Three Upcoming Tests for the Gladwell Theory

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The editors at The New Yorker must give Malcolm Gladwell a gigantic hug every time he comes into the office. At the very least they have to buy him lunch once a week. 

Gladwell is known primarily for his three best-selling books. However his recent piece for the magazine entitled "How David Beats Goliath" is what's generating buzz everywhere. It's become must-read to the point where a discussion he had via e-mail with ESPN.com's Bill Simmons was linked on the front page of ESPN.com for a week.

Gladwell's article tells the tale of a seventh and eighth grade girls AAU Basketball team from Redwood City, Ca. Their coach was a man who came to the U.S. from Mumbai named Vivek Ranadivé. He simply wanted to coach his daughter's basketball team but didn't understand a common basketball strategy he viewed as a mistake:

Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court.

Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet.

Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams.

Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?

Ranadivé's idea became the focal point of Gladwell's Theory. In basketball, if you are clearly the inferior team and your best effort may not be enough to win...why not press? Taking a risk doesn't guarantee victory but Gladwell believes it increases the chances of it by forcing a superior team to move away from what they do best.

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