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A Coach's Plea to Officials: Allow the Gather Step

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While scouting an upcoming opponent this past winter, I caught a video clip that I jokingly referred to as “High School Basketball in a Nutshell.” A player dribbled into a crisp Euro Step, driving off his right foot and up off his left to the rim to score. As the camera panned back towards center court, a group of fans threw their hands in the air and did the travel dance, waving their arms around in a circle vigorously to show how the official clearly missed an obvious travel. Except it wasn’t a travel, obviously. But the current conversation about the gather step in the NBA Playoffs brought me back to moments like that. Over the past decade, we’ve seen the Euro Step become a universally legal move. Over time, officials realized that it was the same as a traditional, "one-two" layup, just with different timing and direction. I believe that it’s time that high school officials allow the gather step (or zero step) on all plays where a player is on the move a
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The NBA Doesn't Need the NBA Draft

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As a fan, if your team isn't good enough playing into May or June, you may spend the NBA season watching college games as an amateur scout focused on the NBA Draft. If you're a fan of a small market team, the draft is even more vital to your franchise's chances to move up the standings because big-money free agents are less likely to choose middle size markets in the Midwest.  So for the NBA season, or for five seasons, you watch as your team's general manager puts together peculiar rosters with four non-shooters as your entire city silently cheers for competitive losses to get more ping pong balls for the draft. Year after year, your team throws away chances to win games to have a shot to pick someone who is not guaranteed to pull your team out of the lottery.  And honestly, if you're out of the lottery as a 5-8 seed in the playoffs, it's not good enough anyway. In three or four years of first round exists, you're tweeting "BLOW IT UP, STA
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It's Time for a Global NBA

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The American sports calendar is full of yearly events that demand a lot of attention. January: NCAA Football Championship Game February: Super Bowl March: NCAA Tournament April: NCAA Men's Basketball Championship Game & the Masters May: Indianapolis 500 June: NBA/NHL Finals October: MLB World Series December: NCAA Bowl Season I know, I'm definitely missing a few, but these are the ones I'm usually keyed in on. With the NBA catching up to the NFL in American popularity and attention, the league still holds itself back because it lives by American sporting norms. On the flip side, the entire world was tuned in to the World Cup over the last 30 days or so. When our local radio station in Des Moines is talking about soccer every day for a month, that means the event has crossed the line and become mainstream. We didn't have a team in the World Cup. American casual fans have absolutely no reason to watch. And yet, the World Cup was still a pretty big d
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How Small Ball Would Lead Milwaukee on a Big Run

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How Small Ball Would Lead Milwaukee on a Big Run The Milwaukee Bucks are a conundrum. They're pure Jekyll and Hyde, feast and famine. A season that began with so many expectations and such promise finished with just 44 wins, a seventh seed and the separation from former Head Coach Jason Kidd. The Bucks were often criticized under Kidd's reign for having an over-aggressive defense and inefficient offense. The Bucks defensive strategy often put them in a scramble, giving up wide open corner threes and layup attempts. The offense was an old school homage to the midrange jumper and low block post iso, which lacked efficiency when compared to the run and gun offenses of today. But the biggest problem the Bucks have had in the Giannis era is who they surround him with much more than the X's and O's. I think there's an easy fix to the woes that would set the Bucks on a path to play into June. I don't think we'll see the Bucks take this strategic route w
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