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He Has a Break Away and He... Loses the Ball

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He Has a Break Away and He... Loses the Ball

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While playing basketball for 10 years while growing up, I had many experiences that were both good and bad.  One memory that haunts me to this day happened when I was playing on the freshman basketball team.  My team was losing by 6 points with a few minutes left in the game.  If we scored some points quickly, we would still be able to win the game.  The opposing team's point guard dribbled the ball down the court and I was defending him.  He made a wrong move and I was able to steal the ball.  I knew that we had to score quickly, so I dribbled down the court as fast as I could with defenders right behind me.  Just as I thought I was going to beat them to the hoop and make a layup, the ball bounced off my foot and headed out-of-bounds.

Oh how I wish that I knew of the speed-accuracy trade-off before that break-away.  Fitts' Law implies that there is an inverse relationship between a task's difficulty and the speed in which it is performed.  In other words, we "trade" accuracy for speed or vice versa.

In my situation, I ended up trading accuracy for speed because of the amount of time left in the game and the defenders who were chasing after me.  The increase in speed caused a decrease in accuracy of my dribbling.  This decrease in accuracy caused the ball to bounce off my leg and out-of-bounds.  Looking back, I wish that I slowed down a little bit more so that I could have kept my dribbling accurate.

The gif above shows someone who also traded a little too much accuracy for speed.

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Lebron James is commonly known as the best basketball player currently in the NBA.  He was a standout player in high school and was the #1 overall pick in the NBA draft.  What a lot of people don't know is that James also had an impressive football career in high school.

James decided to pick up football his sophomore year in high school.  He quickly became a stand-out player and by the end of his junior year, he was the #1 football recruit in the state of Ohio.  How did James manage to become a top recruit so quickly?  This can be explained by a positive transfer of learning, or the gain of proficiency in one skill due to practice in another skill.

One theory of transfer that explains James' phenomenal performance in football is the Transfer-appropriate Processing Theory.  This theory says that practice in one skill will lead to an improvement in another skill due to similar processing requirements. Football and basketball both require athletes to react to defenders, make quick decisions, along with other similarities.

Another theory of transfer that can help explain James' success is the Identical Elements Theory. This theory states that positive transfer from one skill to another is due to similarities in skill and context components. James was a wide receiver on his football team. Wide receivers use footwork techniques to get by their defenders, just like in basketball. The context of football and basketball games are also similar. Both sports involve teammates, fans cheering, and high-pressure situations.

James was able to transfer these skills that he learned from basketball over to football which allowed him to excel in the sport very quickly.

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When I was beginning to play basketball, I would always hear my coach say, "Keep your head up!" as I dribbled down the court.  It took me a while to be able to do this, but eventually, I was able to listen to my coach's advice.  This helped me to become a much better basketball player.

To be a good basketball player, it is important to have good visual search abilities.  Visual search is the process of directing one's attention to relevant clues in the environment.  For basketball, the visual search patterns for novices and experts vary drastically.

Novices tend to fixate their vision on either the basketball or on the defender directly in front of them.  This is what I was doing in my early years of playing basketball.  I would keep my eyes focused on the basketball when I was dribbling, much like the player in the image above.  Eventually, I was able to advance past this habit.

Experts in basketball tend to keep their eyes up and constantly moving.  This is a skill that I learned after much practice.  In games, I was able to look for my teammates, know where multiple defenders were at the same time, and even look at the clock on the scoreboard.  Using my visual search to identify more objects in the environment allowed me to locate more relevant items on the basketball court.  In turn this led me to more success in the sport.

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Basketball looking at ball while dribbling

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Michael Jordan was one of the best in every aspect of basketball.  He is currently ranked 5th all time for most points scored by an NBA player.  One thing that allowed him to score over 30,000 points in his NBA career was his ability to shake off defenders.  Jordan would switch up his moves to always keep his defenders guessing.  Nobody was excited when they were matched up against a man with such skill.  To create enough room to get his shots off, Jordan had some help from the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP).

The PRP is a delay in response to a second stimuli because a first stimulus is still being processed.  When the time between the two stimuli, or stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), is between 50ms and 250ms, we see the PRP take affect.

In the example above, we see Jordan do a quick hesitation that the defender reacts to.  This is the first stimulus.  Then Jordan immediately performs a cross-over, which is the second stimulus.  The time between the hesitation and cross-over, or the SOA, was between 50ms and 250ms.  The defender was still processing the hesitation move when Jordan crossed-over, so he had a delayed reaction time to the second move. This delay is due to the PRP.  Jordan is then able to utilize this delayed response and make his shot.

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Michael Jordan is arguably the best player in the history of basketball. During a game in 1991, Jordan stepped up to the free throw line in the last minute of the game. He made his first free-throw like he had done so many times before, but one fan was not impressed.  They heckled, "Shoot it with your eyes closed."  This fan did not understand the concept of memory systems.

There are two memory systems, declarative and procedural. Declarative memory is our conscious memory that tells us what something is. For a beginner, they would use this memory system while learning how to shoot free-throws. Jordan, however, was not a beginner. Throughout his many years of practice, the process of shooting free-throws became automatic for him.  This is known as procedural memory.

Because the process of shooting a free took no conscious effort for Jordan, he was able to answer the fan's request.  He closed his eyes and sank his second free-throw.  Next time that fan will think twice before challenging a person's procedural memory.