altgeld88
- Arlington, Virginia
Props on bringing up Jay Burson, about whom I was thinking recently. A formidable point guard. He was listed at 6'0" but I ran into him once and he was barely taller than me (5'10" at the time.) Held the Ohio High School scoring record (for all classes) for more than 20 years. A coach's kid and master of the fundamentals.
Coincidentally, I recently stumbled across an article from 1965 about Hall of Fame Knicks star Bill Bradley when he was an All-American at Princeton, and the best basketball player in America. I've been reading it during my commute the past couple days. It's a long read but one of several gems I've found recently from the golden age of sports journalism. The essay has a lengthy dissection of Bradley's repertoire of moves, and it all comes down, unsurprisingly, to footwork.
I highly recommend it to any hoops fan, particularly former players. It also reminded me that the Golden State Warriors (formerly the Philly Warriors) were originally the Syracuse Nationals!
A Sense of Where You Are
What makes a truly great basketball player?
Here's a passage about Bradley that reminds me of our beloved Belo:
Bradley’s play has just one somewhat unsound aspect, and it is the result of his mania for throwing the ball to his teammates. He can’t seem to resist throwing a certain number of passes that are based on nothing but theory and hope; in fact, they are referred to by the Princeton coaching staff as Bradley’s hope passes. They happen, usually, when something has gone just a bit wrong. Bradley is recovering a loose ball, say, with his back turned to the other Princeton players. Before he turned it, he happened to notice a screen, or pick-off, being set by two of his teammates, its purpose being to cause one defensive man to collide with another and thus free an offensive man to receive a pass and score. Computations whir in Bradley’s head. He hasn’t time to look, but the screen, as he saw it developing, seemed to be working, so a Princeton man should now be in the clear, running toward the basket with one arm up. He whips the ball over his shoulder to the spot where the man ought to be. Sometimes a hope pass goes flying into the crowd, but most of the time they hit the receiver right in the hand, and a gasp comes from several thousand people. Bradley is sensitive about such dazzling passes, because they look flashy, and an edge comes into his voice as he defends them. “When I was halfway down the court, I saw a man out of the corner of my eye who had on the same color shirt I did,” he said recently, explaining how he happened to fire a scoring pass while he was falling out of bounds. “A little later, when I threw the pass, I threw it to the spot where that man should have been if he had kept going and done his job. He was there. Two points.”
