March 20, 2007
Another Look At Race And Basketball
In my column reviewing the weekend NCAA Tournament games, I wrote a short piece about Tyler Hansbrough's athleticism and included a final line wondering if he would be viewed differently if he were black. Obviously, that's the sort of topic that's not best handled by a single throwaway line, but I didn't have time to go into it more.
Fortunately, Chad Orzel of the Uncertain Principles blog read what I wrote and expanded on it nicely.
As most anyone who watches much sports knows, there tends to be a bias in how white and black athletes are described. Let's ignore the "truth" about how athletic various players really are or aren't - white athletes tend to get credit for hustle, hard work, attitude and smart play while black athletes are noted for their sheer athleticism and skill. In many cases, these descriptions are appropriate and in many cases they are not. This kind of analysis is laziness in the form of easy stereotyping. You see the same thing when an athlete reminds the announcer of some similar athlete who is invariably of the same race.
As for Hansbrough, I'll admit that I haven't always thought of him as athletic. Sure, he's no Will Bowers, but I wouldn't compare him to Sean Williams or even Josh McRoberts either. That's partly why I was surprised to realize that his brother and father both have accomplished things that do require supreme athleticism. Maybe Hansbrough isn't just a hard worker or "the toughest basketball player in America" but is also a superior athlete. I mean, Jason Cain plays pretty hard and he's fairly athletic as well, but he's nowhere near the player Hansbrough is.
I think Tyler actually is a superior athlete, but he's just one of those guys who's not very fluid. He's jerky and angular, but surprisingly athletic. We've probably all had friends like that or at least played against that guy at the gym. He looks goofy and runs funny, but damn if he doesn't keep scoring on you or hitting jumpers from 20 feet. I ran track with a guy like that in college. He looked and acted like a big dork. He kind of loped when he walked and looked like he was trying too hard when he ran. But the dude could long jump 23 feet (you try that some time) and was a hell of a dunker at just about 6 feet tall. And yes, he was white.
It just goes to show - you never really know until you watch what someone can and can't do. The color of their skin or the smoothness of their gait doesn't tell you the whole story.
Comments
(2) by william on 03/19/2007 02:28 pm
With respect to Hansbrough, maybe he will have to be more of a Larry Bird type with all the bigs in the NBA, but I think I have seen something in his game that is overlooked, but that he is better at than any other inside player I have ever seen.
Watch him on the inside when he shoots and watch how he uses that angles to score. Maybe it is due to superior vision or hand-eye coordination, but he seems to make more of what I will call "impure" shots than anyone else.
A pure shot is either intended to go in from straight on or is based upon a clear and easy banking angle. Hansbrough makes many of these of course, but he also nails a lot of shots which seem to bank in from very strange angles (acute?) or that seem to rim in from the back rim. After two years of doing this, it seems clear that it is not just luck. He seems to understand the geometry of making shots to a degree far greater than any other player. Compare him to B. Wright, who seems to either swish, dunk or miss.
Strangely enough, to me anyway, the Tar Heels also have a second player with a shooting style on the inside somewhat similar to Hansbrough and it is Ty Lawson. It often looks like he has a bad angle on those shots where he goes by everyone in the lane, but somehow they seem to almost always go in from a weird place on the backboard. We don't really know everything about how the human mind calculates the geometry of making shots (Shaq's mind just can't grasp the notion of arc), but it seems apparent that some players can really analyze the angles and make shots that other players would not be able to make.
(3) by Dave on 03/19/2007 02:52 pm
william wrote:
Strangely enough, to me anyway, the Tar Heels also have a second player with a shooting style on the inside somewhat similar to Hansbrough and it is Ty Lawson. It often looks like he has a bad angle on those shots where he goes by everyone in the lane, but somehow they seem to almost always go in from a weird place on the backboard. We don't really know everything about how the human mind calculates the geometry of making shots (Shaq's mind just can't grasp the notion of arc), but it seems apparent that some players can really analyze the angles and make shots that other players would not be able to make.
That reminds me of one aspect of basketball that you rarely hear anyone make mention of - the difficulty of many "layups." Guards frequently penetrate and have to throw up high arcing shots off of their fingertips that spin off an odd spot on the backboard and yet go in. Quite often, they do this with their off hand. Those shots always amaze me and yet usually the announcers gush at the quickness of the drive.
(4) by william on 03/19/2007 06:49 pm
Good point. I can remember a few games where announcers have said a team lost because they missed a "lay-up" but the shot in question was highly contested and not an easy one at all.
(5) by orzelc on 03/20/2007 09:49 am
Here's a manual TrackBack to my comments on the Hansbrough stuff. Because, well, I need stuff to post on my own blog...
(6) by orzelc on 03/20/2007 10:27 am
A couple of notes on the conference rating stuff: It really doesn't make sense to talk about absolute numbers of wins and losses when comparing conferences-- you need to take the seeds into account. There's a big difference, for example, between Georgia Tech losing in the first round as a ten seed, and Duke losing as a six seed. Duke was supposed to win that game, while Tech was not, and any attempt at comparisons between leagues ought to take that into account.
The way to do the comparison is to count up the number of games each team is expected to win, and compare the actual total to that. So, UNC as a #1 is expected to win four games, Maryland as a #4 is expected to win two, Duke as a #6 one, and Tech as a #10 none.
If you do this for various leagues, you find the following:
Conf. Expected Actual
ACC 9 (7) 6
PAC-10 7 (6) 6
Big 10 9 (6) 6
Big East 8 (7) 5
SEC 8 (6) 8
(The number in parentheses is how many they would be expected to win at this point-- that is, two of Carolina's expected wins haven't happened yet, so they shouldn't really be counted)
What does this tell you? Well, not much. None of the power conferences have really dramatically underperformed to this point. The SEC is doing better than expected (at the expense of the PAC-10 and ACC), but they're all within two games of where you'd expect them to be.
(7) by Dave on 03/20/2007 10:59 am
orzelc wrote:
Here's a manual TrackBack to my comments on the Hansbrough stuff. Because, well, I need stuff to post on my own blog...
I actually just finished reading your piece (before I saw this ping) and am planning on posting about (to complete the circle. Then you can post about my post about your post about my post.)
(8) by william on 03/20/2007 11:51 am
Thanks for the mention, ozelc, I have bookmarked your site and also sent the page to Adam Lucas, who is the media and press relations director for the Heels and does a fantastic job.
Maybe slightly on a different point, comes the issue for many whites as to whether it is moral to root more for a team that has more whites, maybe like the Celtics back in the 1980's or Duke currently.
Honestly, when I watch UNC I don't really see color. I had to stop and think as to whether Carolina had any white players among its rotation in 2005--I don't think it did--and it honestly didn't matter to me.
At the same time, I think we can take pleasure in Tyler's success for a reason articulated by Michael Wilbon, the black columnist for the Washington Post. He has noted that many of the excellent white players in the NBA of late, come from other countries and stated that after talking to parents of talented white athletes, that many of the American parents had convinced their children to focus on sports besides basketball, because they didn't think that their children could compete on an equal footing. The Spaniards, Germans and Eastern European players don't seem to have the same hang-up and do fine.
Perhaps Tyler and players like him can inspire more young people to play this great game of basketball. There has been a lot of newfound love for Pete Maravich lately with two biographies about him out.
It really makes me think back to how underappreciated he really was. In some ways, he was the Eminem or Tiger Woods of basketball (although Tiger is half-Asian, arguably a contributing background to his success hardly analyzed by anyone--too hot to touch?), meaning that Pete was the most skilled player in the history of basketball and white, a somewhat anomolous situation.
The rub on Maravich was that "he wasn't a winner." While not even necessarily true with respect to the facts (LSU was a dormant program that made it to MSQ in the NIT during Maravich's Senior year), one wonders whether the real problem was simply that his staggering talent and skill level intimidated even his own coaches and teammates. Not to mention his hair--he had the greatest white person hair in the history of the NBA--playing in the backyard, I would try to make my Bobby Brady-styled hair bounce up and down like his did. Pete seemed to have the whole package.
By the time Pete made it to a team worthy of his skill level, with Boston in 1980, his knees were gone and he never really contributed to a contender in the NBA.
It really doesn't matter though, because while basketball is a team game and winning is the ultimate goal, the main reason we do it is that it is fun.
Pistol Pete (probably the greatest nickname in the history of basketball--somebody at LSU understood marketing) knew implicitly that fun should be the sine qua non of sport, telling all that if he could accomplish the same goal with a standard pass or a fun one, he would always opt for the fun one.
When few people will remember or even care that the Washington-Capitol-Baltimore Bullets won the NBA title in 1978, people will remember Pete Maravich and the joy and inspiration that he brought to the game. When I shoot around in the backyard with my sons, I will try to make the hair remaining on my head flop up and down and tell them about Pistol Pete and how great he was and all the things that he could do with a basketball.
Now Tyler is not quite Pete Maravich, but he is a good, fun kid who says he wants to stay in college and is an excellent player. The more success he has, the better it is for the sport, because it is going to show some of the chicken-hearted prospective white players out there that race is no impediment to success in basketball. So, yeah, I am rooting for you Tyler. And Pete, wherever you are, we miss you. I wish we had told you that more when you were still with us.
With respect to Hansbrough, maybe he will have to be more of a Larry Bird type with all the bigs in the NBA, but I think I have seen something in his game that is overlooked, but that he is better at than any other inside player I have ever seen.
Watch him on the inside when he shoots and watch how he uses that angles to score. Maybe it is due to superior vision or hand-eye coordination, but he seems to make more of what I will call "impure" shots than anyone else.
A pure shot is either intended to go in from straight on or is based upon a clear and easy banking angle. Hansbrough makes many of these of course, but he also nails a lot of shots which seem to bank in from very strange angles (acute?) or that seem to rim in from the back rim. After two years of doing this, it seems clear that it is not just luck. He seems to understand the geometry of making shots to a degree far greater than any other player. Compare him to B. Wright, who seems to either swish, dunk or miss.
Strangely enough, to me anyway, the Tar Heels also have a second player with a shooting style on the inside somewhat similar to Hansbrough and it is Ty Lawson. It often looks like he has a bad angle on those shots where he goes by everyone in the lane, but somehow they seem to almost always go in from a weird place on the backboard. We don't really know everything about how the human mind calculates the geometry of making shots (Shaq's mind just can't grasp the notion of arc), but it seems apparent that some players can really analyze the angles and make shots that other players would not be able to make.
(3) by Dave on 03/19/2007 02:52 pm
william wrote:
Strangely enough, to me anyway, the Tar Heels also have a second player with a shooting style on the inside somewhat similar to Hansbrough and it is Ty Lawson. It often looks like he has a bad angle on those shots where he goes by everyone in the lane, but somehow they seem to almost always go in from a weird place on the backboard. We don't really know everything about how the human mind calculates the geometry of making shots (Shaq's mind just can't grasp the notion of arc), but it seems apparent that some players can really analyze the angles and make shots that other players would not be able to make.
That reminds me of one aspect of basketball that you rarely hear anyone make mention of - the difficulty of many "layups." Guards frequently penetrate and have to throw up high arcing shots off of their fingertips that spin off an odd spot on the backboard and yet go in. Quite often, they do this with their off hand. Those shots always amaze me and yet usually the announcers gush at the quickness of the drive.
(4) by william on 03/19/2007 06:49 pm
Good point. I can remember a few games where announcers have said a team lost because they missed a "lay-up" but the shot in question was highly contested and not an easy one at all.
(5) by orzelc on 03/20/2007 09:49 am
Here's a manual TrackBack to my comments on the Hansbrough stuff. Because, well, I need stuff to post on my own blog...
(6) by orzelc on 03/20/2007 10:27 am
A couple of notes on the conference rating stuff: It really doesn't make sense to talk about absolute numbers of wins and losses when comparing conferences-- you need to take the seeds into account. There's a big difference, for example, between Georgia Tech losing in the first round as a ten seed, and Duke losing as a six seed. Duke was supposed to win that game, while Tech was not, and any attempt at comparisons between leagues ought to take that into account.
The way to do the comparison is to count up the number of games each team is expected to win, and compare the actual total to that. So, UNC as a #1 is expected to win four games, Maryland as a #4 is expected to win two, Duke as a #6 one, and Tech as a #10 none.
If you do this for various leagues, you find the following:
Conf. Expected Actual
ACC 9 (7) 6
PAC-10 7 (6) 6
Big 10 9 (6) 6
Big East 8 (7) 5
SEC 8 (6) 8
(The number in parentheses is how many they would be expected to win at this point-- that is, two of Carolina's expected wins haven't happened yet, so they shouldn't really be counted)
What does this tell you? Well, not much. None of the power conferences have really dramatically underperformed to this point. The SEC is doing better than expected (at the expense of the PAC-10 and ACC), but they're all within two games of where you'd expect them to be.
(7) by Dave on 03/20/2007 10:59 am
orzelc wrote:
Here's a manual TrackBack to my comments on the Hansbrough stuff. Because, well, I need stuff to post on my own blog...
I actually just finished reading your piece (before I saw this ping) and am planning on posting about (to complete the circle. Then you can post about my post about your post about my post.)
(8) by william on 03/20/2007 11:51 am
Thanks for the mention, ozelc, I have bookmarked your site and also sent the page to Adam Lucas, who is the media and press relations director for the Heels and does a fantastic job.
Maybe slightly on a different point, comes the issue for many whites as to whether it is moral to root more for a team that has more whites, maybe like the Celtics back in the 1980's or Duke currently.
Honestly, when I watch UNC I don't really see color. I had to stop and think as to whether Carolina had any white players among its rotation in 2005--I don't think it did--and it honestly didn't matter to me.
At the same time, I think we can take pleasure in Tyler's success for a reason articulated by Michael Wilbon, the black columnist for the Washington Post. He has noted that many of the excellent white players in the NBA of late, come from other countries and stated that after talking to parents of talented white athletes, that many of the American parents had convinced their children to focus on sports besides basketball, because they didn't think that their children could compete on an equal footing. The Spaniards, Germans and Eastern European players don't seem to have the same hang-up and do fine.
Perhaps Tyler and players like him can inspire more young people to play this great game of basketball. There has been a lot of newfound love for Pete Maravich lately with two biographies about him out.
It really makes me think back to how underappreciated he really was. In some ways, he was the Eminem or Tiger Woods of basketball (although Tiger is half-Asian, arguably a contributing background to his success hardly analyzed by anyone--too hot to touch?), meaning that Pete was the most skilled player in the history of basketball and white, a somewhat anomolous situation.
The rub on Maravich was that "he wasn't a winner." While not even necessarily true with respect to the facts (LSU was a dormant program that made it to MSQ in the NIT during Maravich's Senior year), one wonders whether the real problem was simply that his staggering talent and skill level intimidated even his own coaches and teammates. Not to mention his hair--he had the greatest white person hair in the history of the NBA--playing in the backyard, I would try to make my Bobby Brady-styled hair bounce up and down like his did. Pete seemed to have the whole package.
By the time Pete made it to a team worthy of his skill level, with Boston in 1980, his knees were gone and he never really contributed to a contender in the NBA.
It really doesn't matter though, because while basketball is a team game and winning is the ultimate goal, the main reason we do it is that it is fun.
Pistol Pete (probably the greatest nickname in the history of basketball--somebody at LSU understood marketing) knew implicitly that fun should be the sine qua non of sport, telling all that if he could accomplish the same goal with a standard pass or a fun one, he would always opt for the fun one.
When few people will remember or even care that the Washington-Capitol-Baltimore Bullets won the NBA title in 1978, people will remember Pete Maravich and the joy and inspiration that he brought to the game. When I shoot around in the backyard with my sons, I will try to make the hair remaining on my head flop up and down and tell them about Pistol Pete and how great he was and all the things that he could do with a basketball.
Now Tyler is not quite Pete Maravich, but he is a good, fun kid who says he wants to stay in college and is an excellent player. The more success he has, the better it is for the sport, because it is going to show some of the chicken-hearted prospective white players out there that race is no impediment to success in basketball. So, yeah, I am rooting for you Tyler. And Pete, wherever you are, we miss you. I wish we had told you that more when you were still with us.
How many times have you seen Tyler jump out in the passing lane, and then at 6'9 dribble then length of the court for an uncontested dunk?
Just look his fast break layup to end the 1st half vs Mich St when he avoided Neitzel and was able to finger roll it in. He may look awkward or gawky at times, but you can't justly call him unathletic.
Just look his fast break layup to end the 1st half vs Mich St when he avoided Neitzel and was able to finger roll it in. He may look awkward or gawky at times, but you can't justly call him unathletic.
I haven't seen a lot of Florida, but it seems that a pretty good arguement of the elusive nitty-gritty basketball player would be Al Horford. Probably the MVP of Florida, he always brings it, but never seems Big Baby-esque smooth. *shrugs* Again, I need to see more of Florida before I pass judgement on Horford (or on the rest of that team, except for Noah).
| SuperJew wrote: |
| I haven't seen a lot of Florida, but it seems that a pretty good arguement of the elusive nitty-gritty basketball player would be Al Horford. Probably the MVP of Florida, he always brings it, but never seems Big Baby-esque smooth. *shrugs* Again, I need to see more of Florida before I pass judgement on Horford (or on the rest of that team, except for Noah). |
See, you're right. When you look closely at any team, you'll find all different levels of athleticism even within guys in one race. (Except maybe Memphis, those guys all look like studs.) There are many ways to be a good, effective basketball player, but announcers too often place players into a few standard buckets.
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