Chocolate Chip Cookies and Basketball (Don't Miss the Recipe)

Chocolate cookies resemble basketball. They differ in quality. As an aficionado, you notice differences.

Joanne Chang makes the best chocolate cookies at her bakery, Flour. She shares technique at MasterClass. What's her secret and how does that relate to basketball? "One day these cookies will be famous," read her departure memo from consulting. 

You want to bake these masterpieces? 

1. "Mise en place." Gather all in place. She sets out the cookware and ingredients.

Basketball: Plan, prepare, practice. Set out our philosophy, practice components, and playbook for our players. Explain how each ingredients adds to the whole. Basketball is in the public domain; there are no secrets. 

2. Temperature. Have the right temperature. Measure it. Attend to details. Thomas Keller says, "all cooking is about time and temperature." Chang says not to make the cookies unless you KNOW the temperature of your oven (cooking thermometer). 

Basketball: We constantly take the temperature of our athletes. Assess their intensity and their mental state. Patience (time) and faith (belief at work) flank the top of Coach Wooden's "Pyramid of Success" for good reason. 

3. Kitchen scale. Volume and weight are not alike. 

Basketball: Two players have the same physical makeup; they are not the same player. Filling a cup with marbles is different than filling a cup with sand although both are a cup. Recognize differences. 

4. Temperature of ingredients. Adding cold eggs to your creamed sugar/butter mix changes the flakiness of the bake. 30 seconds in hot water will bring our eggs to room temperature. 

Basketball: If a player is cold, get her involved. Run a set play for her, change the tempo, and emphasize the total game, contributions through defense, rebounding, playmaking. 

5. Quality of chocolate. Those semi-sweet chocolates are not the be-all, end-all. Chang uses high grade chunk chocolate and add in a touch of milk chocolate. 

Basketball: Better ingredients, better basketball. Assign imaginary grades to your players - lottery pick, first rounder, second rounder, free agent. Skill development can help move players up a grade but lottery picks are few. "Every day is player development day." 

6. Mixing matters. Overmixing activates gluten and makes them firmer than our desired consistently. A little pulsing and gently turning the batter works the dough without overworking. 

Basketball: Finding the right blend of players is an art. We can overmix the roster and get the wrong consistency. Red Auerbach said, "it's not the five best players but the five players who play best together." 

7. Secret ingredients. Baking soda is not baking powder. Unsalted butter is not salted butter. A half teaspoon of vanilla adds to the mix. 

Basketball: Special sauce includes caring for each other, mentoring, positivity, and player and ball movement. 

8. The binder, "glue guy" matters. Adding some bread flour to all-purpose flour improves the consistency of our cookies. 

Basketball: We need the players who bring the mix together. They may not be the most talented or most athletic, but they hold the team together. 

9. Rest the dough. Three hours to overnight airtight resting allows the flour to incorporate the wet ingredients better. 

Basketball: You can overtrain our athletes. Shakespeare wrote, 

“Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.”

Lebron James gets up to 12 hours of sleep a day.

10. The chef matters. 

Basketball: That's why you're here. Because the chef matters. 

"Every day is player development day." 

Lagniappe (something extra). 

Coach Hanlen simplifies the game. Five dribbles and combinations allow more than enough variety. 

Lagniappe 2: "The chocolate chip cookie recipe" from Joanne Chang "MasterClass"

Basketball: The Problem-Tree Exercise and Followup (Don't Repeat Our Mistakes)

Defining problems allows us to invoke specific solutions. In Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai's MasterClass, she shares the Problem-Tree exercise. 

Enumerate our 'central problems' and assess root cause and consequences. 

In an example, her guest discusses childhood obesity and consequences including low self-esteem, Type 2 diabetes, and excess national healthcare costs. 

Common examples we encounter in basketball include:

• Turnovers
• Ball containment
• Shot selection
• Transition defense
• Pick-and-roll defense

Players learn in different ways. Part of our "feedback-rich" solution means testing and monitoring results. "We get what we accept." When players know that actions have consequences, they are more likely to change behaviors. 

Tailor practice to reduce the root causes (e.g. inability to handle pressure) by playing 5 versus 7 or other advantage-disadvantage exercises. 

Another example, use a spreadsheet shortcut...

Implement SMART followup of teaching. 

S = specific  "We expect turnovers to decline." Tracking reduced turnovers. 

M = measurable  

A = achievable  Turnovers will never go to zero. 

R = relevant   Turnovers are one of the "Four Factors" outcome definers

T = timely  It's too late to implement surveillance the last week of the season.

At the middle school level, we reported statistics for the team, not for individuals. We avoided singling out individual girls as turnover-prone or taking low quality shots. 

Defining a handful of problems (e.g. six) and asking team members (pairs) to develop  problem trees might have educational (production) value. 

The method is flexible and applies to issues like grades. Ask players what root causes contribute to lower grades and what the consequences might be (lack of admission to desired schools). We've had players whom coaches said were not academic considerations for their schools.

Lagniappe. We call the three-point line the "spacing line." 

Lagniappe 2. Finding work-life balance is an endless challenge. 

 

Do Our Actions Reflect Our Basketball Values? Truth-telling, Listening, Collaboration and Extras for Hoop Aficionados

"There is a pecking order on every team." - Erik Spoelstra 

Our values form over a lifetime. They range from Phil Jackson's immutable, "Basketball is sharing" to maximum ego, "it's all about me." 

Each of us has different values and priorities. The notes above come from Malala Yousafzai's MasterClass on advocacy. She finds them vital to pursuing her mission of promoting education for girls. 

What are our basketball values? How big do we want our list? Let's choose the Buffett "Top Five." I won't say that mine are superior to yours. Each of us needs authentic values and process. 

1. Basketball is about relationships. 

2. How you play (coach) reflects how you live. 

3. There is always give and take. Give great effort, instruction, and feedback.

4. Focus on process not on results. 

5. Basketball is a game of separation - creating and preventing it. 

Relationships. Relationships build trust. Trust creates loyalty. Loyalty endures and diminishes ego while building teamwork. 

• Greet every player by name daily 
• Give regular progress reports
• Remind players that we enthusiastically network and write recommendations

Philosophy and integrity of play. A team is like a band or an orchestra. Remember Metallica's philosophy, "what's good for the project." They make decisions for the good of the whole not of any individual. Planning, preparation, and practice produce "one band, one sound."

A few years ago our seventh grade girls lost a highly competitive game to Andover, the top team in the league. The girls said that the Andover parents told them they played the hardest of any team they had faced. As coaches, we ask for that. Be a worthy competitor. 

Give and take. Reciprocity is a powerful Influencer. Professor Adam Grant teaches three interactive styles...givers, matchers, and takers. You might think that people take advantage of givers and sometimes they do. But givers also are more likely to rise by adding value to organizations and individuals. And those who refuse to share credit are often scorned like legendary Frank Lloyd Wright whose career suffered from being a credit hog. "He required his apprentices to put his name on any work they completed to insure all recognition would be allocated to him.  At several points in his career he was abandoned by the architectural community and went years without work."

Separation. To master separation is to master space and time. Great players like Jordan, Bryant, and James created space to allow for execution. Great individual and team defense condenses space. Terms like "crawl up into him," "nose on chest," and "don't back down" exhort ball pressure and oppose "pace and space."   

Process over results. Have a process worth trusting. The Latin phrase Mens sana in corpore sano means a healthy mind in a healthy body. Just as you build your athleticism and skill with workouts and practice, build your mind with reading, study, video review, and mindfulness.

The more you know, the more you can apply. 

Lagniappe. Michael Phelps trains in the dark. When his goggles failed at key event, he soldiered on, because not seeing is his default state. 

Lagniappe 2. What's your off-season shooting workout? 

Lagniappe 3. Bury, pindown, entry, confusion. 

The Metamorphosis: Stop and Think from Another Perspective. Plus Two Drew Hanlen Videos

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
― Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis, the Kafka novella offers insights...into basketball? Stop and think. 

The protagonist, Gregor Samsa, awakens in his shared apartment as a giant bug, most commonly depicted as a cockroach. How does his metamorphosis affect his relationships with those around him who no longer see him as son or brother? 

What if we awoke changed - as our overseer (e.g. Program Director), our assistant, our players, our broader community, or inanimate? How would others see us? How we see our former self - foreign, unrecognizable or sympathetically? 

Program Director. She is a stakeholder in our success as minister of her fiefdom. But what carries the most weight - program success or smooth seas, no parent or community backlash against the inevitable injustices (cuts, minutes, and roles)? 

Assistants. Am I a valued team member, excess baggage, or something else? Remember that "people don't quit jobs, they quit people." Am I a 'yes man' or part of a culture of collaborative conflict? 

Players. How do we collaborate, connect, and communicate with players? Do the key players see us radically differently than reserve players? Are we adding value for everyone? Am I a taskmaster or mentor? 

Our absence results in a chance for metamorphosis for others, who might grow or shrink in our absence. Do they raise their game or regress?  

Our metamorphosis offers insights into empathy within our program, the capacity to see how others feel. We usually see how a challenge impacts us, not how it impacts those around us. But coaches need to be able to read the room and take the pulse of individuals and team. To me that's a key lesson of Metamorphosis. 

Ego tells us that the program needs us. The Metamorphosis asks what happens in our absence. To paraphrase Detective Freamon in The Wire, "Six out of ten people think you're a self-absorbed jerk. On the other hand, the other four just think you're a jerk." 

Lagniappe. Separate ways...from Coach Drew Hanlen

Lagniappe 2. Jab step moves are core elements. Consider filming your moves.

Coaching Through Stories: Inspire by Doing

Inform basketball values through stories. Empower players through examples of your choice. Define values like commitment, courage, excellence, resilience, sacrifice, and toughness. 

Collect stories that embody those principles, realizing they may open doors for further study by our players. Here are a few of mine. We coach basketball and life. 

Some examples: 

Toughness. Women have completed the grueling Army Ranger School. 

Sacrifice. In "Made to Stick" the Heath Brothers share the power of stories. One example is Floyd Lee, a retired Army food specialist who returned to transform the Pegasus Chow Hall in Iraq into high quality dining for American troops. Lee explained that he wasn't in charge of dining but of morale. 

Achievement. Francis Perkins rose from humble circumstances to become America's first cabinet level appointee under President Franklin Roosevelt. As a young woman, she witnessed the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, where young women locked in a garment factory sweatshop died in a fire. As a reformer, she said, “I promise to use what brains I have to meet problems with intelligence and courage.” Perkins also helped promote laws to restrict child labor and establish a minimum wage. 

Resilience. Wilma Rudolph, one of 22 children, had childhood polio. Her doctor told her she would never walk again. She never believed him. At the 1960 Rome Olympics, she won three gold medals, including a world record in the 100 meters. 

The Power of Education. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was a Professor of Rhetoric and Language at Bowdoin College in Maine. He had no formal military training but served as a Union officer during the Civil War. He cobbled together forces from the Maine 2nd and 20th at the southern tip of Gettysburg and helped win a fierce bayonet counterattack at the Battle of Little Round Top with his men out of ammunition. He received Lee's sword at Appomattox and later was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor and. When asked how a Professor became a military strategist, he answered, "I can learn." 

Courage. Arlene Blum led the first all-women's expedition in 1978 to climb Annapurna, one of 14 Himalayan peaks above 8,000 meters. Two members of her group summited the mountain and two died during severe storms. Women have the capacity for boldness and adventurousness, experiencing the same fulfillment and tragedy as men. 

But she was also a scientist and helped author important work that led to removal of cancer causing chemicals from children's sleepwear and furniture.

 

Performing Under Pressure. Spencer Haywood had a tryout for a scholarship at the University of Detroit. At one point the coach offered him a scholarship if he could make fifteen consecutive free throws. Haywood did and the rest is history, including induction into the Professional Basketball Hall of Fame. 

Agent of Change. Malala Yousafzai was a ten-year-old girl in Pakistan when she became an activist for education for girls. Local government officials and some religious leaders fiercely opposed. She survived an assassination attempt and became a global advocate for girls education, winning a Nobel Peace Prize. 

No excuses. Kyle Maynard climbed Kilimanjaro...born with rudimentary arms and legs. 

"Focus on what you can do." 

Find stories that have meaning to you. 

Lagniappe. "Basketball is a game of creating and preventing separation." Find some change of direction/change of pace techniques within the video to adopt.

Lagniappe 2. Cross-screens are hard to defend, especially when leading to mismatches. Zak Boisvert shares another problem action, slipping the screen against defensive overreaction. 

Basketball Experiences for Which I'm Thankful

Happy Thanksgiving!

Basketball shares indelible memories. Thanksgiving is a good time to be grateful for ours.

I don't believe in the 'self-made person.' Family, coaches, mentors, and friends shape us. "Mentoring is the only shortcut to excellence." Be thankful for those who helped find canvas for us to paint on and who cleared our paths. 

The fourth question from Michael Useem's, The Leadership Moment is "what are the enduring lessons?" Sometimes losses are our best teachers within the competitive cauldron. Losses teach us humility, resilience, and sportsmanship. Celebrate wins and love our losses. 

For what basketball experiences am I most thankful?

1. Experiences with teammates. Remember bad teammates? I don't. Rose-colored glasses? Maybe. We were together, win or lose. It was a privilege to play with the  kids with whom I grew up. 

2. Coaches. The two coaches who had the biggest influence for me were Sonny Lane and Dick Kelley. They preached sacrifice, positivity, and improvement. I've stayed connected with Coach Lane and his wife for almost fifty years. 

3. Competition. Many readers competed at a much higher level. But it was a thrill to play in the Tech Tourney twice at "the Gahden" and watch my daughters play twice there. Beating the defending state champions in overtime still seems like a fairy tale. 

4. Coaching. I've coached a lot of great young ladies who will change the world for the better long after I'm gone. As Brad Stevens says, coaches get more than we give. 

5. Connection with fellow coaches. The coaching fraternity (including women coaches) is generous with their time and insights into basketball. I spent the most time coaching with Ralph Labella who invested countless hours throughout the year in helping players grow their basketball skill and knowledge. 

6. Community. Being a basketball parent and a basketball coach allowed me to meet many wonderful people in our community whom I would have otherwise never met. 

7. Collaboration. Phil Jackson says, "Basketball is sharing." As bad as the pandemic has been, it spawned the greatest imaginable sharing of basketball concepts and cooperation via the online community. Anyone who cares to enter the community has innumerable avenues for growth. 

8. Sam beat me. At Sam Jones's camp (1972), I won the free throw contest and lost to Sam as the reward. When they asked for a volunteer to go first, I was up like a rocket. I figured that if I made ten first, nobody would be able to handle the "sudden death" pressure to do that. Basketball teaches the value of applying and handling pressure. 

9. A player was graduating from our middle school program. I told her, "you're the best I've ever coached. You need a better coach to take you from here." She answered, "you're a great coach." And she became an All-Scholastic as a freshman because of her skill and will. 

10.Family ties. I watched my identical twin daughters grow through four years (90-6 record) of high school basketball. Bit players as freshmen, they played three years with future WNBA player Shey Peddy and grew into confident young women. 

Lagniappe. Use principles of play (structure, player and ball movement) to create space and time (from Chris Oliver). 

Zone or man this play would work to isolate a matchup in space in the high post area. pic.twitter.com/Sni5SjUNcX

— Chris Oliver (@BBallImmersion) November 25, 2021

Lagniappe 2 (Celtics simple BOB)

Lagniappe 3. Managing boundaries. Always keep boundaries in mind as a coach between coaching and exploitation. Here's an article that discusses some. There is no role for us to invoke challenges to ego integrity (worthless), religion or ethnicity, gender, and so forth. 

"Boundary violations harm the client through some form of exploitation – psychological, sexual, financial, or emotional – for example, asking clients to do personal work or errands, borrowing money from a client, inappropriate sexual touch and so on. In boundary violations the coach’s needs, wishes, and goals are placed ahead of the client’s."

Reason Why Good Coaches May Have Bad Records

Evaluating one's coaching skills presents a fool's errand. Ego distorts the calculus. Self-assessment is tough. We grade ourselves too harshly or too loosely. Goldilocks, anyone? 

A lot of factors go into winning... 

• Intent (is winning the primary goal versus development or fun?) 
• Talent (chicken soup from chicken feathers) 
• Schedule
• Coaching (prior coaching of your players, current assistants)
• Luck (continuum of skill and luck)
• Circumstances (more below)

Remember the 'fundamental attribution error' where we attribute behaviors or outcomes of other people to character and our behavior to circumstances. "In other words, you tend to cut yourself a break while holding others 100 percent accountable for their actions."

Intent. As a youth coach, develop skills, teamwork, and have fun. Nobody became elite by quitting the sport. When blessed to have that "great" player, give them 'more' but sacrifice no one on the altar of victory. 

Years ago as an assistant, we trailed by 17 at the half. The coach asked me to take over. We had a furious rally with everything from changing defenses to "offense-defense" substitution and tied it late. But I felt badly about unequal playing time and put the reserves in for overtime. "We made our point" and lost by two. 

Share life lessons, too. Coaching girls, I enjoy sharing anecdotes from history about great performances (e.g. the Battles of Chancellorsville, the heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain) and women's empowerment (e.g. Arlene Blum and the climb of Annapurna).

Talent/resources. Great talent makes smarter coaches. As Earl Weaver noted, "momentum lasts as long as the next day's starting pitcher." Great talent helps coaches compete even on an 'off day.' There's even a formula:

Achievement = Performance x Time 

Talent ups the average performance and leverages time. Lengthen the game if we have talent and shorten it when we don't. 

Lose players to illness, injury, or transfer and we might be toast. 

Schedule. If you're the fifth best poker player in the world, enjoy success. But if you're in a game with the top four, not so much. They'll eat you for lunch. There are exceptional programs from small communities that overachieve. That's why they're the exception. Steve Harrington's Watertown boys program has won multiple state titles playing as a small school in a competitive league.

Coaching. Past and present coaching matter, including assistants. The high school coach who schools players in fundamentals is an incredible resource for the college coach who gets her players. Bob Knight said that the game is 80 percent mental. Remember what was said about Bear Bryant, "he can take his'n and beat your'n or your'n and beat his'n." 

Luck. A continuum of luck and skill define results. WSOP champion Annie Duke elaborated on this in Thinking in Bets. When we flip a coin often enough, we'll see five or ten consecutive heads. 

Michael Mauboussin clarifies this in The Success Equation. Gatekeepers recognize this in everyday life. Twenty percent of Navy SEAL applicants fail the "psych test' and 98 percent of those fail the training. Ergo, you fail the screening test and they cut you from the program. 

Circumstances. Sometimes a team implodes for uncontrollable reasons. Personality conflicts matter. One college team fell apart because the straight and gay players couldn't coexist. A high school team melted down in the playoffs when one player "stole" another player's boyfriend before the playoffs. Our team lost focus from a parental death during the season. 

Reduce our self-judgment to creation (offense) and denial (defense) of opportunity. View execution separately. Even with limited talent, orient toward spacing, player and ball movement and shrinking space defensively. Low talent clubs need extra attention to finishing and practice should reflect that. 

The same considerations go into assessing another team. Lack of talent isn't an excuse for lack of planning and preparation to create and deny space and time. 

Return to the "Achievement" equation that it's about performance over time. Someone asked the great Amos Alonzo Stagg about his team. He said, "ask me in twenty years and I'll be able to tell you." 

Lagniappe. Skill limitations have great impact on decision making implications. 

Short roll passing depends on the skill of multiple passers and three point shooting. With younger players (middle school), long-range shooting is generally weak (ergo the proliferation of zone defenses). 

Lagniappe 2. Barkleyvision...never boring. 

Basketball, Hemingway, and the Six Word Urban Legend

"Brevity is the soul of wit."  - Shakespeare in Hamlet

Urban legend speaks of Ernest Hemingway's six word story, "For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn." Coach better, communicate better, briefly. 

Meet the challenge of brevity. Some approach art - Bill Belichick, Gregg Popovich, Jose Mourinho. 

Short phrases live through history and art: 

"Veni, vidi, vici." (I came, I saw, I conquered... Julius Caesar) 

"Bond, James Bond." 

"Call me Ishmael." - Moby Dick, Herman Melville

"Jesus wept." - John 11:35

"Anything is possible." - Kevin Garnett

Basketball teaches life.

"You play as you live." 

"You cannot hide on the court." 

"Success is a choice." - Rick Pitino

"We gave the game away."

"I'm pleased but I'm not satisfied." - Ellis "Sonny" Lane 

"Choose to be a great teammate." 

"We get what we accept." 

"What are we doing here?" - Bill Belichick

"It's how you play, not who." - Don Meyer

"Goodness gracious, sakes alive." - John Wooden oath

"You outrebounded a dead man by one." - Abe Lemons 

Lagniappe. "Live Your Life." 

Lagniappe 2. Be great at a few things. 

Lagniappe. What is your will for greatness? 

Basketball: The Unorthodox. What Is That?

I write every day for one reason...the Platonic wisdom. 

The world celebrates conventional wisdom. If an investment fund loses money on Amazon or Facebook stock (once IBM), "you buy the blue bloods, because everyone else is buying them." The manager assumes little 'career risk' by mainstream risk-taking.

What would that mean for basketball? For discussion sake, I eliminate 'stall ball' as we have a shot clock. "Switching everything" isn't unconventional in 2021. Unorthodox might mean unexpected or different, even minor wrinkles. If we had excellent individual defenders and cohesive team play, nothing is better than tight man defense. 

Here are a few possibilities. 

Defense: 

1. "Junk defenses." Enough teams use box-and-1 or triangle-and-two that we might call hybrid defenses simple variants. I believe in tailoring strategy to personnel versus 'system coaching' with recruiting or vertically-integrated programs (from youth to high school). 

Or consider aligning in a zone each time down and shifting into man-to-man.

2. "Unique defenses" - e.g. The Freak Shift between man and zone defenses or zone and zone defenses depending on your preference and experience. Young players can become easily confused even with clarity and simplicity.

Here's a link to a UNLV tome on the Amoeba defense. Years ago we played a middle school team averaging 63 points/game with the best player in the league who could penetrate and make threes. Using a hybrid defense to try to deny her the ball and double any drive with the other guard, we held the team to 45 and lost by 20 because we were offensively challenged. 

When "star players" don't "get theirs" they sometimes become frustrated, selfish, or play out of control. 

3a. Unexpected defense (e.g. trapping, trap and go (run and jump)). We've never had the luxury of much practice time to introduce alternatives. And do not major in the minors (devote the most time to what we do a lot). 

3b. Hack-a-Shaq. Do they do that in high school? 

Offense:

1. Back door cuts (cutting and screening combat tight defense). 

2. Slipped/ghost screens

3. Unusual screening or handoffs. This depends on the eye of the beholder. Staggered screens including Iverson actions, screen-the-screener, and even screen-the-roller (Spain action) aren't so unusual. 

Duke transforms horns into handoffs or isolation, a clever wrinkle. 

Sequential screens by 2 set up a big for an open layup or a mismatch on a switch. 

Elbow get action often out of horns is another action most teams don't see. Years ago our high school had a phenomenal pick-and-roll player who excelled at rejecting screens. 

Obviously, without talent to execute, "we can't run what we can't run." 

Lagniappe (something extra). Daily development idea. 

Note the magic of Durant and the "lateral float crossover." 

Lagniappe 2. Consider complex problems at your leisure. Four key Platonic ideas:

• Think more.
• "True love is admiration." (be more like those we admire)
• Decode the message of beauty (educate our souls).
• Reform society (what unifying themes belong - fulfillment, excellence?) "bad heroes give glamor to flaws of character" and he wanted a new breed of heroes who modeled goodness and kindness

Basketball: "I Have to Take You Out" and Reasons Why

Substitution is not punishment. Coaches aren't arbitrary; we want to put players and teams in a position to succeed. 

Success is impossible under a variety of conditions: 

1. Don't know your defensive/offensive assignment 

2. Don't get back in transition defense (subset of lack of effort)

3. Bad shot quality (ROB = range/rhythm, open, balanced)

4. Situationally inappropriate play (clock management, fouling)

5. Poor free throw shooter in obvious foul situation

6. Unaware of pick-and-roll or other coverage 

7. Can't contain the ball leading to help/rotation problems

8. Won't block out

Where might these arise? There's a method to mistakes and errors. The Big Four difference makers:

• Differential effective field goal percentage
• Net rebounding differential
• Turnovers (including 'shot turnovers')
• Free throw differential 

Another framework is violation of:

• Structure (spacing and location)
• Player and ball circulation (movement)
• Execution 

On offense, effective players create space and time, earning minutes. Strong defenders constrain space and time resulting in lower quality chances. When your play and decisions degrade or impair team function, "I have to take you out."

Lagniappe (something extra). Basketball rewards athletic explosion. Here's another example. 

Lagniappe 2. Ball control is no accident. "Every day is player development day." Separation creates time.