Anyone who has played or watched basketball, irrespective of level, has witnessed the athletic mismatch. It can be a professional game where one team is just constructed better than the other. It can be one of those pre-conference college basketball mismatches between teams from different divisions. It can be a high school game featuring an established program against a relative newcomer. It can be a recreation league game where one of the teams is just stacked. It can even be a pickup game where one guy picking his squad just wings it, only to discover his side is vastly inferior. Whatever the case, when one team is running circles around the other, it raises the question: Was your team outhustled or outquicked?
A TRACK AND FIELD ANALOGY
Pick a world-class track and field sprinter from any era. Carl Lewis, Usain Bolt, Jesse Owens. Pick one. If I, for example, ever ran a 100-meter dash against either of these sprinters, even if they hadn’t trained for six months and spotted me a 75-meter headstart, I’d still lose the race by a substantial margin. First of all, by the time I creaked my way out of the starter’s position, my opponent would have gained at least 50 meters, and the race would be over before I gathered any momentum. After suffering a humiliating defeat like that, the last thing I’d need is some unsolicited track pundit telling me I was outhustled.
Perhaps to a lesser degree, this is exactly what basketball players are up against when playing against a squad where nearly every player on the opponent’s roster is superior in the quickness department. Quicker reflexes, quicker leapers, quicker instincts, quicker hands, quicker feet. As the expression goes, “speed kills.” A team with an overall quickness advantage can make opponents (even those giving maximum effort) look like they’re not trying. Sometimes the other team is just quicker, but that explanation falls on mostly deaf ears.
“BUT, COACH…”
A basketball team is running an offensive set. After an errant pass, the ball gets free and rolls toward midcourt. An offensive player is five feet from the ball and a defensive player is eight feet from the ball and they both pursue it. The quicker defensive player, despite having been further away from the ball at first, scoops up the ball and jets half the length of the court for a layup while the offensive player closest to him and the ball gives futile chase, never getting close enough to even attempt to foul his opponent This poor guy knows what’s coming after the layup, so he looks toward the bench where his coach, with veins popping out of his neck, frantically calls for a timeout. After staring down his embarrassed player all the way to the bench, the coach then spends the next 45 seconds ripping the player to shreds, questioning his passion for the game, his passion for life, his commitment to his teammates, his manhood, his DNA, and anything else he can think of.
After all that, the player might even get benched for lack of hustle when, in fact, he’s just not as quick.
After the game, the losing coach will talk about how his team was outworked, how he didn’t have his team prepared, how unacceptable it is that the other team “wanted it more” and how much his players will despise him after tomorrow’s practice. But those players won’t emerge from a hard practice any quicker than they were before, and all the punishment practices in the world won’t make a team become more athletic than an athletically-superior team during the course of a game.
Even if your anticipation skills are top-notch and you take all the proper angles when the ball is loose, sometimes you simply get outquicked.
Meanwhile, the winning coach walks away proud that his quicker squad “outworked” the opponent. No practice tomorrow.
“BUT, DAD…”
After the game, your parents or siblings chime in with their own post-game analysis telling you how you were outworked and looked slow. Never mind that half the players on the other team were also members of the track team. But to your harshest and most well-intended critics, that’s just a feeble alibi. The assumption is that the other team “wanted it more.” You have to somehow figure out a way to be quicker than your quicker opponent before the clock strikes zero. It’s not fair, just the way it is.
Particularly at the youth level, a fast kid with skills can dominate a game with steals and layups, especially if he’s on the court with a bunch of first-timers. Meanwhile, the parents on the losing side are screaming at their kids to play harder and yelling at the coach to get the team to show more effort. Coaches at the youth level are usually helpless in those situations.
FOR THE QUICKER TEAM, THE POSSIBILITIES ARE LIMITED
We’ve seen the other side as well. A quicker team somehow underestimates the opponent and ends up getting outworked. They might even lose the game. The losing coach has a real gripe should his team not snare the majority of loose balls and long rebounds, or get outclassed in the fast break department. And even though sometimes quicker reactions to situations can help mitigate differences in foot speed, there’s still an overall advantage. But these are the instances where the timeouts, the benchings, the hard practices, and constructive criticism from family members are warranted.
We’ve all seen games like this, especially at the high school level. We see it at the professional level too, but in those cases, it usually involves a team playing its third game in four nights or at the end of an extended road trip against a well-rested team. That tends to eradicate a quickness advantage. The legs are dead, but the losing team will still be accused of being outhustled.
IN SPORTS, PERSPECTIVE IS EVERYTHING
We see and hear this in every sport, where one’s truth depends upon which side of the ball you’re on. In baseball, a 1-0 final score will result in the winning side being praised for great pitching while the losing team will get lambasted for lack of clutch hitting. In an NBA game ending with a score of 90-85, the analysis will include how the winning team “held” their opponent to 85 points, while from the losing team’s perspective, it was “lack of offensive execution.” A stat sheet shows a team had 25 turnovers. Were they sloppy or did the other team force all those turnovers? Depending on the source, the summary usually has an all-or-nothing conclusion.
As with everything else, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
So the next time your favorite team is getting beaten to every loose ball and long rebound, getting dominated on the boards by quicker leapers (even if the “boxing out” fundamentals are there) or giving up fastbreak points by the bunches, perhaps the players aren’t totally at fault. Analysts casually tossing the term “outhustled” around might make for good theatre, but it also creates a climate that could lead to a player or coach losing a gig.
“Who picked these sides, anyway?”
Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash
