Teach a Man to Fish
With about ten minutes to go in the third quarter of the Thunder/ Pelicans game, Jalen Williams drove the left lane line, picked up his dribble due to traffic, and found three Pelican defenders staring at the ball. A prescient Josh Giddy ran a back cut from the corner which J-dub instinctively rewarded with an old-school bounce pass that Giddy kissed off the glass for two. And I immediately thought of Robert Montgomery Knight.
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In my first year as a head basketball coach, I taught my high schoolers to run motion offense. Continuity offenses, the ones that lived at the other end of the spectrum, never appealed much to me, perhaps because my ADD went haywire during the predictable patterns that were easy to learn and a yawner to practice. The Flex Offense was especially vogue at the time, but its back-and-forth and back-and-forth again reflexive action (hence its name) made me want to poke my eyeballs out. True motion, however, spoke directly to my heart. “Poetry! This is athletic poetry!” I thought when I watched it, long before I understood what it was or how it worked.
Then I began to study it and loved it even more.
If you want to learn how to do something, you look long and hard at whomever is currently doing whatever it is really well. The man who taught “poetry in motion” better than anybody on the planet was an intolerant giant who had a gift for saying things in a way that made you not forget. He could be found in Bloomington, Indiana wearing a red sweater and scowl, but he shared his “gospel” freely in clinics across the land. I attended every one I could get to. I ordered his videos. I bought his manuals. I immersed myself in the art of motion offense then transferred all I learned to the players on my teams. Teaching it was, is--and probably always will be—my favorite thing on Earth to do.
But nobody could teach the game James Naismith invented quite like Coach Bob Knight.
For him, everything made sense—the when, the why, the what, the how. He could take the game apart and put it back together as if it were a puzzle made for children under ten.
The first time I saw motion offense played, the dimension of it captivated me. Then once I learned what the guts looked like, I was hooked. The endless possibilities that grew with each twitch of every player on the floor kept the lid off perfection. You could keep getting better and better and better no matter how good you got because the extrapolations were only limited by the imagination of those reading and reacting in real time on the court. The rhythm, the delicate balance of screening and cutting, the spacing and timing that the offense was predicated on were fun (but hard) to teach and rewarding (but sometimes frustrating) to learn. Once you understood it though, the game switched to High Definition. You could see things in vivid detail you previously never even knew were there.
They say the great ones do that--they see things others don’t. That is certainly a character trait that could be ascribed to Bobby Knight. But I always felt like his gift was greater than what he saw. Where he excelled was in getting others to see it, too. And nowhere was that as evident as in how he taught his players to play on the offensive end.
Coach Knight believed that what you did when you didn’t have the ball in your hand was just as important, if not more so, than what you did with it when you had it. Purposeful movement was his sermon, selflessness and trust were the scripture and the verses, and discipline was the invitation song. Once teams were baptized in the system, they ran on autopilot. They didn’t need set plays to score. In the church of the General from West Point, advantages were created by players who understood how to play the game.
The first trip our Oklahoma team took to the NCAA tournament was in the spring of 2000. The March Madness bracket sent us to West Lafayette, Indiana for the first two rounds, where after winning game one, we found ourselves in a tussle in round two as we faced the Purdue Boilermakers, the defending National Champions, on their home floor. We trailed the entire game. Yet, in the final minutes, we found ourselves down one with possession of the ball. So I called time-out to draw up a play. Our team took the floor and ran it to perfection. Except it didn’t work.
So our All-American point guard, Stacey Dales, did what she knew how to do. She took the ball to the center of the floor so that it could see both sides. And what it saw was Laneisha Caufield, Stacey’s back-court teammate, being closely denied beyond the three point line high on the right wing. Stace took one hard dribble at Caufield, who took two steps toward the ball before planting her foot and cutting directly toward the rim. Dales led her with a bounce pass that she corralled and laid off the glass while being smacked by two desperate defenders. Whistles blew, Caufield went to the line where she promptly sank two freethrows, and we took our first lead of the game. When the final buzzer sounded shortly thereafter, we were headed to the Sweet 16.
Lots of coaches reached out in the weeks and months that followed that game, as ESPN had whipped around to the final minutes from all their various coverages across the map. Coaches wanted to get our “play.” Unfortunately, I had to tell them we didn’t have one. My guys made the play all by themselves.
They hadn’t needed me to hand them their dinner—they knew how to fish. That win belongs, in part, to Bobby Knight.
I had coach’s aphorisms all over my office and his teaching points appeared regularly as the “Thought of the Day” on our practice plan. On my credenza lived a post-it that said, “It’s not what you teach but what you emphasize.” We had, “Teams don’t get beat on help, they get beat on recovery” on a sign in our locker room lounge. And we talked regularly, as if on a contract, about fostering the will to prepare, as much as the will to win. I am not alone.
Bob Knight’s teachings are embedded in coaches everywhere, regardless of the innovative offenses they may run or the defensive wrinkles they’ve added to their systems over the years. When meticulous practices are being planned or every toe is behind the line, a hint of Coach is there--and will continue to be in the future, long after those in the trenches have forgotten from whom or where it came. And when Golden State zips the ball around like a hot potato, or the Celtics set a screen and second cut, or a high school squad from Lomego, Oklahoma runs the “give and go”, a portion of the credit goes to the stubborn genius who taught us how to play.