Malcolm Gladwell has a great piece in the latest edition of the New Yorker called “How David Beats Goliath.” Gladwell details why underdogs, under the right conditions, often have a great chance of winning even when faced with seemingly impossible odds.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

Gladwell uses observations derived from telling statistics and anecdotes from the history of global warfare to back up his point, but his most persuasive example and the backbone of his theory is centered around basketball–specifically the full court press, and the inexperienced coach of a youth girls team.

Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?

Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, “little blond girls” from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley. These were the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. They worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”

Gladwell also interviews Rick Pitino, the collegiate master of the craft, who gives insight into the rarely used yet incredibly effective strategy. Pitino, while stroking his own ego, still makes a great point–that the underlying idea of surprising your opponent with something they’ve never seen before is sometimes a hard argument to sell to your team but can produce amazing results.

Rockets.com used Gladwell’s premise to show how Shane Battier and Duke used the “surprise ‘em strategy” when he was in college, and how Battier’s Houston Rockets are using a similar tactic against the heavily favored Lakers right now in the NBA playoffs.

On February 27, 2001 – five days before Duke’s regular season finale – a seemingly disastrous twist of fate gave birth to a whole host of doubters. Battier played his final game at Cameron Indoor Stadium that day and it was certainly memorable – just for all the wrong reasons. Not only did Duke suffer the ignominy of falling on its home floor to rival Maryland, but the Blue Devils also lost Boozer to a broken foot. His absence promised to leave Duke painfully vulnerable in the low-post. So, like all other creatures subject to the whims of cold, cruel evolution, the Blue Devils were forced to either adapt or die. They chose the former. And the result speaks for itself.

“You have to understand, Boozer was our only post player,” recalls Battier. “People just wrote us off. They said, ‘Boozer’s out. Duke is done.’

“We had a six o’clock practice the next morning after the loss and Coach K came in and said, ‘We’re changing our style. We’re going to shoot nothing but threes. Our goal is to shoot 30 to 40 three-pointers.’

“We played North Carolina in our season finale. They were top-ten, this was for the ACC championship and we were big underdogs, so we totally changed our style. The first drill we did, we put ten minutes on the clock and we shot nothing but threes the entire time, trying to see how many we could make in that amount of time. That was the mentality: Attack, attack, attack – three, three, three. If you missed, just shoot again. We did that at the beginning of practice, the middle of practice and the end of practice for three days straight so that by the time we got to the Carolina game, we were all laughing because we all walked off the bus like we had this secret that no one knew.

“Everyone was saying we were dead, it was going to be a romp. Carolina had bigs like Brendan Haywood. Without Boozer, we couldn’t compete with their size. But we came out and just shot three after three after three and won by 14 points – it wasn’t even close. It worked beautifully. They never knew what hit ‘em.”

For more on the subject as it relates to sports, check out Gladwell and Bill Simmons as they argue back and forth about everything under the sun on ESPN.com today or Gladwell’s response to the article on his blog.

But if the article does nothing else, it will certainly leave you wanting to take up the otherwise annoying job of coaching 12 year old girls basketball and just so you can press the shit out of other teams.