The Lost Art od the Mid-range Jump Shot

"This stimulus bill is huge, so disastrous, and so harmful to our country that even though Obama has been in office for less than a month, I think it's already fair to label him as one of the worst Presidents in American history," - Right-Wing News

"Our inaction will be seen as a betrayal, our promises false and our ideals hypocrisy. Vladimir Putin has fired the first shot of a new cold war, the first battle is Georgia and we can be certain there will be many more."

- Lance Fairchook of the American Thinker (sic) on the need for immediate U.S. Military action against Russia, August 2008.

During the 1990-91 season 24 of 27 teams averaged over 100 points per game. The Golden State Warriors at 55-27 paced the league by pouring in 118.7 PPG.
Chris Mullin (25.7 PPG and 53% shooting), Mitch Richmond (23.9 and 49.4%), Tim Hardaway (22.9 points and 47%) led the Warriors with outstanding perimeter shooting.
This year, there are only six teams scoring over 100 points per game, led by the Orlando Magic (103).
The NBA has tried to stop this downward trend by moving the 3-point line twice, changing defensive rules and encouraging coaches to apply more movement in their offenses.
None of these changes will make a difference, however, until players realize that learning to shoot the ball is the key to their success, not dunking, playing defense and dribbling.
The jump shot is the lost art in sports.

- Eddie Johnson, writing for USA Today in 2001

As some of you may recall, we here at the D10 have been egotistical enough to launch a minor crusade against the sloppy, heuristical thinking of hyperbole. Looking above you, you will find three quotes. Each, in their own way, points to the same fallacy. Of course, the last of these is the most concrete. As a rule, technical proficiency in basketball has given way towards a fixation on the brutal and spectacular. No longer are tried, true (and heretofore necessary) conventions such as passing, fundamentals and the mid-range jump shot the hallmarks of hoops at the highest level. Instead, the new paradigm is one of highlight reel dunks and fadeaway three-pointers. As a result, the overall quality of the sport has deteriorated. In fact, I do not mean to pick on basketball. Football has suffered a plague of "hitting" displacing the art of tackling and baseball, well, speaks for itself, it is simply that the terminology of basketball lends itself more cleanly to my purposes.

Now, on to the other two quotations cited above. Per my usual disclaimer when I post such things, I don't mean to pick at the rightward side of our political spectrum for any sort of ideological purpose. These examples just happen to be two egregiously representative of the problem of thoughtless hyperbole.

The causes of this problem are not simply laziness, however. To wit, whenever there is a societal problem blamed solely on the "laziness" of others (the media, one's fellow citizens, etc.), my instinct is to find the fault to be more with the cocoon from which the complainer speaks than with those about whom he is complaining.

In the cases we are considering, however, there is more to the issue. Why engage in breathless proclamations that could one day serve as a source of endless ridicule? Because why be sober and moderated when you can take a risk to be the next Winston Churchill at Westminster College?

More directly, the reason for this preponderance of categorical, bombastic pronouncement is simple: it is invigorating for the ego of the pronouncer. I would elucidate this concept here, but I feel it is straightforward enough to decline further comment.

So, instead of learning how to play basketball, players teach themselves to be explosive, thunder down showstopping slam dunks and swish the occasional three-pointer. Instead of learning to give measured, realistic commentary on events, talking heads teach themselves to make broad, histrionic pronouncements and the occasional memorable quip.

What sort of thing does this lead to?

What element of modern primary and secondary pedagogy over the past, say, 20 years has led our youth to believe that socialism is awesome? Actually, nothing. The real secret is that the Berlin Wall fell, which paved the way for conservatives to call everything Democrats have proposed in the interim socialism (this isn’t to say that they weren’t doing that before, but it became much easier for them to say it without the Giant Socialist Enemy Beast forcing us to duck and cover under our desks every day). I came up in a world where “socialism” was defined in popular parlance as “liberalism”. Bill Clinton, effectively a liberal Republican, was a socialist. Barack Obama, a moderate Democrat, is a socialist. There’s an actual socialist in the Senate, and yet all the Democrats in the Senate (except Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh)? Socialists.

The main people responsible for the embrace of “socialism” are the pro-capitalist conservatives who’ve so diluted its meaning that it’s okay to embrace socialism, because the majority party in the country and our tremendously popular president are socialists.

Good job, suckers.

The upshot?