The Art of Competition

A Digital Zine of Sports, Hero Worship and Poetry.

Jeremy Lin and The Art of Turnovers

As a basketball coach, I love seeing my point guard make turnovers.

But only the right kind of turnovers. There are basically two types. Passive turnovers and Aggressive turnovers. Passive turnovers are the result of hesitation, uncertainty and fear. Aggressive turnovers are the result of fearlessness, confidence and superior effort.

I love point guards who make Aggressive turnovers. I’ve played on a lot of basketball teams, but only a few of those teams had point guards who were willing to make Aggressive turnovers. Those teams achieved the best results. Many point guards try to minimize their mistakes by dribbling too much, keeping their head down and refusing to drive into the lane for fear of losing the ball. A tentative point guard like this will only occasionally make things happen for his team.

When you have an aggressive point guard on your team, you know you will get the ball more often. Aggressive point guards are unpredictable. They have no set patterns. It makes them unpredictable to both teams and even to themselves. Point guards like Jeremy Lin are agents of chaos. All they know is they need to drive to the hoop, RIGHT NOW. They can’t anticipate what will happen, because they simply go for it. As Jeremy Lin gets better at knowing how his teammates respond to his madness, his turnovers will go down.

Jeremy Lin has introduced a new play style to the New York Knicks. So far the results have been great. He will fail if he ever becomes embarrassed about making turnovers. If he continues to play with reckless abandon, he won’t care about the turnovers and he will continue to have the loose and unpredictable game that his led to his early, supernova success.

I’m guessing coach Mike D’Antoni is a major advocate of these aggressive turnovers. You still see Steve Nash making these kinds of errors on occasion. I don’t see them as errors. It’s damn hard to find a point guard willing to risk the personal embarrassment of committing high profile turnovers. The net effect of these type of turnovers is extremely positive. It has awakened a stagnant team and offense. It has captured the imagination of a city and league. 

I hope Jeremy Lin is continued to be given the green light to fail spectacularly on a play by play basis. There is nothing failing about the Jeremy Lin era so far.

  1. pok-eman reblogged this from theartofcompetition and added:
    wow such a good read #Linsanity is the real deal guys D’Antoni thankyou
  2. banpenfugyo reblogged this from theartofcompetition
  3. theartofcompetition posted this