The cover of the latest issue of The Surfer’s Journal. Click for the larger version.

In a discussion with Galley Friend A.W. I was pressed to explain more fully why I think Gladwell’s full-court press/David/Goliath piece is such bosh. Here’s a more unpacked expansion of that first post:

1) Gladwell’s central premise, that overmatched parties in any sort of conflict need to alter the rules of engagement to maximize their chances of victory, seems so broad and obvious as to be not worth writing about at all. It’s like doing 5,000 words on “Hey! In any sort of physical confrontation, the high ground provides an advantage!”

2) Gladwell’s specific point about changing the rules of engagement in basketball is, as I’ve said, ridiculous. There’s a reason he had to find a middle-school girls basketball team to bear out his example of the press working as an equalizer: Because the press almost never works as an equalizer; to the contrary, it almost always acts as a multiplier on the talent/skill differential between teams. The press actually stands for exactly the opposite of Gladwell’s central premise: It’s used by better coached, better skilled, more athletic teams to multiply their advantage over less athletic, skilled, etc. teams.

The reason most “Davids” don’t try the press against the “Goliaths” is that the press is *very easy to break* if you’re more athletic and skilled than the people pressing you. When weaker teams press stronger teams the result is usually fast-break points for the stronger team as they throw over the top of the press and wind up with a 2-on-1 advantage near the bucket.

The reason Gladwell had to go all the way down to middle school girls basketball is because at that level *none* of the teams–even the really good ones–are particularly skilled or athletic. Using that team to hang his entire piece on is like finding something that worked once in pee-wee soccer and saying the premier league teams should try it. Middle school girls don’t play the same game as even junior high school boys, let alone elite Division I men. I wouldn’t expect Gladwell to know this, but nearly every strategic aspect of the game changes once you reach the level where people on the court are playing above the rim.

3) Because of this, I suspect, Gladwell doesn’t mention the most noted example of a pressing team–Nolan Richardson’s “40 Minutes of Hell” Arkansas Razorbacks who won a title and went to a couple other Final Fours. The reason Gladwell doesn’t mention them is that those teams were so much more athletic than everyone else that they pressed *and* fast-broke–on almost every made shot offensively and missed shot defensively. The reason Richardson had his team do this was precisely to magnify the advantage his guys already had.

4) Why is it that presses maximize a strong team’s advantage? Because it creates more possessions. If Team A shoots 45% and Team B shoots 30%, Team B’s best strategy is to cut the number of possessions in the game to the point where they have some chance of winning. The more possessions there are, the better the chance that the law of averages helps Team B pull an upset.

5) As it happens, there are two basketball strategies which underdogs have used throughout the ages to to alter the rules of the game. Gladwell mentions neither of them.

The first is the Four Corners. The four corner offense–spreading the ball in the half court and taking as much time off the clock as possible–was used all through the ’60s and ’70s and parts of the ’80s by underdog teams to give themselves a chance at upsetting better teams. Because if you’re an underdog, you could win a game 20-18; but if the score got into the 60s, your chances diminished. The NCAA eventually fought this strategy–because it was so effective–by instituting the shot clock.

The second is the zone defense. The zone presupposes this: The further you get from the basket, the smaller the difference in shooting percentages between good and bad teams. That’s generally (though not always) true. So overmatched teams often pack into a zone determined to cut off any shots closer than 10 feet on the assumption that they have a better chance dueling with outside shots where the differential between good and bad is most often no more than 10 percentage points.

6) The other time-worn way to score upsets is by using a gimmick. Paul Westhead, of Loyola-Marymount fame, devised an offense in which his team never held the ball for more than 10 seconds. They fast-broke on every possession, even made baskets, often pulling up and shooting 3s. His teams would average something like 80% more points than the NCAA average; playing them was a nightmare if you saw them for the first time in the tourney; they scored a number of NCAA tourney upsets. Yet Westhead’s teams were not, as you might imagine, totally dominant in their own leagues. Why? Because if you see a gimmick a couple times a year, its weaknesses become obvious. Other gimmicks include Syracuse’s match-up 2-3 zone and Temple’s 1-3-1 trapping zone. These defenses aren’t pure gimmicks, but are played infrequently enough that teams seeing the Orange or the Owls for the first time are often given fits by them.

7) Gladwell doesn’t mention this, but reason they don’t press in the pros is that zone presses (or even true zone defenses) aren’t allowed. The NBA–even with it’s modified “help-zone” rule–is designed for man-to-man.

So why is Gladwell so enamored with the press? I suspect it’s not because he was actually concerned with finding a way for underdogs to lessen their disadvantage in basketball because, as previously stated, there are strategies for that which Gladwell ignores.

It seems obvious that Gladwell fixed on the full-court press because he thought he could use it as a stalking horse for his Outliers contention that great people (or in this case, teams) aren’t really great–they just had the luxury of getting 10,000 hours of practice, or having rules tailored for their traditional success, or whatever. Gladwell’s middle-school girls let him tell his readers that the ability to work hard is what’s rare, not physical talent. Using statistcs-based strategies (like the four-corners or the zone or even Princeton’s back-door weave) wouldn’t allow him to make that claim.

I think that’s what I find so offensive about this piece. As someone who was a mid-level high school player who spent literally thousands of hours practicing basketball, I can assure you that, at least on the court, physical talent trumps perseverance nine times out of ten. Here’s the nub of what Gladwell wants to tell his readers:

We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability—legs, in Saxe’s formulation, can overpower arms—because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coördination.

Merely confining himself to strategies which minimize the differential between stronger and weaker teams–like the Four Corners, or zone defenses–wouldn’t allow Gladwell to make this grand claim. So Gladwell needed the press, because the press lets him pretend that effort is what makes the difference.

Again, Gladwell’s argument might be true at the level of pee-wee soccer, or middle-school girls basketball, but it strikes me as being self-evidently untrue when applied to more advanced arenas. America’s playgrounds are teeming with kids throwing themselves into serious, rigorous practice for all kinds of sports. But if you can’t throw a baseball 90 mph, you’re never going to be a big-league pitcher, no matter how relentless your effort. Which is more rare, a kid who practices basketball relentlessly, like me, or someone who is 6’10”, with soft hands who c

an hit from 15′?

Galley Friend C.W. sends a link to this Megan McArdle post–she seems to be having maybe-sorta second thoughts about Obama! Who knew!

But that’s not the point. The real gold is in these two comments down below, where some cranky conservatives are venting about past and future Chrysler bailouts.

Comment #1:

Meet the new Amtrak, same as the old Amtrak.

Comment #2:

Yancey, that’s completely ridiculous. Chrysler is NOT the new Amtrak.

The new Amtrak is building a “high-speed” rail network that everyone will be forced to ride because the Chrysler they got in lieu of a tax refund is in the shop drawing on our new universal coverage car-care plan (“Car care is a human right!”). The waiting lists for oil filters are going to be awful, don’t you know, and you won’t be able to get “life-extending” care after 50,000 miles.

Well played, sir.

Steve Sailer has what may be his most devastating deconstruction of a Malcolm Gladwell article yet. The subject is sports and underdogs, and in particular the full-court press in basketball.

Gladwell’s hypothesis–that weaker teams should press stronger teams to even the odds–is so divorced from basketball reality that I wonder if he’s ever played organized ball at any level. Just one season of 8th grade ball would have taught him that the press (like the fast-break) is a way stronger teams (and by strong I mean “more athletic and better skilled and coached”) maximize their advantage over weaker teams.

My middle-school team was pretty insane in 7th and 8th grades. We had probably 10 guys who could dunk and we went undefeated over those two seasons. (My family moved and I wound up at a different high school, but my teammates would go on to win states in our senior season.) We started every game out in a press, either a 2-2-1 or a 1-2-2, depending on whether or not they showed an ability to pass over the top. Typically, we’d call it before half-time since we’d be up by 20. On the rare occasions other teams tried to press us, they’d give up after a couple possessions.

On an semi-related note, we would mostly alternate between running man and a 1-3-1 zone in the half-court on defense. (Our coach was pretty nuts about throwing different defensive looks at people, which had the effect of doing a great job teaching us about the spacial-relations of the game.) The 1-3-1 has the practical effect of acting like a half-court press, with the ball getting trapped every time it goes near a corner. And it has the same overdrive advantage of a true full-court press–it maximizes the better teams advantage.

Also, it was amazingly fun to play. The reason it’s not taught more often, however, is because it’s only effective when used by very good teams.

Saw the new Star Trek last night and have some assorted thoughts. I’ll try to keep this spoiler-free, so it’ll be necessarily oblique at times. If you’re just looking for a quick take-away, overall there’s a lot to like and admire about the movie, but it isn’t an instant classic.

Let’s start with the good:

* Time travel makes me nervous as a conceit because it tends to open up a narrative Pandora’s Box. The Abrams Star Trek (written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) revolves around a single instance of time travel, which is the engine for the entire plot. And the writing here is exceptionally elegant. Again, without getting into any details, the conceit allows Abrams to create his own Star Trek universe without disavowing or re-imagining the original. It allows the new Trek to have both continuity and freedom to go in whatever new directions it wants. I can’t overstate my admiration for this thoughtfulness.

But to make it even more impressive, the writers do it with such little fanfare that I suspect most audiences (and critics) won’t even realize what’s been done until long after they’ve left the theater.

* The casting is great. Ever single performer succeeds in creating interesting characters from the icons. They’re helped enormously by the writing, of course, but even so, the featured players do really solid, organic work. Even in this group, though, were some standouts.

Chris Pine looks, to my eyes, like a serious, bona fide movie star. He’s charismatic and interesting; the camera loves him. I haven’s seen a star turn like this since George Clooney took over ER. He’s already a far superior Kirk. Zoe Saldana turns Uhura from a background token into an actual human being. It’s fantastic, subtle, and even touching work. And Bruce Greenwood makes Christopher Pike into a presence that anchors the film even when he’s not onscreen. But then, Greenwood is one of those actors who adds value every time he shows up.

* The film really moves. The pacing is brisk and unrelenting. There are very few wasted beats. Nearly every aside has pay-off integral to the story. As a for instance, when Capt. Pike is first taking the Enterprise out he tells Sulu to engage the warp drive. Sulu flubs it and the episode become a joke–a funny little character moment. But it also provides two important narrative points–(1) the minute the Enterprise loses waiting for Sulu to figure things out turns out to be critical and (2) it gives Sulu motivation for another action he takes which might otherwise be out of character. Again, the writers deserve a great deal of credit for this.

With all of that, I feel a little guilty complaining about a few things that didn’t quite work for me:

* The villain, Eric Bana’s Nero, isn’t quite heavy enough (or interesting enough) to hold his own. The best villains are the ones who act as though the story is really about them. Nero is really never more than an afterthought, a guy keeping us from spending time with the really interesting people: Kirk, Spock, etc.

* At times the production felt a little TV-ish. The CGI space battles were less convincing that what was concocted for Battlestar Galactica and some of the sets felt a lot like sets. I don’t know what the budget for the production was, but if it cost more than $80M, then I don’t know that they got every last dollar up on the screen.

* There were, to my mind, maybe three in-jokes too many. Part of the appeal of this project is that it’s a chance to bring in new, non-Trek fans and convert them. I think the movie still has a very good chance of doing that, but newcomers will be aware that there are moments passing over their heads.

One final note: Growing up, you could be either a Star Trek guy or a Star Wars guy. You could like both, but could really only love one. (I was a Star Wars guy.)

Watching flicks like Trek’s Search for Whale Songs or whatever that dreadful movie was, I never would have imagined that there could come a time when the Star Wars universe would become such a joke that nobody could thoughtfully embrace it and Trek would be the only serious sci-fi game in town.

But here we are.

Galley Friend M.G. takes a swipe at TNR’s Chris Orr for this paragraph:

I am no military historian, but it’s my understanding that many armed conflicts that we might consider pre-civilized concluded with just this kind of slaughter (and pillage, enslavement, etc.), and that the widespread recognition of civilized rules of war has saved literally countless lives. As bad as the Nazis were, I think it’s unequivocally a good thing that we were not forced to depopulate Germany. The reason we weren’t was that Germany surrendered, and the reason Germany surrendered was its well-placed faith that we wouldn’t depopulate (or torture, enslave, etc.) the nation anyway.

Leave aside everything else: How do you use the phrase “literally countless” without giving yourself whiplash.

Ross Douthat, the New York Times’s new conservative columnist, has a piece up today doing a What If Dick Cheney had been the nominee in 2008. Douthat seems to think that if Cheney had run he would have lost in such a landslide that it might have jump-started conservatism on the road to intellectual recovery:

[T]he conservative movement might – might! – have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that’s necessary if it hopes to regain power.

One quick question: Why is it that everyone assumes political movements need intellectual renewal to be successful? After John Kerry’s defeat, the general consensus was, If the Democrats can’t beat a weak incumbent like Bush they’re doomed as a political party! Remember how the end was nigh for Democrats in January of 2005? Yet two years later they scored big in the mid-terms and then two years after that expanded their congressional majorities while recapturing the White House.

Did liberalism undergo an intense intellectual renewal between 2004 and 2006? I don’t think so. Instead–the other side presided over a series of intensely bad events.

Look, I don’t mean to sound like a Marxist determinist here, but let’s strip away, for a moment, the more complicated questions of blame and look at the bare facts. After George W. Bush took office:

* Lower Manhattan was devastated in the 9/11 attacks

* America launched two wars, which were conducted with varying levels of success and failure

* New Orleans was destroyed

* Gas prices rose by more than 200 percent

* Home prices fell by something like 40 percent (in some areas)

You don’t need intellectual renewal to run against that! (Again, it isn’t fair to blame President Bush for all of these events; and he did have some successes. But we’re talking about crude political matters here.)

Yet even with that litany of failures, John McCain was still leading Barack Obama until Lehman Brothers collapsed in mid-September, triggering an enormous financial crisis which destroyed a goodly portion of voters’ personal wealth. (Funny how McCain’s campaign–which was highly imperfect!–went from being perceived as brilliantly obsessed with tactics before the Lehman collapse to “feckless” afterwards.)

In sum, it would be nice for conservatism to find some intellectual energy in the coming months. But that is hardly a precondition for electoral success.

If President Obama proves to be as callow, arrogant, and counter-productively impulsive as President Bush was–and there is much evidence to suggest he will–then there’s a good chance that Republicans will regain their political potency irrespective of the state of conservative thought.

On the other hand, even if conservatism’s Bright Young Things rescue the movement’s hearts and minds from the Bad Old Guys, but the economy quickly recovers, Iraq and Afghanistan stabilize, and the international scene remains stable–then it won’t make a bit of difference. Obama and the Democrats will remain politically dominant.

Batman & Robin out-grossed it. And that’s not even counting inflation.