Basketball from the Right Side of the Brain

I've been thinking of my own difficulties in grasping what I might call the "mental terrain" of basketball. 

One problem is that I've never played the game.  Frankly, the odds were stacked against me.  Neither of my parents cared about sports.  I was an only child, so I never had brothers or sisters to play with.  I grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians, and even though many great basketball players have come from southeastern Kentucky, the terrain where I grew up was hilly, or rocky, or decidedly not flat - I literally lived at the bottom of a hill.

Sports depended on who you grew up with.  There were never enough kids around to have a basketball game.  I knew of two hoops, each on the side of a barn.  Dribbling would have been virtually impossible, and the hoops were much higher than any regulation height. 

So when I got to school, my basketball development was way behind, to the point that basketball was one of those things that you avoided.  Instruction at the high school physical education level was virtually non-existent.  "Here's a ball.  Choose teams, and play."  A lot of readers out there have the same story. 

This means that I lack all of the elementary experiences of basketball - dribbling, passing, and shooting are foreign languages to me. 

But another problem might be how my brain is organized.  There's an artificial division in popular culture between being left-brained and being right-brained.  (This theory was debunked just this month.) To be "left-brained" is to be rational, a logical calculator.  To be "right-brained" is to be creative and intuitive.  A mathematician is left-brained, an artist is right-brained.  Daria is left-brained, Jane is right-brained.

I believe it's more complex than that.  There's a war between those who believe that there is one general factor that reflects the ability to perform cognitive tasks in general and those who believe (Howard Gardner) that there are multiple types of intelligences, such as rhythmic, spacial, linguistic, etc. 

I asked an online friend where he thought basketball was on the left/right scale.  He believed that basketball was essentially a right-brained sport, much more a creative sport than a logic/critical thinking sport.  He related chess to basketball.  Even though one thinks of chess as the ultimate rational sport, chess is more about pattern recognition than anything else.  Chess players don't memorize every possible position that chess pieces could take on a board - rather, they memorize patterns involving combinations of certain pieces, and recognize those patterns when they naturally occur in a game.  They know what to do when a pattern presents itself, and act.  My friend states that basketball is basically the same way - you see certain patterns on the court, and great players know what to do when those patterns present themselves.

Furthermore, he said, someone like a computer programmer or mathematician can't "change his/her mind in mid-flight".  The rules of mathematics don't allow it. (*) However, basketball players must be able to change their minds almost immediately, and know when one approach must be discarded for a better one.  They only have seconds, sometimes even split seconds to do it.  A basketball player has an infinite number of approaches to her craft, and is restrained only the rules of movement (dribbling, fouling), space (fouling, court dimension) and time (the shot clock). 

Basketball is very resistant to the logical/analytical approach. (*) It doesn't allow itself to be incrementized like baseball, although a lot of statheads like me have tried/are trying to find the "d factor" (defense) somehow hidden in basketball statistics.  Stats can tell you a lot about baseball, but less about football, even less about basketball.  You have to invent new stats for basketball (like soccer has) to try to find out anything not visible in the box score.  (**)

I still have hope that I can get my hands around this game.  I remember learning the following in freshman calculus in college:  "We say that f(x) is continuous if for every epsilon > 0 there is a delta > 0 such that abs(x - c) < delta implies that abs(f(x)-f(c)) < epsilon".  Sound like gobbledygook to you?  This is a statement about continuous functions, basically graphs that are "smooth looking".  It basically converts something intuitive into something analytical.

Unfortunately, guys like Weierstrass and Cauchy were geniuses, and I ain't one.  Then again, I can comfort myself with a quote from John Calipari - "If you want perfection, go to a bowling alley."

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* - Not that basketball players are bad at math. Some basketball players could do math (Quanitra Hollingsworth) with the best of them, but some basketball players are pretty dim.  Some chess players (Bobby Fischer) were pretty dim, too, pretty much idiots outside of chess.

** - from pilight on an article at Swish Appeal:

"I’m not a believer in +/-. Bill James, in the 1987 Baseball Abstract, said there are three elements required to make a statistic useful: Importance (which measures how well the stat correlates with winning), Reliability (which measures whether the stat truly reflects a player’s ability), and Comprehensibility (which measures how easily understood the stat is). +/- is a big failure on the Reliability front, in that it’s subject to enormous outside influences beyond the ability of the player to control. The attempts to modify it to lessen the outside influences are simply trading Importance and/or Comprehensibility for Reliability. That doesn’t make a better stat, just one that’s bad in a different way."