It's that time of the year: March Madness is upon us, which brings me to occasional ruminations on strategy while I'm cheering for my Heels. It's a pretty common occurence in basketball games that some star player picks up two personal fouls within the first few minutes of the game, and then sits the rest of the first half so that he won't pick up a third.
It's never been clear to me why this is a good idea. After thinking about it a little more, I'm pretty sure it's not. Suppose 10 minutes in, your star player already picked up two fouls. You're worried that if you keep him in the game, he will get to 5 fouls before the end of the game. You can either take him out now, reducing his minutes for sure, or keep him in, which incurs some probability that you'll have to remove him from the game due to disqualification later. If this strategy is to have ANY validity at all, you'd have to think i) points now are less valuable than points at the end of the game (obviously not true), ii) the difference between your team with and without your star player is larger at the end of the game than at the beginning (perhaps true).
Yet even if (ii) is valid, the difference-in-difference would have to be pretty large to offset the chance that you leave your player in the game, get the benefit of him playing more now, and he doesn't foul further, so that you also get the benefit of him playing at the end of the game. Also, you could at least leave him in until he gets his third or fourth foul before really limiting his playing time so that you're sure to have him in the last five minutes of crunch time. Yet it seems to be some part of coaching orthodoxy in college to never let your best player get his third foul in the first half. Can somebody explain to me why?
-BRUECHIPS
P.S.: Is it really that hard to referee a basketball game? I kind of want to try it just to see. It seems like the refereeing couldn't possibly be any worse than it is right now, but maybe I don't fully appreciate how difficult the task is.
2 comments:
Just a thought...once a player picks up his 2nd foul, and is left in to still play, he tends to play carefully and tentatively, and thus is very ineffective.
Woot delayed comments.
It's kinda what steeser said. There are few things that play into the decision of pulling the player. Part of the reason which is the most obviously pointed out one is that they don't want him to pick up the 3rd foul in the first half. Another reason is that a player who picks up two quick fouls are doing something that makes him prone to picking up another one (being lazy on the footwork, not rotating quick enough, overpursuing shot blocking, etc) - but anyways, something is off from the fundamentals so there needs to be a cooling off period/coach talking to the player to remind him of stuff, etc. It's kinda like a player playing on tilt and coach just pulling him back until he's not tilting anymore.
If the player picks up another foul, he does get a little too tentative... similar to tightening up too much after losing a big pot on a fairly aggressively but well played hand or something... and once a player at that level lays back on D even slightly, it really does make a difference... hard to tell on TV but at that level, the opponent would be able to capitalize. So, it would be better that a guy who's video game rating might be a 100 be replaced for a while by a guy whose rating might be 85 but can play 100% aggressively.
As for reffing, yes it's actually hard. I b*tch to the refs all the time in my league games but I remember I reffed a middle school game one time and I was getting yelled at by both coaches and players on numerous occasions about missing this and missing that. Not all of them are true but it's hard to maintain composure because you can't necessarily see everything that happened.
Cheers to a comment longer than the actual blog post.
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