The best schoolboy players participate in basketball all year round. Most of them play the bulk of their games on summer teams, under pseudo coaches who are more interested in catering to their baby stars than in teaching them anything. Even the most successful coaches in college will rant and rave that players not only arrive on campus nowadays without basic basketball intelligence, but that because they've been spoiled all along, it's almost impossible to intercept the process, to get them to go back and start to learn. And, of course, what makes it so difficult to tell young players anything substantive is that they are indeed so physically wondrous. In some sort of reaction to this, NBA coaches have grown more and more controlling.
Every coach has a brain trust of very serious assistants, all of whom carry serious clipboards.
The players' roles are sharply defined. The players are ordered not to take chances. Everything is a set play, most of which consists of taking up 20 dreary seconds on the 24-second clock to try and isolate a shooter on the weak side to hurl up a three. It's important to state, too, that a proper fast break was not helter-skelter. Teams like the Celtics with Russell and Cousy , the Bullets with Unseld and Monroe , ran the break as controlled as any Princeton back door.