Noam Schiller is the author of and a contributing writer for Cowbell Kingdom and Both Teams Played Hard. Today his new column for Hardwood Paroxysm debuts as he seeks to explore those concepts which stretch the traditional limits of the game, its players, and the league. We are, of course, thrilled to have Noam on board as a regular contributor to HP. Please remove your shoes and walk with Noam to the Boundary and Nexus. -Ed.

First: An Introduction, Of Sorts:

If there is one thing that people absolutely despise, it is the idea of conformism.

Walk up to an ape-descendant and tell him that the intricate folds of his mind are identical to that of his ape-descendant brethren, and the reaction might make you drop the word “descendant” all together. It’s an infuriating concept, the thought that you, special being as you are, think just like everybody else. We want to believe we are different, that each and every one of us is free – if not physically, than mentally and spiritually. Wars have been fought and countries have risen from the blood and the ashes just to support the notion that no, I am me and you are you and we’re all awesome in multiple ways which we can’t understand. Except for Serge Ibaka, who is awesome in ways we all very easily understand and cherish.

The funny part is that by fighting against conformism, in tattooing the morals of individuality on our bodies and souls, and touting the anti-conformistic movement, we unintentionally turn the tables. Anti-conformism becomes the property of the masses, thus sneakily removing the need for the “anti” prefix that we so gladly boast. Conformism wins again, except that in doing so, it makes us feel victorious. Sneaky little movement, indeed. Revolutionists become yes men, outside the box is just the inside of a bigger, less discernible box (I got you now, Stephon Marbury!), and opening paragraphs become long and incoherent.

Of course, you’re not reading this because you’re brushing up on your ability to analyze social phenomena. There’s a reason why this site’s official twitter account is @HPbasketball and not @HPphilosophy. And in the NBA, unlike in the field of human behavior, conformism is pretty well received. You build teams, coach them, and win with them in a very certain way. And while there are outliers to the rules – as there are everywhere – the conventional wisdom chooses to ignore them, constantly reminding us that guys like pre-meltdown Don Nelson and Mike D’Antoni are fun to watch, but ultimately doomed to be unsuccessful.

Conventional wisdom is wrong.

Which is why I will be stopping by here every now and then to point out exactly where conventional wisdom is wrong, whether the gap between said perception and actual reality is being properly utilized, and how it can be blasted open to make the world a better place. Because even if dispatching well established beliefs is hard, there is always room for innovation and development.

Just remember, though – whether or not any of my “solutions” are applicable matters less than the actual message: in a game played by some of the world’s most versatile athletes, and taught by some of the world’s most versatile minds, there is absolutely no reason to stick one’s head in the sand and walk the same course that’s been walked for years just for the hell of it.
And hey, worst case scenario, you just won yourself a free Monty Python clip.

Positional Revolution, Noam Style:

If you ignore Lebron James, Chris Bosh, Amar’e Stoudemire, Carlos Boozer and David Lee signing free agent deals on new teams, Dwyane Wade, Joe Johnson and Rudy Gay re-upping with their old pals, Kevin Durant’s complete Durantulization of the FIBA World Championship, John Wall going first in the draft, David Kahn screwing up everything, Shaq going green, the Anthony Tolliver sweepstakes… basically, if you ignore everything but the NBA blogosphere, and most of the blogosphere itself, one might be inclined to call this the summer of the positional revolution.

Though the subject has been surfacing for quite a while now, the weak dam which was struggling to hold in the gushing waters of positional overthrow as is was blasted open by Drew Cannon of Basketball Prospectus, with his fantastic take on the subject. It was then revisited and revised multiple times throughout NBA cyberspace, including by HP’s very own Rob Mahoney (via The Two Man Game), and on this site by stats whiz Tom Haberstroh, whose name I managed to spell without checking. I heartily recommend you carefully read each and every take on this subject, as it is truly a riveting discussion, with great minds contributing their very valuable thoughts to it.

However, in the spirit of Boundary and Nexus, allow me to rewind even before Drew’s original post, to try and understand just how we arrived at inadequate positional definitions in the first place. Just empty your mind for a few seconds, forget everything you know about combo forwards and tweener shooting guards, and ask yourself why positions are even here.

This question doesn’t get asked nearly enough. In fact, I don’t think it gets asked at all. Every single time the ball goes up, we have 10 positions on the court, just as we have two hoops, three refs, and four lines which determine the court’s dimensions. But those things are part of the rules. Without them, the means available towards achieving the game’s objective would be murky and unclear. There would be no order.

How do positions instill order in the game? If I call Chris Paul a center, or if I call Andrew Bogut a ham sandwich, is the game played any differently? Will Bogut now be limited to guarding opposing unkosher delicatessen, or can he still matchup against other big men without the constant fear of being digested?

In and of their own, positions have absolutely no effect on gameplay. None. They are but names, artificial slots through which watching the game is easier, via some sort of generalization of roles. A point guard handles the ball, creates for his teammates, is the shortest guy on the court and guards the opposing player who fits the same description. Why? Just cuz. Don’t question it, go with the flow.

If you would be so kind as to tolerate a few sentences of two bit sports psychology, I believe that this is the reason why small ball resounds as basketball in its most purely chaotic form. In four seasons with Steve Nash and under Mike D’Antoni, the Phoenix Suns finished with the league’s 3rd, 2nd, 4th and 16th (this isn’t really what we’re discussing, but if you forgot what year it was when Shaq joined the Suns, this stat is a good place to start) best turnover ratios. The Golden State Warriors, widely considered the representative of anarchy in the NBA’s congress, haven’t dropped out of the top 13 in turnover ratio since 2002-2003.

Because those teams played smaller and faster then common sense dictates, though, our convention-tinted glasses show us a game trending towards the random, caution thrown in to the wind with no regard for consequence. Part of this is the illusion of pace – more possessions cause more turnovers regardless of how the teams execute those possessions – but even when looking at turnovers per game, the Warriors were 19th in the league last season, clearly sub-par, but not nearly as bad as their reputation would suggest. The Suns finished 7th, 3rd and 9th in the first 3 SSOL years. And yet, the stereotype remains.

Now, clearly there is much more to an organized game than turnovers. I’m not here to try and tell you that last year’s Warriors weren’t a complete and total mess. However, this is a phenomena worth mentioning: positions help organize the game in our heads, with us being fans, media, analyzers, and yes, even coaches. As far as the actual game, though, they are nothing but names. It’s not a coincidence that they derive their names from the numbers 1 through 5 – those numbers are the easiest labels possible for something that is, at the core of the matter, just a label.

This also shows in the actual names given to the positions. The name “guard” gives one the association of a player focused entirely on defense. Tell that to Mo Williams. “Forward” makes you think of an offensive player. Somehow, the memo slipped by Luc Richard Mbah a Moute. And sure, in the classic version of the game, the center is the one who plays in the middle, but I think we all know what happens when you put Channing Frye on the court.

I believe that a major contributor to this disparity is the build of basketball itself. Among the definitions of “position” on the online Merriam-Webster dictionary are the following:

1. an act of placing or arranging: as a : the laying down of a proposition or thesis b : an arranging in order;

2. a : the point or area occupied by a physical object;

3. a : relative place, situation, or standing;

In other sports, this makes for a very intuitive definition of positions. Baseball’s first baseman stands on first base. The wide receiver goes wide, and receives. Soccer’s defensive midfielder plays in the middle of the field, while focusing more on defensive assignments. Positions are not only defined by where the athlete is placed on the field and what they do there, but derive their names from it. Everybody fits into a very certain mold, with special players being able to play multiple positions – but never transcending them.

Basketball is very different in this regard. First and foremost, the court is much smaller, which means that every player arrives at every single spot on the court at some point or another. We are thus deprived of the most dominant characteristic for naming positions. You’ll never call a player a “left baseliner” or a “right free-throw-line-extendeder”, even if it’s a player who tends to drift towards those spots on the court, because it’s absolutely ridiculous.

Also excluding basketball from other sports is the increased mobility. All ten players are (at least theoretically) involved in both offense and defense. Points are given in different portions for baskets made from different areas of the court. The ideal basketball player isn’t one who is outstanding at a few categories, but the best at everything. And if he does everything and is good at everything, how can his position be named after what it is that he does?

Denied the chance of defining positions in a manner similar to other sports, basketball positions are usually a function of size and skill. The first part makes some sense – in no other game is a player’s frame so critical, because in no other game do you have the objective of placing round spheres in tall places.

The skill part, though, is a problem. There are so many different things one needs from a basketball player – ball handling, the ability to create for both his teammates and himself, rebounding, outside shooting, inside shooting, mid-range shooting, height on defense, speed on defense, awareness on defense, and not being Adam Morrison, to name a few. As any statistician will tell you, when you have so many traits, there are infinite possible combinations of these traits to put together in a player. Ignoring almost all of these combinations to create 5 “positions” leaves one with very few traditional basketball players.

Then you add the height as well. Conventional wisdom says that players of certain height do certain things. Well, what if they don’t? What if you had a 7 footer with Derrick Rose’s lightning speed, Steve Nash’s ball handling skills, Lebron James’ court vision, Anthony Morrow’s outside shooting, and Al Jefferson’s post game? What position would he be?

And yet, despite myriad evidence that it makes no sense, we insist on defining positions by skill set. This league is full of point guards who don’t get points, shooting guards who can’t shoot, small forwards who are big, power forwards who are weak, and centers that consistently stay in the outskirts of the court. Tweeners, exceptions, oddities – call them what you want, but they are a dominant part of this game, at times even the best the game has to offer. Forcing them into this predetermined mold makes no sense. If Evan Turner isn’t enough of a shooter to play next to Andre Iguodala at the 2, than he isn’t enough of a shooter to play next to Andre Iguodala anywhere.

Cannon’s brilliant piece delved into the skill set subject at great length. Cannon categorizes players not by traditional position, but separately on offense and defense, with offense being what I called “skill set” and defense being predicated on size. Using this system, teams need not to have a 1, a 2, etc., what they need is an ensemble of players that can guard all sizes, and whose skills on offense complement each other to the point of capably scoring. Much more descriptive than the traditional build, since it actually describes what it is players do. Sounds like such a basic premise, but amazingly, it has been ignored so far.

However, this system is still far from flawless. The offensive positions (handler, creator, scorer, rebounder) are still way too general, and apart from the separation between the two ends of the court, the defensive look is still very close to the traditional one. As Tom Ziller eloquently countered:

“If Rodrigue Beaubois is a “D1″ — meaning he guards point guards despite often playing shooting guard next to Jason Kidd or J.J. Barea — then you’re assuming there are “1s” for him to guard, which is just the type of assumption the Positional Revolution aims to destroy.”

As Ziller says, the D1 through D5 premise is yet again predicated on defining players by both skill set and height. Cannon’s method plots his defensive positions on a “size-speed” scale, but matching up with an opponent’s size and speed isn’t always the best way to guard him. A prime example here is a player who has been breaking positional templates for over a decade now in Dirk Nowitzki. On paper, Cannon’s method would have Dirk guarded by a D4. However, historically, Dirk has had the most trouble playing against tenacious yet undersized defenders, such as Bruce Bowen and Stephen Jackson (by the way, it’s no coincidence that so many of these examples come straight from the mind of Don Nelson), who would be cast as D2/D3 types.

The question which has to be asked here – is there really such a thing as defensive position? Isn’t that side of the court completely matchup based anyway? Think how often you’ve heard concerns that a player can guard big point guards, but not quick ones, or perimeter big men, but not post up guys. And even that doesn’t go deep enough, because within these lines you then need to distinguish between high volume shot blockers, top notch stealers, or those who are adept at drawing charges. If we truly categorize defenders by who they can check and how they can do it, we’ll end up with too many positions to keep track of. Such a system has no value.

Which leads me to my own, personal basketball experiences. As a player in high school, we had positions 1 through 5. However, these positions had very little to do with what we could actually do. Sure, the 1 usually handled the ball and the 5 was usually the tallest, but I played every position from 1 to 4 despite being one of the shortest guys on the team. The value of the positions had nothing to do with what every player could do on the court, but in defining where players stood within the offense, and in running plays. Much like I mentioned earlier – they were merely an organizational tool. On defense, they were ignored completely – each player checked somebody from the other team, and if the matchup was bad, we switched.

Taking things even further away from the NBA, just for the sake of the argument, think of pick-up basketball. If you show up on an asphalt court and call “I’ve got small forward!”, you probably won’t be permitted to play. But what separates pick-up ball from professional ball (apart from the obviously heightened level of play)? Coaching. Order. A hierarchy that goes past “give me the ball because I’m the loudest”.

I’m very much on board with the positional revolution, because it maximizes assets much better than tradition. The five established positions offer some wiggle room, but not enough to encompass players of all kinds and types. As such, it is more than likely that every team in the league has multiple “unorthodox” players on their roster. If they are utilized in an unorthodox way as well, their abilities can be utilized to the fullest. But if you take a Tyreke Evans and tell him he has to focus only on creating for his teammates, or take a Dirk Nowitzki and deny him the chance to play outside of the post, you’re missing out.

The value of the positional revolution isn’t the creation of new positions. It’s in dropping the positional system entirely. No more this guy versus that guy, just 5 on 5. Sure, it’s much easier to offer analysis when all it includes is a number from 1 to 5. But we mustn’t allow our laziness as fans to get in the way of properly understanding the game. On the verge of a season where a team without a traditional point guard or a traditional center might play basketball of unprecedented quality, it may be time we realize that.