Thinking Fast in Basketball
How can experience and the art of misdirection elevate team's game
We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness. - Daniel Kahneman
I’ve just started to read the iconic “Thinking, Fast and Slow” book by the great and late Daniel Kahneman who passed away yesterday (27th of March). I’m currently in the book's early stages, but even in the first couple of chapters, I’ve started to connect concepts laid out by Kahneman with the world of basketball.
The quote above came after explaining the selective attention experiment, and if you aren’t familiar with the experiment you can check it out in this video.
Selective Attention and Basketball
When I read about selective attention in Kahneman's book, I instantly thought about those perfectly drawn plays in basketball and how I always make a loud "oooooh" noise when a wide-open player is cutting toward the hoop and laying/dunking the ball.
Then I connected that with many things that JJ Redick and LeBron James talked about in yesterday’s newest episode of Mind the Game podcast (if you haven’t yet watched it, I wholeheartedly recommend it). They already showed and explained a lot of interesting concepts and plays including Post Splits play which was a new play to me(I might have noticed those movements, but didn’t grasp them as a whole play). This clip demonstrates how the Warriors run it, and why it’s such a tough play to defend.
I would say that basketball plays are a good example of selective attention because if you want to be good at basketball you have to be able to process the entirety of the situation, and not get hung up with the specific bits and pieces of the play (and allow that wide open cut toward the hoop). In other words, a player must be able to pay complete attention to the play as a whole.
But that’s not an easy thing to do, LeBron and JJ talk about basketball intelligence and how some players are born with it, some learn it through time and repetitions, and some never reach great levels. As a player gets “more basketball intelligent” he can make tough decisions and reads practically automatically. To achieve such a state of mind, one needs to be familiar with situations on the court and all possibilities that might happen, as well as have a good intuition about the outcomes of each of those possibilities. Some players are better at it than others, and the tape can easily exploit them.
I would say that this kind of thinking and decision-making - automatic and intuitive-based - is connected to something that Kahneman named System 1 - or fast thinking (the opposite of it is System 2, or slow thinking which requires some time, and crunching inside the brain and ourselves).
Different manifestations of “fast” basketball thinking
Let’s have a look at a play from the recent Mavs-Kings matchup.
PJ Washington attacks the zone nicely by slipping to the nail from where he has plenty of options to attack. He can finish the play himself, kick it to the corner to Tim Hardaway Jr., kick it to the other corner to Kleber, or dump it off to Lively. He has a 4v2 situation essentially. Washington opted for maybe the worst option out of all the possibilities - as he attempted a contested floater that ended up as a miss.
Let’s look at a different play from the same game now, with different main characters. Luka Dončić drives the ball down the right side of the court, where he is soon met with a double team and even a triple team as Sabonis is helping off the strong side. But Dončić knows that his new favorite lob target - Daniel Gafford is lurking in the middle of the paint. Dončić recognizes the situation instantly and throws a lob where only Gafford can not only reach it but dunk it in the same motion (alley-oop it).
This is where the difference in processing of the game is eerily visible. Dončić makes a tough decision from the tough situation, while Washington misses up on a similar (or easier pass) from a way easier and cleaner situation. We could say that Washington was blind to the obvious.
“Intentional” Blinding - the Misdirection
The misdirections can happen in many different ways in the game. It can be the simplest one in the form of a good old crossover.
Miles McBride performed my favorite crossover from the ongoing season versus Evan Mobely and the Cavs. To perform a killer crossover a player must manipulate the defender not only with ball handling but his entire body shifting from one side to the other as well as his eyes and viewing direction.
“Mental” Misdirections
Most basketball plays try to generate a misdirection to fool opponents’ defense. The Warriors’ “Post Splits” actions rely on the fact that Steph Curry and Klay Thompson are the deadliest shooters in the league. Installing fear of wide-open Steph/Klay allows the rest of the team to read the situations and game and attack the space when defenders start to scramble toward them. Steph and Klay are misdirecting the defenses by simply being present on the court…
But the ultimate misdirection for me is when a single player manipulates defenses with only his eyes and “thoughts”, and no one is better at that than players like Dončić, LeBron, and especially Nikola Jokić. Jokić can someone free up a seemingly covered player with his eyes and head. Some of the moves he started to perform only in the past season or two is to go for a hook/floater shot that is actually a perfect alley-oop to his teammate. That teammate is usually Aaron Gordon and you will see several instances of such play here:
Ben Taylor from Thinking Basketball had a great video on many of Jokić’s misdirections with which he practically abuses defenses. I’m pretty sure that the title and general way of thinking about basketball by Ben was also influenced by some principles and writing of Kahneman - at least I can see that after only several chapters of Kahneman’s book.
Maybe that’s why I instantly connected these several early things I’ve noted with basketball.
To conclude, I think already these first several concepts that I’ve learned from Kahneman’s book can be applied in many places, even in basketball, and we can truly feel their impact when there are players such as Nikola Jokić, Luka Dončić or other players capable of processing and manipulating complex situations in a matter of seconds.
I tried to write in a different direction with this post. It’s a bit out of my comfort zone to talk about basketball without relying on the charts and stats as a backbone of the entire post. I hope you enjoyed the text, let me know your thoughts in the comments!