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Monday, December 15, 2025

Basketball - Applying Principles of "Unrestricted Warfare" to Sport

Sport is not war. The stakes are not life and death. But we can learn from how people think about advantage. There's much to unpack. 

In 1999, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui wrote Unrestricted Warfare, a treatise on how weaker powers might confront military superiority. Their “first principle” is blunt: in modern conflict, anything goes - legal, economic, cyber, disinformation, social, and other tools blend together to create advantage.

Through a sports lens, that idea of “unrestricted” competition is unsettling and instructive. 

Unrestricted doesn’t mean anything is acceptable. It means the toolkit keeps expanding, and we must choose our boundaries.

The Dark Arts: Advantage Becomes Manipulation

History is full of “unconventional tactics” that push - or blow past -the line:

  • Overheated visitor locker rooms in the old Boston Garden

  • “Deflategate”

  • Sign stealing in baseball and football

  • Convenient “malfunctions” of visiting team electronics

  • Attempts to pilfer playbooks

  • Fire alarms going off at visiting team hotels

  • “Honeytraps” or gold-digging aimed at professional athletes

  • Gambling enticements or allegations

All of these share a theme: trying to win by damaging the opponent rather than developing yourself. That may be “unrestricted,” but it is not who we want to be.

Contemporary Basketball: Legal and “Alternative” Levers

Fast forward to modern basketball and you get a broader, more complex environment. Some levers are rules-based and transparent; others live near the edge.

1. Rules-Based Edges

Coaches have long searched for tactical loopholes:

  • “Take fouls” to stop transition (now restricted in the NBA).

  • “Hack-a-Shaq” away-from-the-play fouling to exploit poor free throw shooters (limited in the final two minutes of NBA quarters).

These are examples of using the rulebook like a chessboard, until the league adjusts.

2. Financial Arms Race

Money has become a primary battlefield:

  • Tiered penalties and luxury taxes discourage building “superteams” with unlimited spending.

  • NIL payments in college sports now resemble free agency. Top players sign seven-figure deals; elite prospects can secure multi-million-dollar packages before playing a college minute.

  • Under recent legal settlements, schools can directly pay athletes from a capped pool that starts in the tens of millions per year and can grow over time.

  • Schools without big football footprints can redirect more of that pool to basketball, creating new recruiting centers of gravity (see St. John's in 2025).

  • Coaching salaries escalate in parallel. Witness the coaching arms race to attract, retain, and develop talent.

The result: some programs compete less on schemes and more on checkbooks.

3. Strategic and Analytical

Many organizations now treat analytics as a full department:

  • Analytics staffs dissect lineups, actions, and matchups to find hidden edges.

  • The “descendants” of Bill James and Moneyball have moved from baseball into basketball, football, and beyond.

  • The best programs blend data with coaching wisdom, not data instead of coaching.

4. Technological

Technology is the most visible - and often most ethically acceptable  frontier.

  • The Gun and other shooting machines have boosted rep volume and charting since the late 1990s.

  • IntelliGym adapts cognitive training first developed for Israeli Air Force pilots into a “video-game” tool for decision-making and court awareness.

  • Noah uses overhead sensors and cameras to track arc, depth, and left-right miss on every shot, building a database for shot quality and consistency. Many NBA, WNBA, NCAA, and high school programs rely on it as a feedback system.

  • Team tracking systems (Second Spectrum, SportVU, Synergy, and others) record players and the ball in multiple dimensions, tagging actions and play types to study efficiency and outcomes. Spacing, cutting, closeouts, ball screens, defensive rotations - everything becomes data.

Used well, these tools reinforce a simple idea: technology should sharpen fundamentals, not replace them.

5. Sensory and Mental Experience

The frontier roars past conventional boundaries. 

  • The Golden State Warriors have used sensory deprivation (float) pods to help players unplug and recover mentally. Steph Curry is often mentioned as a regular user.

  • Mindfulness training has become mainstream, with Phil Jackson an early advocate and players like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James using meditation and breathing as part of their routines.

  • Some media and rumor circles mention microdosing of mind-altering agents like psilocybin, claiming reduced anxiety or better focus. Evidence is limited, legal status is complicated, and health risks are not fully understood. This is a line credible programs should treat with extreme caution.

The message to athletes: we can and should train the mind - but through safe, legal, and ethical methods: mindfulness, breathing, visualization, reflection, and quality rest.

What Does This Mean?

We live in an era of “unrestricted” competition. Almost anything that is not explicitly banned will be tried somewhere by someone.

But for our program, the question is not, “What can we get away with?”
It is, “What kind of edge can we build that we’re proud of?”

We choose to compete in the quadrant that is:

  • Legal

  • Ethical

  • Healthy

That means:

  • Master the rules, don't bend them to the breaking point.

  • Do our homework on analytics and tech, don't chase every gimmick.

  • Invest in strength, conditioning, sleep, nutrition, and recovery.

  • Build mental skills with mindfulness, visualization, and honest reflection and relationships. 

  • Refuse shortcuts that rely on cheating, manipulation, or risky substances.

Unrestricted thinking helps us see the full battlefield. Our values decide which weapons we pick up - and which we leave on the ground.

Lagniappe. Love Horns? Find a couple to exploit. 






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