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.

AP

Last Friday, a week shy of his 37th birthday, Shaquille O’Neal  abused All-Star big man Chris Bosh and the Toronto Raptors, scoring 45 points on 20 of 25 shooting. Afterward, O’Neal insisted he could do that every night if only he got more touches.

“I think I’m the only player who looks at each and every center,” he said, “and says to myself, ‘That’s barbecued chicken down there.”

Chris Bosh had a slightly different point of view:

Toronto’s Chris Bosh had an explanation for how Shaquille O’Neal scored 45 points: He cheated.

“He was just camping down in the lane,” Bosh said Friday night, after O’Neal’s biggest scoring night in six years led Phoenix to a 133-113 victory over the Raptors. “I mean, if they’re not calling three seconds – I thought it was a rule, but I guess not.”

Old age may have slowed his feet a bit, but apparently not his tongue. Shaq responded by comparing his skinnier opponent to the world’s most famous drag queen:

“I heard what Chris Bosh said, and that’s strong words coming from the RuPaul of big men,” O’Neal said. “I’m going to do the same thing (in their next meeting) I did before – make him quit. Make ‘em quit and complain. It’s what I do.”

Then on Sunday, fresh off his physical and verbal assault of Bosh, O’Neal  scored 36 points, and led the Suns to an upset over the favored LA Lakers, despite his old arch rival and teammate Kobe Bryant scoring 49.

After the game, a questioner who wondered aloud how the 37 year old is suddenly acting like he’s 25 again. O’Neal responded unfazed, in his legendary monotone delivery:

“It’s what I do.  I’ve been doing it since 1992. If you don’t believe it, Google me.”

It is no wonder Shaq mentioned Google because lately, he has been all over the internet. He now has one of the most popular Twitter accounts, originally starting it because someone posted under his name as an impostor. After publicly proving his tweet-legitimacy (and then some) last week, he proclaimed:

“To all twitterers , if u c me n public come say hi, we r not the same we r from twitteronia, we connect.”

David Falk dropped some absolute bombs in the New York Times Sports Section on Sunday, but unless you read the paper, you would not have heard about it. It is a subject no one wants to talk about because it is the NBA’s worst nightmare.

Falk, the original Super Agent, representative of Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing among many others, says when the NBA’s current collective bargaining agreement expires, there is the potential for disaster. In a riveting interview touching on a variety of subjects, he dramatically lays out the likely events and why there is almost no avoiding it.

The N.B.A.’s system is broken, Falk says, and fixing it will require radical measures that almost guarantee a standoff in 2011, when the collective bargaining agreement expires.

“I think it’s going to be very, very extreme,” Falk said, “because I think that the times are extreme.”

How extreme? Falk said he believed Stern, the commissioner, would push for a hard salary cap, shorter contracts, a higher age limit on incoming players, elimination of the midlevel cap exception and an overall reduction in the players’ percentage of revenue. And, Falk said, Stern will probably get what he wants.

“The owners have the economic wherewithal to shut the thing down for two years, whatever it takes, to get a system that will work long term,” he said in an extensive interview to discuss his new book. “The players do not have the economic wherewithal to sit out one year.”

The players, he said, must recognize that the owners have the ultimate leverage. Many are billionaires for whom owning an N.B.A. team is merely a pricey hobby. Some of them are losing “enormous amounts of money” and would rather shut down the league for a year or two than continue with the current system.

So Falk is urging the union to take a more cooperative approach.

“And if we don’t do that, in my opinion, there’s an overwhelming probability that the owners will shut it down,” he said.

There is a major factor, though, that I think David Falk is leaving out; a factor that also makes the situation that much scarier: Europe.

It is possible that Europe is the reason why players do have the wherewithal to sit out a year or more. It’s easy to forget that just six months ago, during the Olympics, Kobe Bryant, Dwayne Wade and Lebron James were asked if they’d ever consider playing across the Atlantic. When reporters threw out absurd numbers like $50 million a year, they started making headlines, and the NBA’s three biggest stars didn’t exactly rule it out.

The potential lockout is the precise opening rich European owners would need to start throwing money at the NBA’s most familiar names in sums that we have never seen. Once they go, the flood gates open.

But even if we assume those guys resist the urge to drop the National Basketball Association, what about lesser paid players? The financial setback of a lockout will hurt them more than the Lebrons or Kobes of the world. In some of their minds, Europe might be a pretty solid alternative if they want to play hardball and try to hold out for something like their current agreement.

And let’s not forget the American Dollar isn’t exactly holding its own against the Euro right now–its an option they won’t be able to ignore. After all, the NBA will be back eventually and they can always come back to the States.

Unfortunately, the NBA won’t be back if that all happens, at least not the NBA as we know it. Just imagine the mess of trying to get all European-contracted players transferred back over here, many of whom probably will have signed different one, two, or three year deals, depending on the league and/or their personal situation.

Making matters worse, that’s just the players piece of this puzzle. What if the economy is still struggling five years from now? What if some teams don’t want to come back at all? The scenarios are endless.

There is no doubt NBA brand will always survive, the basketball market will never go away for a host of reasons too obvious to name here, but it is possible, if we are to believe David Falk, that in a few years the league will look radically different than anything we’ve seen before.

(Newser) – Charles Barkley will be doing time for his DUI bust, the Arizona Republic reports. The former NBA star has been sentenced to 10 days in prison, which will be reduced to five if he completes an alcohol education course. Barkley—who told cops he was in a hurry to receive oral sex when he was stopped on New Year’s Eve—starts his sentence March 21.

I can’t believe this…what better excuse can you have? –Colin Vallance

Awesome, ballsy–not to mention extremely interesting–statement from Lebron James: that he would consider playing in Europe for $50 million a year or more. With Josh Childress and Carlos Arroyo jumping across the Atlantic for more money, this statement by James could blow open the NBA, European, and World market. At the very least, he has created that much more buildup over his coming free agency (even if he secretly would never leave the United States), and has driven his asking price up by at least $10 million dollars. Whether you take this as a shrewd business move, marketing ploy, or just a plain hype generator, it is brilliant. He all but guaranteed himself that he will become the highest paid athlete in history

Now if only he could get a couple decent teammates.

If this isn’t a reason to vote for him, I don’t know what is.

Phoenix Suns fans, still smoldering over the Spurs Playoff Series because the fallacious and lopsided suspensions of Boris Diaw and Amare Stoudamire in Game 5, and the gashed nose of Steve Nash that kept him out of the end of Game 1, will no doubt be even more furious watching this:

Below is video highlights of Tim Donaghy absolutely butchering Game 3 of the same series. The officiating is so atrocious that the national TV announcers, Mike Breen and Jon Barry, actually call him out by name.

Makes you wonder if, barring events outside of their control in Games 1, 3, and 5, Phoenix could have swept the series, nevermind win it. Instead they went down in six.

When the Spurs sweep the Cavaliers tonight, the biggest loser of the series might not be the Cleveland Cavaliers, or even anyone who had to sit through all four games. It is Flip Saunders. It has become glaringly obvious that the Pistons absolutely blew the Eastern Conference Finals and the blame HAS to fall squarely on Flips Saunders’ shoulders. The media was so focused on Lebron’s unbelievable game 5 as well as The Chosen One fulfilling his prophecy to become the face of the league, Flip only got mildly criticized for egregious coaching mistakes. Everyone was so giddy about Lebron, they just chalked up the Pistons collapse to the genius of Boy Wonder. The hype saved Flip from serious criticism, but as everyone watches this horrible mismatched finals, it’s painfully clear Flip absolutely butchered that Cavs series as well as cost the league a much more competitive and entertaining finals.

Game 5 of the conference finals really needs to be looked at again. Lebron was, of course, “a raging inferno”, as Charles Barkley put it, making every conceivable fade away jump shot and drive to the lane. But the telling plays came with less than a minute left when Cleveland was down and with the ball. Lebron easily blew by Taysoun Prince two times in a row and threw down power dunks. I mean this is the Eastern Conference Finals! Game 5 with less than a minute to go and you give up back to back dunks!?! This has probably never happened in the history of the NBA. In between being giddy about what they had just seen TNT analysts Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley kept repeating to Reggie Miller, “you need to double or triple team,” with Reggie saying there’s no way to stop him. But watch exactly how easy it was for him:

Let’s not forget last year the major contention between Ben Wallace and Flip Saunders was defense. Everyone talked about how Ben Wallace was upset he wasn’t included very much in the offense, but the only time he ever said anything publicly about the coach was when they were about to lose to the Heat in the Conference Finals, “We’re not focusing on defense enough.” He claimed they spent all practice working on offensive plays and not worrying about defensive schemes and rotations.

Now cut back to these NBA Finals. The Spurs have held Lebron to 22-61 and he has yet to take over a game, but most importantly there have been ZERO dunks in the lane. Besides those two famous throw downs in the final minute of game 5, Lebron had posterized the whole Pistons team for the entire series. Almost every game he had a rim rattling dunk in the lane over Tayshwun or rasheed Wallace. The Spurs simply took away the lane by having a second or third defender anchored there every time he gets by the first guy. Obviously it’s not easy to stop Lebron James, but his team is so weak, it’s not exactly rocket science either. Now watch how much trouble Lebron has every time he drives to the lane against the Spurs. It is like night and day.

The Spurs may be the best defensive team in the league, but Detroit is no slouch. They got to back to back finals on defensive principles used by players who know how to play defense. The players are there, but it’s the coaching that’s missing.

Now go back to the pistons series and compare the lineups side by side.

PISTONS                                            CAVS
G Richard Hamilton                              G Larry Hughes
G Chauncey Billups                               G Sasha Pavlovic
F Tayshaun Prince                                F LeBron James
F Rasheed Wallace                                F Drew Gooden
C Chris Webber/Antonio McDyess    C Z. Ilgauskas/A. Varejao

It’s almost a joke. The pistons have a DISTINCT advantage at 4 out of 5 positions. The only better player the cavs have is LeBron and he is going up against Tayshaun Prince, a premier defender and automatic mismatch where ever he goes. With his extreme length, one could make the argument he’s the best matchup defensively against LeBron in the league. Regardless, even if Tayshaun was the worst player on the floor, is there ever a scenario when one team has 4 out of the 5 best players on the floor should ever lose a playoff series? I can’t think of one.

Flip Saunders has always had the label of not being a good playoff coach, but here was always an excuse. Never had the players (first few Minnesota years), got unlucky (ran into shaq on both the Lakers and Heat), plus he’s gotten to the conference finals twice before this year. But he put the nail in the coffin by not even coming close to finding an answer for James. To lose four games in a row in the conference finals to a team that starts Larry Hughes and Sasha Pavlovic against Billups and Hamilton is a disgrace. Sportscenter has a nice cover story because LeBron won, but we were deprived of a much more entertaining finals because of Flip Saunders.