Basketball: Leverage the Information Revolution

"Think better" doesn't mean "think like I do." It means develop a system of thinking that improves our "editing" capacity for basketball and more.

Thinking offers a chance to think better. Warren Buffett says about investing ideas, "there will always be another train." 

Do you have to read books to think better? History says no as Gutenberg invented the printing press in the early 1400s and prior to that books were hand written. But reading helps stimulate thinking. Here are some suggestions:

1) Basketball Beyond Paper We're still in the early innings of translating action into better player and team development. Dean Oliver and others have shown that deeper analysis improves outcomes. Mike D'Antoni, Daryl Morey, Joe Mazzulla and others transform 'analytics' into better results. 

2) Making Decisions Ed Smith helped edit British cricket blending data and human experience. Having more data doesn't guarantee high performance. How do we apply data in roster selection, strategy development, and making decisions? 

3) Moneyball Everyone knows how the late Billy Beane helped put Michael Lewis's work on the sports map. "If he's such a good hitter, why doesn't he hit better?" Teams don't buy players, they buy runs. 

4) Game Changer: The Art of Sports Science Human Performance expert Dr. Fergus Connolly shares ideas about unlocking higher performance. He advocates making every action impact winning. 

Embedded within the analysis are:

• Skill (technique)
• Strategy (tactics)
• Physicality (strength, conditioning, recovery, etc)
• Psychology (resilience, toughness)

5) The Leadership Moment  Michael Useem explores case studies where transformative leadership made all the difference, life and death. In the introduction, four questions sear into our collective consciousness:

• What went well?
• What went badly?
• What can we do differently next time? 
• What are the enduring lessons? 

Do we (as coaches and players) embrace the full power of finding and correcting mistakes? Do we cling to mistakes (sunk cost fallacy) and bias (e.g. confirmation bias), hardening both correct and flawed thinking? 

6) Think Again  Professor Adam Grant examines why change is hard and asks us to create a "rethinking scorecard'. 

"“You must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool,” said Richard Feynman, Nobel-winning physicist. Laureates of another kind—David Dunning and Justin Kruger, winners of the 2000 Ig Nobel prize—backed this truism with data, showing that we are particularly prone to fooling ourselves when we know just enough to be dangerous, which partly explains why mortality rates spike every summer as fresh residents take up the mantle of medicine."

Lagniappe. What words are the most dangerous to society and sport? "This time is different." 

Lagniappe 2. Thinking better begins with thinking. How many times have we heard, "I don't have time to think." Repeated errors are often the most costly. Think concretely at a saying, "haste makes waste." Rushing into something often turns out badly. 

Lagniappe 3. Study video.