@Lulufulu
Your latest assessment seems pretty accurate to me.
Though fans that pride themselves on trying to learn the game and be objective in their assessments don’t like to admit it, all of us are biased by the long ball not falling.
Shooting 21% from trey on 19 3ptas colors our perceptions of other things, particularly guard play, for awhile after games.
Cold outside shooting does have some real adverse effects on what guards can do, of course.
So our perceptions are not totally a product of missing lots of treys.
It gets harder as the game goes on to drive the ball, if they quit honoring your trey, because you are bricking so many.
But I am convinced there is a psychodynamic between poor trey percentage and the feeling that the team, especially the backcourt, isn’t playing well, when in fact it may be playing okay, but just not making shots.
Coaches are usually more objective about this sort of thing than fans, but even they succumb occasionally to the bias of missing the long ball.
The purpose of play is to make more baskets and FTs than the other team.
It doesn’t feel good on a basic level, when we don’t make’em.
And when we do make’em, it feels soooooooooo good that we sometimes think we are playing better than we are.
This is one of the ways you begin to know you are making progress as a student of the game; you see through the effect of shooting on your perceptions of the rest of the game.
On a subconscious level, everyone was, as shrinks say, experiencing a lot of cognitive dissonance because of all the clanked treys. We enter this season with lots of question marks in the front court. We aren’t sure who can play and who can’t. We aren’t sure if Diallo will be cleared. We aren’t sure if Bragg can come along fast enough to gives a scoring and rebounding presence in the paint. We aren’t sure if Selden will ever be healthy. We aren’t sure if Hunter will play as well as he did in the WUGs. We aren’t sure if Svi is a complete bust. We aren’t sure if Brannen’s hip will bounce back. We aren’t sure who Perry can and cannot score on in D1…
But we felt sure our perimeter guys could pot the triceratop, could trinitize the trifecta, could R2D2 the C3PO, could replicate the triplicates of last season and last summer.
It was like, well, at least we know going in we have one thing we can count on: the guys can ding from downtown.
But then they shot 21% and it was like Bohr and Heisenberg telling Schroedinger, sorry, you’re making this too complicated. The stinking cat really is alive AND dead. Or its like Bohr and Heisenberg telling Einstein, Podolski and Rosen, sorry but changing the spin of an electron will change the spin of an electron across the universe instantaneously and quantum entanglement does involve superluminal speeds fellas.
Human beings, especially ones trying to practice the fine art of thinking about something systematically, really hate have their foundation kicked out from under them.
No, we all subconsciously cried, not our three point shooting assumption, NO, basketball god, don’t take that away from us!!!
But the basketball god laughed at us and took away our three point shooting, as surely as the god of the universe laughed and took away the locality assumption from Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen.
Woe is us for awhile now.
We can’t be sure of our outside shooting anymore, until our guys shoot their way out of the slump, if they do.
We have to wonder: was last year as freakish a year of three point shooting as it was a freakish year of injuries?
Maybe we weren’t as good of trey ballers as we thought we were.
And all that doubt causes angst, and all that angst adversely colors our perceptions of other things, like floor play.
But a little time passes and suddenly we are able to get our bearings and things look a little better.
Rock Chalk!
