebounds. Our outside players are very talented—Clyde, Porter, Cheche, Parkson—they can pair up nicely with Ah Gan."
"When Ah Gan is playing one-on-one, they move around on the outside, ready to seize opportunities, and when Ah Gan isn’t playing one-on-one, they can handle the ball and initiate offense using screens. Now, defensive strategies in the league are becoming more and more complicated, according to data efficiency..."
When Beelman mentioned "data efficiency," he paused for a moment and glanced at Jack Ramsey. He knew Ramsey wasn’t keen on the whole data statistics thing.
At that time, many NBA coaches were not interested in data analysis, believing that caring about the data’s result amounted to playing basketball for data, not for victory.
To traditional coaches, basketball coaching was an art, and art couldn’t be abstracted with concrete data. Experience, inspiration, and the genius of the artist were what truly characterized the charm of basketball.
Once you start using data to describe it, basketball becomes as rigid as baseball.
In America’s professional sports leagues, baseball has the longest history and the best implementation of data, which is related to the turn-based nature of the sport.
Statistical analysis for basketball started to take off in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Beelman had been very focused on data since his college days because he liked to gamble and bet on games.
Of course, this behavior eventually led to his involvement in a sports betting scandal. Although he never gambled as an assistant coach, his past experiences with gambling and betting led to his dismissal. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶
Now, Beelman had completely given up his gambling habits, but his penchant for data analysis persisted. At Gonzaga University, he specialized in basketball data analysis and mingled with Gus, who was into financial analysis. They used Gus’s data models to analyze teams and games.
Gus successfully predicted the Philadelphia 76ers’ championship win in 1983, as well as the Portland Trail Blazers’ likely defeat to the Los Angeles Lakers in 1985.
In the new season, while juggling the tasks of an assistant coach, Beelman used his opportunities for editing video and collecting team data to analyze teams and players with the model.
And these tasks were not assigned to him by Ramsay.
Ramsay said to Beelman, "Go ahead, speak your mind boldly. I don’t have the power to fire you right now."
Beelman continued, "From the perspective of data efficiency, during the first and second week, the most efficient scorer was Michael Jordan. Although his shooting percentage wasn’t always high, his assist rate was very low, meaning he directly attacked the basket a lot without the initiation of tactics. Plus, his contribution to the team’s victories far exceeded others. When he is on the court, the Bulls can outscore their opponents by 11 points. Also, his usage rate is very high, and even with such a high usage rate, his efficiency hasn’t decreased, which means..."
As Beelman spoke, he noticed that everyone was silent, staring blankly at him.
He felt a little awkward and waved his hands, saying, "Here... Here we’ve used some uncommon data models that a friend and I developed together. I think we can use these to more directly evaluate a player’s impact on the court. Of course, this method of evaluation is not perfect, so we developed many different analytics methods, looking at it from various angles to build a complete evaluation of the players."
Adelman raised his doubts, saying, "People are not machines. A player’s performance is affected by emotions, health, and many other factors. Every game is a brand new situation; the past is just the past."
Beelman replied, "That’s true, theoretically speaking, but the more outstanding the players, the more stable they are in all respects, especially those at the pinnacle of the pyramid. Through extensive and repetitive training, they have developed a playing pattern, which is exactly what data analysis seeks to evaluate and process."
Adelman then asked, "So, are you saying that our strategy should become like the Bulls, letting Ah Gan play one-on-one extensively? How is that different from what Gene Shue used to do?"
Gene Shue, during his time with the Bullets, preferred to let his players play one-on-one, with the offense often observing one player while the defense conserved energy. Furthermore, Gene Shue and Ramsay had a notoriously poor relationship.
Beelman admitted, "Yes, Ah Gan’s one-on-one play is the most critical aspect of this system. I know this goes against traditional basketball philosophy, but that’s how the NBA rules are set. We play within those rules. Besides Ah Gan’s one-on-one, Clyde’s ball-handling to initiate the offense, and Cheche’s perimeter shooting are equally important. Clyde must have the ball in his hands, and Cheche is even better without it..."
Beelman spoke the latter half of the sentence more discreetly. He didn’t say that according to his data analysis, Clyde’s off-the-ball offense was mediocre and Vandeweghe’s ball-handling errors were a disaster.
Everyone turned to look at Ramsay. Dr. Jack was silent for a while before he finally asked Gan Guoyang, "Ah Gan, how have you been feeling lately?"
