Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* The two GSW splash brothers, Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson:

1. Their fathers were both relatively lighter skinned black men who themselves played in the NBA, Dell Curry and Mychal Thompson

2. They were both married to lighter than themselves wives who both played volleyball in college, a very light skinned black woman, and a white woman, respectively

3. Because the two splash brothers are from two parent households and their mothers were lighter than they, and not some dark skinned proto-thug from a single BT-1000 mother household, black people don’t think Curry or Thompson are “real.” Viz: ESPN, The Undefeated.

* I think Curry’s long bombs will have a greater impact than Kareem’s sky hook because Curry isn’t doing anything fundamentally different than what everyone else does — he’s just doing it better, from farther away. A bunch of kids are going to start shooting like that, and (unlike before) their coaches won’t bench them, and a few will really be able to do it. So you’ll have lots of Steph Currys, instead of just one, and maybe even a Super-Curry.

People who think Curry couldn’t have succeeded w/out rule changes really don’t need to be lecturing anyone else on their knowledge of basketball. Partly because of his delicate features and skin color, there’s a perception that Curry is a fragile little waif. Not so. And because he’s got a great drive to the basket and can hoist up accurate shots instantly from way out, you have to defend more of the court against than you do against anyone else. He would have been a star in any era, and a monster star in any era with a three-point line.

* Curry’s benefited from the fact that the NBA finally clamped down on hacking/fouling after letting it run wild in the 1990s (which put a lot thuggish streetball players in the NBA, to detrimental PR results) and less so in the 2000s, but still there.

If this were 1995 or 98, Curry would be getting heavily bruised every night by some shadowing defender, which would hamper his accuracy and force him to get a wee bit closer (after juking a defender who was out for blood).

In contrast, the 1990s saw the re-emergence of the towering center becoming dominant (Shag, Olajuwon, Alonzo Mourning) and big muscular smaller guys (steroid-enhanced, of course, which explains a lot of the over-the-top aggression) who could take the hacking and fouling and dish it out better.

The three-point line was of course invented to bring the smaller (and whiter) dudes back into the game, allowing them to avoid being blocked closer to the basket and rewarding skill over brute athleticism.

* I think it’s a revolutionary advance in how basketball is played.

I suspect their remarkable technical revolution in long distance shooting is the result of genes (obviously), but also because they avoided the “inner city” style of hoops, dunking, in addition to the “suburban style,” i.e. pass it around a lot and don’t even think of shooting from anywhere beyond the very edge of the three point line and only if you’re wide open.

If you can throw in three out of five three-pointers, while your opponent throws in three out of five non-three-pointers, you win 9 to 6! And if you can foul the opponent on a couple of those forays and they miss a foul shot, it’s 9 to 5… a blowout!

I don’t watch much NBA basketball these days, but this is more or less what happened when Oklahoma City collapsed against Golden State: OKC would grind and grind and occasionally get a two-point basket and sometimes get to the foul line. And then one of the Warrior’s Terrible Twosome would fling the ball into the net from 3 feet beyond the arc.

* Working like she has done over years doesn’t just change the muscles; it changes the skeleton from what it would have been otherwise. (There have been studies of the evolution of bone mass in pitchers’ arms; the bones in the pitching arm become big and heavy; after retirement they lose some mass but retain volume, as I recall.) There are limits, of course, especially in achieving elite levels of ability, but the shape of our bones is shaped by how we use them.

* Rodman would watch film of individual players to scout how their shots tended to bounce off the rim. He had a whole package of things he did to rebound, like tipping the ball to himself, and he was tall, had a quick bounce and extreme laterally quickness. I’ll take lateral quickness and lose several inches over very tall and sluggish. Rodman over just about anyone over 7 feet.

* The skyhook took finesse. Today’s players have never heard of finesse inside the 3-point line; it’s all about lowering your shoulder and shoving. The skyhook’s not a shot that’s likely to succeed when defenders are allowed to hack at you and most fouls don’t get called.

* It’s like how Rick Barry set the all-time record for career free-throw percentage by shooting underhanded but since then nobody has tried to copy him.

* The NBA has made a lot of changes since the 1990′s and since the Pistons/Pacers brawl in 2004 to make the game more friendly to offensive players like Curry and he benefits greatly from that as have other players like Kevin Durant. He wouldn’t be putting up those numbers if he played in the 80′s or 90′s.

One thing I’ve noticed watching Curry and Klay Thompson over the past few weeks is how high they keep the ball after catching it, especially Thompson. This helps them get their shot off a lot quicker. The fact that they are so accurate while shooting so quickly is really impressive. Most great outside shooters have always been set shooters like Curry’s dad Dell.

* Most big guys today are mostly relegated to finishes off the pick-and-roll, and putbacks on offensive boards. The day of the center as post player is over, or at least in hibernation, as sophisticated double-teams and semi-zone defenses disrupt entry passes and tangle up the big guys before they have a chance to put a post move on. Also, three points is so much better than two . . . .

I think the development of Kareem’s sky hook may also have benefited from the NCAA rules when he was at UCLA, i.e. no dunking meant that even a point-blank finish had to be via a ‘finesse’ layup or finger roll, so taking the slightly-less-certain but much-easier-to-launch and difficult to block sky hook made lots of sense.

* “[The skyhook] might be the most awesome weapon in the history of any sport.” –Pat Riley

* The legalization of zone defense has significantly weakened post play for sure. Someone like LeBron who has both the physical strength to win 1v1 and the passing skill to exploit zones/double teams can still be effective, but a big man who’s a mediocre passer isn’t going to be able to dominate nowadays even though the league’s gotten smaller. Also a big man who can’t stay in front of a guard on a pick-and-roll is a defensive liability against modern offenses, even if he’s strong offensively. An athletic 6’9″-6’10″ big who can both move defensively and shoot is generally more valuable than a slow-footed 7-footer who needs to be near the rim, though such players are still around and can be useful, but they’re far less prominent.

* I remember Bjorn Borg had a hellacious topspin on his forehand. More than any other player, ever. The way he managed to do this was to hold the racket by the underside of the handle, instead of the side of the handle like everybody else. He said he acquired this strange way of holding a racquet because it’s the same way he held his hockey stick, before he ever picked up a racquet. An added benefit was he didn’t have to change his grip for his backhand. His dad, who was his early coach, never corrected him, because the kid’s topspin was so hellacious from the get go, he let it slide, and Bjorn perfected it.

When I read about it, I tried holding the racquet that way for about a week. It DID give me a helluva topspin, but I couldn’t get control of it to be consistent, and didn’t want to change my “way of life” to accommodate mastering it, especially since there was no guarantee that I ever could.

I didn’t want to spend a couple of years on it, discover it didn’t work for me, and consequently fuck up my whole game.

I suspect most people who acquire a unique way of reaching an athletic goal come about it the same way: spontaneously, subjectively, haphazardly, and that’s hard for onlookers to duplicate.

* Another interesting example is Jerry West’s effective jump shot. Despite being the logo of the NBA, West’s mid range jumper is a lost art. It’s as dead as the hook-shot.

* Re Kareem, he is obviously quite intelligent. Although basketball has its share of high-talent low-IQ stars (Shawn Kemp, Antoine Walker) a lot of the very best basketball players are noticeably intelligent. Magic Johnson built himself a small business empire. Michael Jordan is doing OK running a team. Lebron James has managed his business career extraordinarily well (on the path to becoming a billionaire) and has even leveraged his stardom into a successful sports management business featuring his high school buddies — something I thought would be a disaster but has been shrewdly done. David Robinson has a BA in mathematics and has been very successful in his post-basketball career. etc.

* I once made up a list of the top ten basketball centers of all time, and only Moses Malone would appear to clearly have a 2 digit IQ.

* First, Curry’s phenomenally accurate from long distance, so he’s definitely ‘one of the best’ in terms of three-point accuracy. But there have been plenty of very accurate shooters in the NBA with impressive range, from Larry Bird and Mark Price to Reggie Miller and Ray Allen to Kyle Korver and Klay Thompson.

Second, it’s the speed of his shot release that may be the innovation — there have been lots of very accurate three-point shooters, but I’ve never seen one who got rid of the ball as quickly as Curry. Watch his shots vs Klay Thompson’s. Thompson got a classic, conventional set-up and shooting motion that seems to take just that bit longer to wind up and release than Curry’s.

Third, players such as Curry and Thompson had to be granted the blessing of their coaches to launch seemingly-reckless long-range bombs with total impunity. The shots Curry takes routinely now, especially in high-stakes game situations, would have had his ass on the bench in seconds in past years. I think this is one reason it took Curry a while to emerge as a superstar — he had to be given utterly free rein to become what he is, and that’s a big step in terms of coaching.

* Does anybody else imitate Nowitzki’s wrong-footed jump shot that’s pretty much impossible to block?

* Curry’s speed of release of the basketball is like Dan Marino’s throwing a football: Marino would be standing there and suddenly his left arm would come straight up to his helmet and the ball would rocket 40 yards downfield. I don’t think Marino has been all that influential on how quarterback is played simply because nobody can imitate him. You could tell your son to study Peyton Manning to figure out all his many tricks for maximizing his output from his physical abilities, but you couldn’t tell him to release the ball like Marino.

* Curry’s release is so fast it’s sometimes quite hard to see his hands squaring up and launching the ball, and he often has either no follow-through at all, or else a weird exaggerated one that looks off-balance. He only sometimes seems to have the classic ‘goose-neck’ follow-through coaches were always harping on us about when I played high school hoops.

* Although basketball has its share of high-talent low-IQ stars (Shawn Kemp, Antoine Walker)…

* Please add Allen Iverson to that list. His older son had to be placed in behavioral treatment facilities so apparently there is a genetic problem. Larry Johnson is bankrupt and has nine children. Derrick Rose had to cheat on the SAT and get his grades changed to be eligible to play in college.

The average SAT score for college football players is higher than college basketball players because football has a higher percentage of whites. Basketball players are less aggressive and animalistic, better social skills and speaking ability.

Jamal Mashburn has a huge fast food empire. Shaquille Oneal skipped the first grade and has a doctorate in education. Apparently Shaq has never touched a dime of his basketball earnings and lived off of his endorsement money, or vice-versa. Shaq’s son Shareef is a high school player and sounds intelligent in interviews.

David Robinson’s son was a national merit scholar and is on the Notre Dame football team. One of Kareem’s sons is a cardiologist and yoga instructor.

* And Marino is still the best quarterback of all time. Sportswriters can argue about stats or, absurdly, championships but you can just listen to the people who played against him.

Rod Woodson went apoplectic on some TV broadcast counting down the top players of all time when Marino was announced with other qbs still on the board. His response was something like, “WHAT? come on, man. Get out of here. Dan Marino is the greatest. This is nonsense. I played against Elway, Manning, Brady…please. Theyre fine but they can’t touch Marino”

Darrell green said a receiver could be short, fat and slow but if he even had average hands Marino would torch you.

Bill Walsh said Montana was a good QB in a system but that Marino WAS the system.

A defensive coordinator said something like it probably wouldn’t matter if you had an offensive line. If a center could hike him the ball hed still get the ball where he wanted.

The man could not run to save his life but he was harder to sack than Elway, Montana, Young, etc. because he was fearless and had that release.

As for techniques, Terry Bradshaw held the ball at a different spot than almost everyone, I think, and he had a cannon. It’s hard to say if people are outliers or if coaching is just prone to groupthink. These days white quarterbacks are likely to be guys with rich dads from Orange county or wherever who can afford to send their kids to private coaches who all teach the “right” technique.

* I’ve always wondered about Dennis Rodman’s ability to anticipate where a missed shot would bounce to off the rim. Is that something that could be taught to young players, or is it just a knack that Rodman had? When I played basketball, it was always a huge surprise to me which way the rebound would bounce.

My impression is that other guys weren’t as 100% clueless as me. For example, since the Rice basketball team never came close to making the NCAA tournament, I used to watch tournament games with a Rice basketball forward named Dave who had a hilarious talent of being able to predict missed freethrows just as they left the shooter’s fingertips. If he’d say “brick” as the free throw was released, 98% of the time the free throw would then clang off the rim. This was a watching a fuzzy 1977 19″ TV.

I suspect Rodman could have predicted where the rebound would bounce to.

Some of Rodman’s skills were due to him not bothering about some normal basketball duties like shooting the ball. But, still, he remains one of the more uncanny athletes of my lifetime.

* Dave Bing, who led the NBA in scoring one year despite being blind in one eye, made a post NBA fortune owning a mini-mill steel company. His term as mayor of Detroit wasn’t very successful, but that seemed like something he took on out of noblesse oblige.

* Curry is possible, like Nash before him, because of the changes in rules and resultant spacing. The hand-check was fully banned in 2004, just as Nash became the league’s MVP; before that, he was a lame version of Mark Price.

The NBA used to be dominated by bigs. This was even the case when Jordan was at his height — the other top players in the 90s were Malone, Olajuwon, Barkley, etc.

Today the NBA is much more of a finesse game. There’s less power and arguably less athleticism than 20 years ago. This is by design.

The days of defensive slugfests in the mid-80s as ppg standard are over. Not because the players have improved, but because the rules have fundamentally changed and softened the game. What used to be a physical, often ugly battle — the playoffs — now looks more like an 80s all-star game. Curry and the rest are given huge amounts of space to operate and go where they want; thus they’re often given favorable looks from deep, rather than bounded for 90 ft.

* At the 2012 Olympics, somebody took silhouette photos of athletes by sport, and, holy cow, are they a weird looking bunch. By this point, at the Olympic level, everybody is bizarrely perfectly shaped for their sport.

The only guys who look like Michelangelo’s David anymore are the decathletes and pole vaulters. The female pole vaulters are extremely good looking women as well. I was skeptical about women’s pole vaulting 20 years ago, but it’s hard to argue with the results: women pole vaulters are as good looking women as men pole vaulters are good looking men.

If I were in the personal trainer business, I would open a pole vaulting training business in Hollywood for starlets.

* Everyone, including both his fans and detractors, agrees that Duke’s Coach K’s greatest talent is psychological mastery.

He gets players to run through a brick wall for him, as JJ Redick says. Hilariously, rival UNC fans also acknowledge this is true while vacillating between jealousy (“coach k would never have lost with our talent”) and condescension (Dean Smith wrote a book called “Multiple offenses and Defenses” and used stats like points per possession before the moneyball era; coach k writes “leadership” books for the group Sailer describes as airport bookstore business guys)

This approach also leads to other virtues in that coach k is highly adaptable rather than intellectually ideological. To quote JJ redick again, K just wants to know who his “horses” are and he’ll figure out the basketball xs and os from there.

Someone like Roy Williams, a poor copy of Dean Smith, will just run Carolinas system. When the pieces fit, hes good. When the pieces don’t fit the system, he suffers.

Obviously, Coach K has been the perfect coach for our Olympic team. He knows his job isn’t to enforce some basketball system on reluctant prima donnas (like Carolina’s Larry Brown, whom everyone agrees is a basketball genius who also ruined our national team).

No. When you have the best players in the world your job is to get them to play nice.

* Basketball is an interesting case because its extremely athletically demanding (probably has the highest all-around athletic demands of any of the major sports, football has higher athletic demands for specific skills but it is relatively specialized compared to basketball) but also quite cognitively complex. A lot of the cognitive demands are improvisational but given the complexity of modern defenses there is a lot of self-conscious awareness required — and that becomes especially true for stars where the other team is specifically game planning to take away your strengths. To reach the very top level stars also have to strategize their own development, e.g. adding additional skills in the off season and the like. So the NBA has both athletic freaks with intellectual/self-discipline issues and others who combine fine athletic skills with a lot of intelligence and self-discipline. The very greatest players of all time have tended to have both characteristics. It seems like it’s rare to reach truly historic levels of achievement in the sport without having something on the ball mentally.

It blows my mind how people continually underestimate Lebron. Maybe after he reaches his tenth Finals in a row at the age of 35 people will give him some credit. Lacking fundamentals is a laugh — have you noticed that he is one of the best defensive players of all time, has more assists than any other forward in history, etc.?