Slow down man, please…you’re going absolutely too fast. Don’t you see these people out here? Where are you trying to go…huh? C’mon now … you really need to slow your roll before you run over somebody. I know you know how to “drive.” I’m just saying, it’s much easier to negotiate “traffic” moving more s l o w l y.
Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger. It’s not just you, everybody seems to be in a hurry? I don’t quite get it. Yeh, yeh speed kills… in football maybe. In basketball going fast usually just kills your ability to be in control. Speed may be necessary sometimes, but mostly makes negotiating the terrain more difficult. Besides, going fast may not even get you there more quickly.
Let’s just say that speed is about how fast you can go. Quickness on the other hand is how efficiently you can get there. You don’t have to go fast to be quick. In fact , speed and quickness many times is based on the ability to stop fast, which makes you fastest in your shortest steps– relative to any opposition.
Basketball is one of the few sports in which the offense has the advantage. Unfortunately, many players and teams give theirs away with poor technique and a flawed offensive approach. One of the keys to offensive manipulation is the right to move first. This gives the offensive player the ability to deceive or control opponents with intentions or false intentions to go places or do things. If all of our movements are in frames – as in motion pictures – and we can learn to control our movement in each frame, then we should then be able to mislead and manipulate opponents with our intentions in early frames of movement. It is extremely difficult to predict anyone’s start, stoppage or change of movement. Furthermore, the defender must match the rate of the proposed movement in those early frames or risk being moved past. Therefore, we can control our opponents by proposing an action and being continuously contrary to their responses. Given the typical controlled rate of a Virtual Player’s movement, it becomes easy to make necessary changes to exploit or maintain advantage.
-The Virtual Game of Basketball-
It’s no coincidence that the best players not only play slow, but seem to slow the game down as well.
TBL: You don’t need speed to succeed. Act like you know and go slow…er!
Slow doesn’t mean SLOW…it means SLOOWER, at least enough to stop ANYTIME after you start your motion forward. For starters, effective use of the push (back) and control (front) foot is essential. I talk in greater detail about that in “Foot Control is Quite the Feet” (Article 2), “We Can Build You” and “Can You Handle It” in the book- “The Virtual Game of Basketball”
