The Golden Age of Basketball-Chapter 504 - 7 2 Reduced, 1 Increased
Gan Guoyang’s words alleviated Ramsay’s anxiety and cleared his mind a lot.
Of course, Ramsay knew that no tactic could solely rely on giving the ball to a certain person to resolve the situation.
Isolations don’t necessarily mean a low requirement of tactics; many times, how to deliver the ball to the one who can isolate is also part of the tactical equation.
Ah Gan is a center, not a guard, and it’s difficult for him to start taking the ball from the backcourt and go it alone like Jordan does (Ah Gan: Not impossible, though). A team with poor tactical literacy would struggle to feed the ball to the center properly.
Or put it another way, any team that wants to build around the inside and create an offensive system must have strong tactical literacy.
Only the style of play led by guards and forwards like the Spurs and Nuggets can afford to play freestyle, which is determined by the characteristics of the players.
Last season, Gan Guoyang and Ramsay had been trying to integrate isolations organically with team tactics.
To engage the whole team’s tactical enthusiasm, Gan Guoyang followed a "three-second rule": after receiving the ball, the handling time should not exceed three seconds; the dribbling, ideally, should not exceed three times; and the number of low-post offensive moves per game should not exceed three types.
As well as his assists, his ball distribution ability had reached its best since his rookie season, all to contribute better to the team’s offense.
Although Ah Gan always acted as if to say, "Just give me the ball and you guys don’t have to do anything", it was for giving confidence to everyone; he is the kind of person who, even when the world is about to explode, could squeeze out a little joke to comfort you and tell you it’s all right.
Behind the scenes, he trained harder and thought more than anyone else. Every season he changed and improved.
In his rookie season, he played in the post like Moses Malone; by the end of his third season, he had almost none of Moses’s shadow left—he became himself.
Ramsay noticed that Gan Guoyang had become heavier and stronger than before.
He must have been training madly over the summer, and in the new season, he would certainly show even more outstanding and astonishing performance.
Thinking of this, Ramsay pulled himself together. He and Beelman stayed up late to watch videos, to compile statistics, to analyze, and constantly combined past experiences to set the tone for the team’s new season.
The process was painful for Ramsay.
He had no problem with his physical condition or energy.
The problem lay in his concepts, in the ideas he had steadfastly held in the past.
Watching the data compiled by Beelman, watching last season’s game videos, and Beelman’s edits of even earlier footage, after repeated discussions, training experiments, they reached a conclusion: they needed to overturn many of the tactical principles that had been considered sacred.
After a week of overtime work, painful thinking, debates, arguments, and calling Cunningham and Pete Newell at three in the morning, Ramsay made a decision.
At training camp, he presented the new season’s tactical requirements to the Trail Blazers players, who had been confused for a week, summarizing them in three points:
"Decrease fast breaks, decrease passing, increase three-pointers."
Two reductions and one increase.
Everyone was somewhat bewildered by Ramsay’s words—was this still Dr. Jack?
Gan Guoyang asked quietly, "Isn’t the tactical requirement to give the ball to Ah Gan? What are you talking about, Jack?"
Ramsay gave Gan Guoyang a sideway glance, then he and Bobby Berman went on to explain the rationale behind the two reductions and one increase.
To reduce fast breaks means that unless there’s an absolute certainty of a fast-break counterattack opportunity, don’t initiate a quick break; instead, switch to positional warfare.
In the 1980s, the number of fast breaks in a game could be around 15 to 20 times; against weaker opponents or when facing the Nuggets, the number could exceed 20 times.
Jack Ramsay had once judged that if you could successfully execute over 30 fast breaks in a game, the probability of winning would be very high.
At the end of the 70s and the start of the 80s, fast breaks held a very important place in NBA games, ensuring a high scoring efficiency.
Ramsay had always been a firm supporter of fast breaks, known for shouting "Run run run" from the sidelines.
But by the late 80s, as defense steadily intensified and physical confrontations improved, the success rate of fast breaks declined.
On the contrary, in positional warfare, when having an isolation expert like Ah Gan, efficiency wouldn’t be much worse than fast breaks, and the lethality was even stronger.
So he demanded to reduce the number of fast breaks in a game to around 10 times.
The second point, decrease passing.
Unless a teammate has a very good opportunity, or a strategy calls for someone to handle the ball and attack, the player with the ball should reduce meaningless and defensive passes and initiate the attack with the ball themselves.
In the past on the basketball court, there were a lot of passes and handoffs during the offense, and the more passing, the more it reflected a team’s unity.
However, as players became more physically conditioned, the tall and strong NBA players made the court feel increasingly cramped.
The more passes there were, the greater the chance of making a mistake.
The damage caused by a turnover could even exceed the benefit of scoring a goal.
Ramsay once encouraged his players to pass a lot, and the Trail Blazers always had a great half-court passing system, with an outstanding high-post center facilitating system.
But Bobby Berman’s statistical analysis showed that more passing wasn’t always better.
Since the NBA didn’t track the number of passes, he collected a lot of game footage for sample statistics.
He and Little Spo (who stayed in Portland for college) visually counted the number of passes in the game rounds with their own eyes and categorized these passes.
Which were offensive passes that could threaten the opponent’s defense, which were defensive passes to prevent turnovers, or to pass to a teammate because they couldn’t make a move themselves, and which were meaningless handoffs.
This requirement was to reduce defensive passes and eliminate meaningless handoffs.
Players had to be more creative on the court and more daring to display their offensive talents, making every point a threat—Trail Blazers’ players had such talent.
As for the third point, increasing three-pointers was a major trend in the League.
Three-pointers not only had a higher scoring efficiency than two-pointers, but more importantly, they could create more space, giving each player more room to perform.
These three points could be said to go against Ramsay’s basketball principles which he had adhered to in the past; no wonder he was in such pain.
For a person, to negate their past self and mold a new one is very difficult.
Such denial and rebirth, if one experiences it once in their lifetime, would be transformation and sublimation, but to go through it twice might lead to unbearable breakdown.
In the 60s and 70s, Ramsay had already experienced such self-denial once.
At the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s, the tactical system on the basketball court was completely different.
A lot of offenses started with the triangle formation from a set position, with centers receiving the ball inside for a back-to-the-basket play, then either attacking with their back to the basket or passing out to the perimeter, repeating this process over and over.
In 1972, the U.S. Department of Education issued an important decree, known as Title IX Amendment, which protected people from gender discrimination in educational programs or activities receiving federal financial assistance.
This regulation, aimed at ensuring gender equality, profoundly changed the tactical systems of high school and college basketball, and thereby the NBA, and it also affected Ramsay.
Due to the principle of gender equality, public high school and college basketball teams had to halve their training time, because they needed to allocate half of the time to girls, whether they played basketball or participated in other activities.
This meant basketball training time decreased, and the set position triangle offense, which used to require a lot of training and coordination – especially for the frontcourt, understanding many tactical routines – was no longer viable.
Once training time was reduced, there was no longer enough time to practice these routines, and the teams’ offensive levels dropped significantly.
It was at this time that Bob Knight invented the "motion offense," a system where all players move to the perimeter to set screens, creating opportunities for cutters to shoot and layup.
This system swept across America in the 70s, not only because it was efficient and flexible, but also because it was simple to learn, attracting many high school coaches to Bob Knight’s training camps to learn this revolutionary way of offense.
This offensive approach eventually influenced the NBA, and then the high schoolers from the 70s entered the League in the 80s, many of whom learned and played in this system. Consequently, the style of play in the 80s became faster, with more fast breaks and passing.
Jack Ramsay was also influenced in the 70s. Having entered the League in 1967, he transformed and reached the pinnacle of his career with the Portland Trail Blazers in 1977.
But what he did not expect was that another decade would pass, and by 1987, the basketball world was set to change again.
It seemed they were returning to the triangle-style tactics and set offenses of the 60s.
Is this world really just a massive cycle?
Ramsay had asked himself this question more than once.
Regardless, he had already decided that he would retire after this season was over.
He didn’t have the stamina and energy to hang on for another 15 or 20 years, waiting for the next cycle to come around.
