KD and JJ Redick talk about the Evolution of Basketball
Interesting video of KD and JJ talking about where they think the NBA is going, the impact of players being able to guard 1 through 5, and the death of the stretch-4.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4MRqAWBX7Y
I'm a big believer in the idea that 1-5 basketball is dinosaur language, mostly because of how many pro-players have articulated it and by observing the pros (and very good college teams) play positionless basketball so effectively. Your role on a team is about who you can guard and what threats you can present to opposing defenses. People get caught up in "is this person a 3 or a 4" or "this person is a 4, therefore they are not a wing". I don't think that is a modern/appropriate/accurate way of understanding basketball.
A coach has a collection of players. Their players have certain talents and deficeincies. That coach's job is to maximize the collective magnitude of their offensive threats (and resulting points scored) and mitigate the opponent's threats (minimize their points scored). That coach does that by recruiting, coaching, and scheming (strategic and tactical).
Let's stop saying things like "this person is a 4 and so we need to find a 3 because we don't have one". Let's talk like "we need someone who can better mitigate threat-x and provide threat-y because team z has somone who loves to do y and if we were substaintially better able to do x, then that would open up threats a, b, and c in our offense."
I think I may be asking too much from an internet message board, but some of the persistent commentary surrounding the team is sophmoric and boring. #GoBlue #CalebAllB1G2023
I'm responding more to your comments specific to Michigan than the video & NBA.
I don't care what position name or number you apply, the issue still remains the same.
Jones and Brooks were not tall enough or athletic enough to be positive one-on-one defenders. (Brooks was an excellent help defender in certain situations). Will going out and getting a 6'9" guy who can shoot from range solve that because "positionless"? No. Michigan also needs guys who can successfully bring the ball up court against a press.
I'm not saying there has to be a specific height or size defined C, PF, SF, SG, & PG. But there is a big difference between guards and forwards which goes well beyond how well you can shoot the three or play defense.
If you had 5 Kevin Durant's in his prime, I'd still take the team built around out muscling him in the post and being quicker on the perimeter.
Sure, but I think you're misunderstanding some of the point here. It's not, "let's get the best player and multiply them by 5". It's "let's present the most threats and be able to defend the most threats". There are diminishing returns to the quantity of the same threat that you present (if you have five big-men who finish at the rim or 5 just-a-shooters, you don't have a very effective offense due to the simplicity of defending it").
Ballhandlers, slashers, shooters, passers, play-callers, movers, post-players, rebounders, etc. These are examples of "threats". Many of these are essential to having a coherent/effective offense (e.g. if no one can handle the ball, then you can't start your offense).
My point is not "guards do not exist - we must clone KD", it's that we should expand the conversation beyond pre-conceived bundles of qualities that we define as a "3" or a "wing". For example, saying that "we do not have enough of on-the-move three-point shooting to stretch defenses, with the goal of giving HD enough room to effectively work the post" is a sensible statement. "We don't have a wing and HD regressed from last year" is not a sensible statement.
April 12th, 2022 at 12:32 AM ^
I don’t know your age, but this has been true in basketball for a long time.
I’m not saying what you are contending against doesn’t exist in some circles. But progressive minds in basketball have always existed.
A couple examples, look at how the lakers used Magic, Worthy, and Kareem on offense.
Look at how the Bulls used Jordan, Pippen, Rodman and Harper on defense.
Look at how the Celtics used Bird’s unique skills to exploit forwards and guards.
Manute Bol learning to shoot threes to diversify the offense.
Oscar Robertson being a primary facilitator.
Watch the documentary on Paul Westfaul’s philosophy.
Check out the story of the Mighty Mites of Kentucky.
I could go on and on. The point is, the idea of leveraging individual defensive or offensive capabilities to force other teams into or out of traditional strategies has long been engrained in the game. It’s about the player’s skills and a coach that can leverage them.
If you had five prime KDs, you'd score 150 points per game and win a title without breaking a sweat.
Pretty much. I was gonna say that if one of the five was feelin' it on a given day, that one would score 50. You could likely count on one of the five to get 50 each night.
five prime KD's sure, but also that's one of if not the greatest pure scorer in the history of the NBA
so instead of 5 KD's, how about 5 7-footer's currently playing, sure Giannis and KD would be a nightmare, but the other 7-footers would maybe be more of a liability?
5 KD's versus 5 MJ's? (lol)
5 7-footers versus 5 sub 6'9"ers?
Would a team with 5 7-footers versus a team 4 7-footers and one 6'6" guy be at an inherent advantage/disadvantage?
OP I have a love/hate relationship with your post.
Love: Your overall point is spot-on. Positionless basketball is already here for the most part and pretty soon it wouldnt surprise me to see individual player's positions being eliminated sometime soon replaced by "strengths/weakness" or some other means of measuring their expected contribution.
Hate: That you felt the need to be a condescending fuckwad to others while making it.
mGrow & others, sorry if it came off as condescending. That was not directed at you (hopefully, obviously). I've just been fed up with a lot of the condescension/hate against Caleb that seems to be unwarranted/uninformed.
I think a lot of peoples frustrations with Caleb is that he simply didn’t make shots, nothing much else. He wasn’t very good defensively until midway through the season. He came in as as a supposed great shooter and that didn’t happen…certainly could (and hopefully) change in the future. I’m just not sure how this explanation of basketball changes that he couldn’t make 3s like people thought he could.
....and if you're going to insult the board and be a condescending fuckwad, check your spelling.
Totally agree re: the overall point of the thread and that the frustrations towards Houstan were basically just missing shots and disappearing for stretches. IMO, the biggest improvement he can make to his game is finishing strong at the rim. He missed a ton of bunnies when he anticipated contact, and if he can build the strength and confidence to finish through contact it will not only raise his FG% immediately but also give defenders another threat to defend and act as a confidence booster that may also help his outside shooting.
April 12th, 2022 at 12:06 AM ^
R.e your second point, I completely agree! That is something that can be developed via further skills and physical training. Yet, some people here (even some who write for this site) have written him off as a disappointment and bust.
I just hate to see the blog that covers the sport/teams that I love act like jerks to players who I believe in.
April 12th, 2022 at 12:43 PM ^
He's a kid. Never, ever write a player off as a freshman (or sophomore for that matter). There is so much physical growth still happening in these young kids in addition to the adjustment to the size/speed/schemes/workload of the college game.
Not saying this will for sure happen, but he could easily add 15 lbs. of muscle and come back a much more physical player next season with improved rebounding and finishing at the basket, in addition to settling in an being a more consistent outside shooter. His defense already has and will continue to improve.
No worries and thanks for the mea-culpa. As someone who's definitely crossed that bridge myself with others here over the years I understand how easy it can be to let your frustrations with something color your words in a way that comes across off-putting to the rest of the board.
Sadly we still dont have an edit feature for original posts so you're stuck with it. In the old days you could just go back in and fix it but we dont have access to that type of space-age technology here at MgoBlog anymore.
April 11th, 2022 at 11:49 PM ^
Thanks. After reading your initial response, I wish I could edit my post/had taken a different tone.
While I stand behind much of what I wrote, some of the tone was not appropriate and many people who are active members of this community took stray collateral damage that was not intended.
I respect this community and just wanted to raise the level of conversation about something we all care about.
I appreciate the conversation and I think it is clear that this is where the NBA and high-level basketball has been going for several years now. Yet, I gotta say your rebuke of the board for using terminology that you find boring and antiquated comes off as pretty condescending and elitist! There are enough hypocritical people in this world telling us how stupid the public is - we don’t need that on our blog too!
Let’s stop saying words like “condescending“ and “elitist“ and instead let’s just think of ways that posts can be insufferable, demeaning, and otherwise simply poo poo.
It's good to have players with multiple skillsets. You still need someone to bring the ball up the floor and have the skills to distribute the ball so that other players can score. And while you may not need a traditional "big man" it is helpful to position your players offensively in a way to stretch and expose vulnerabilities in defense, and likewise it is necessary to have players with the ability to stop a variety of offensive skillsets. In the NBA, you may have 6 guys on your roster who can bring the ball up the court, outmuscle guys inside, get set up by someone else for an open shot or to beat someone in space off the dribble - as well as effectively play defense on both ball handlers, shooters, and big men. But even in the NBA, it's rare to have a full starting line up of guys who can do all these things more effectively than other NBA players. This is especially true in college and at lower levels. And so it is useful to have complementary players with varying skillsets.
I can see why guys like KD in positionless basketball - he is a guy who can do it all as well as everyone else. And if you want to label the bigs and the guards something else, that's fine. But whether you call the guy getting the ball on the block a big or a 5 or a TRex, their role is similar. It may be dinosaur terminology, but dinosaurs became birds and the birds are doing all right, even by another name.
"But whether you call the guy getting the ball on the block a big or a 5 or a TRex, their role is similar"
Even if you keep your bigs on the perimeter, and only post your 6'2" point guard?
I didn't know there was going to be algebra.....
Dreaded double post. Here's a pic....
I remember this game. I think we won. Although I don't remember someone spray painting on the field like that. Man the things some kids will do for attention.
Well you know...Chuck was so confident that he decided to sign the field before the snap as he knew he was about to flip the momentum of this game.
Somewhat agree with the sentiment, could have done without the last 2 paragraphs. Often times people categorize or assign position labels based on skillsets and it doesn't make them "sophmoric" (sic) or "boring" to do so, it's just more efficient.
You started great, then you got unnecessarily confusing, and then you just got mean. What happened, you were doing so well back in paragraph two!
April 11th, 2022 at 11:56 PM ^
As I stated above (after your post so no worries), the tone got a bit beyond where I wanted it to be in retrospect.
Tbh I just have some lingering resentments about how people have talked about Caleb, which seem to sprout from a number of things. One of those things seems to spring from a marriage to the 1-5 understanding of basketball. I have chosen not to engage with the others in this post.
Thank you for saying I started great, that means I did something well at least.
I don't mind position-less basketball, but I wish teams would run more motion offense and less P'n'R.
I also wish there was no more three point line. It seems to be killing creativity in the pro game especially. I miss traditional post play from bigs.
Regardless, when Michigan and the Pistons are winning consistently, I pay more attention.
As for Caleb, it wasn't his shooting percentages that were so irksome, it was that he rarely seemed to play with much aggressiveness (on either end).
If he was knocking down wide open threes with regularity like many of the great shooters before him, we wouldn't have cared about his lack of aggression. His shooting percentage was exactly what irked me. He looked like he wasn't ready to be out there as a starter. Unfortunately, there wasn't anyone pushing him for his spot. I hope he can shake it and come back as a big timer next season.
This team was just not very good in comparison to the bar that was set and the expectation that came from the high recruiting class. And that was with extraordinary center play from Dickinson. We couldn't consistently make the three (including many wide-open looks) and our PG play was very subpar compared to what is has been over the last decade. Not much off the bench either.
This is you talking about the evolution of basketball--or your opinion of how we should talk about it. I'd rather hear what KD and JJ have to say, honestly. College ball isn't the NBA. This is a far more nuanced issue than you make out here.
For example, Hunter is a 5. Period. He’s more valuable in college than the NBA, but even in the NBA he’s a 5.
Just because he’d be facing teams in the NBA that have a roster of “positionless” players doesn’t mean he’s not a 5/center or can’t be called one. It does mean, though, that as a 5 he’s less valuable in the NBA facing a bunch of dudes who are 6’9” and fast.
Yes, I would say that while positionless ball is increasingly dominant in the NBA--hardly universal--its influence is less pervasive in college ball, mostly (maybe obviously) because huge, athletic athletes capable of playing all five positions. . . do not grow on trees.
P.S. Should add that positionless hoop is a really fun idea, and that to the extent that teams are playing like that it's great fun to watch. I love basketball, the NBA too, and feel like that evolution is a good thing. It was just the OP's tone and insistence that this was now established fact that seemed a bit sketchy.
This is in the wheelhouse of my interest and understanding-and plenty of direct experience. Here my beliefs will always be strongly colored by what happened to me at Pinckney High when Coach Lincoln came to town-my sophomore year. He turned a school that had averaged less than 2 wins a season the previous 5 years and had them playing River Rouge in the quarterfinals three years later-and he turned us into an immediate winner. Coach Lincoln was, schematically, a defensive genius but it was his employment of the personnel that was a huge difference-maker. We were assigned defensive roles that specifically took advantage of our individual strengths and protected us from our deficiencies.
Sure, there are significant differences between a public high school and the University of Michigan. But there will always be many variances in the talent that lands on any roster. Great coaches are able to better catalyze talent and mitigate weaknesses-both individually and corporately. They can also better exploit weaknesses and mitigate strengths of the opponent. And if you can push every side of this ledger in your direction you are going to win a lot of games. Coach taught us to play a very complicated matchup zone that employed man pressure principles and we pressed and trapped teams into oblivion. We played brief snippets of man and 2-3 but they were not our bread and butter-only used to mess with the minds of our opposition. We would routinely and seamlessly rotate through 4 or 5 different defenses on a single possession. The 1-2-1-1 press played three different ways and 1-3-1 and 1-2-2 zones is where we tied folks into knots. It was glorious-for us.
Today, I remain flabbergasted that college teams, with the shot clock, do not defend as we did. Here "Jones and Brooks" are protected on the perimeter and Hunter is not having to defend a guard 20 feet from the basket. Everything seems to be locked into this pathologically man-to-man copy-cat world of defense. The bottom-line is that you are going to need a variety of skills on your roster to cover as many bases as possible. I will never forget an early '70s game when an very good Wisconsin team came to Crisler and tried to go over the top of a very short Michigan with a 6-11, 6-11, 6-11, 6-7, 6-6 lineup. I wonder how many steals little Joe Johnson had that game! And so, the last bottom-line is that every roster is going to have its vulnerabilities.
This is in the wheelhouse of my interest and understanding-and plenty of direct experience. Here my beliefs will always be strongly colored by what happened to me at Pinckney High when Coach Lincoln came to town-my sophomore year. He turned a school that had averaged less than 2 wins a season the previous 5 years and had them playing River Rouge in the quarterfinals three years later-and he turned us into an immediate winner. Coach Lincoln was, schematically, a defensive genius but it was his employment of the personnel that was a huge difference-maker. We were assigned defensive roles that specifically took advantage of our individual strengths and protected us from our deficiencies.
Sure, there are significant differences between a public high school and the University of Michigan. But there will always be many variances in the talent that lands on any roster. Great coaches are able to better catalyze talent and mitigate weaknesses-both individually and corporately. They can also better exploit weaknesses and mitigate strengths of the opponent. And if you can push every side of this ledger in your direction you are going to win a lot of games. Coach taught us to play a very complicated matchup zone that employed man pressure principles and we pressed and trapped teams into oblivion. We played brief snippets of man and 2-3 but they were not our bread and butter-only used to mess with the minds of our opposition. We would routinely and seamlessly rotate through 4 or 5 different defenses on a single possession. The 1-2-1-1 press played three different ways and 1-3-1 and 1-2-2 zones is where we tied folks into knots. It was glorious-for us.
Today, I remain flabbergasted that college teams, with the shot clock, do not defend as we did. Here "Jones and Brooks" are protected on the perimeter and Hunter is not having to defend a guard 20 feet from the basket. Everything seems to be locked into this pathologically man-to-man copy-cat world of defense. The bottom-line is that you are going to need a variety of skills on your roster to cover as many bases as possible. I will never forget an early '70s game when an very good Wisconsin team came to Crisler and tried to go over the top of a very short Michigan with a 6-11, 6-11, 6-11, 6-7, 6-6 lineup. I wonder how many steals little Joe Johnson had that game! And so, the last bottom-line is that every roster is going to have its vulnerabilities.
April 11th, 2022 at 11:29 PM ^
This seems needlessly pedantic to me. For example, Hunter Dickinson is the epitome of a traditional 5 and much of the this specific person is a 4 talk revolved around that person's troubles guarding perimeter players, which falls into the who can you guard category.
Was wondering why all the downvotes, then i kept reading. You're wrong and a jerk about it. Caleb is a 4...because he's too slow and un-athletic to guard 3's well and we need a 3 because we have nobody to guard 3's well. Which is a much simpler way to say we need a 6'5ish athletic person who can guard 6'5ish athletic persons who can also make 3's. Why say all that nonsense when people know what you mean when you just say 'we need a 3.' I might just be asking too much of a random internet poster, but all of your comments after the video are sophomoric and boring.
April 12th, 2022 at 12:24 PM ^
It's really simple in today's NBA. Get as many 3 shooters on the court as possible and shoot as many as possible. It's all about the 3 now and it's made the NBA so boring.