One for the foxes
As I’ve built up my repertoire of moves against imaginary opponents, I have been mindful of a harsh truth of basketball: it is usually better to be great at a few things than to be good at many things. Modern basketball is dominated by hedgehogs, not foxes. We know the big stars by their signature moves: Harden’s stepback, Olajuwon’s Dream Shake, Kareem’s Sky Hook. For those who seek greatness, it is best to select just one or two weapons and hone them to as fine an edge as possible.
My imaginary game is built on the stylish and economical approach of Shaun Livingston, who almost never got outside of his mid-range circle of competence. It is all hedgehog, all the time…turnaround jumpers all day long:
His jump shot is harder than it looks. The tricky bit is turning around. Turn too slowly, and the defender can anticipate the shot and move to contest it. But if you spin like a top there’s a significant chance you’ll over-rotate and miss the shot. Doing it properly requires good footwork, core body strength, and the discipline to get eyes on the rim as soon as it comes into view. The great ones do it with blinding quickness. Kobe demonstrates here:
Actual humans cannot do this.
As I went through my ritual Sunday morning, I overheard a coach on the next court teaching the kids a new move. “Now Bobby,” he intoned as I pretended to reflect on a free throw, “drive to the hoop, then STOP, and pull back.” He demonstrated, stopping, shifting his weight back, and elevating into a mid-range jumper.
What a clever move, I thought. Usually if someone blocks my path to the hoop I smash into them as hard as I can (FINISH THROUGH HIS CHEST!), and we argue block or charge. But with this move, I could just pull up and get a jumper off before the defender had time to recover. Could save wear-and-tear on the old bones. Victor Oladipo deploys a nice, efficient ur-pullback from time to time, plus many modern variations on the theme:
To my mind, if you drive forward, stop, then pull back that leg and go directly into the shot (as he does at 1:00), that would be a pullback. Anything more than that, and you’re in Harden-Doncic-Curry stepback territory, a world of zero steps, drop-steps, side steps and all sorts of lawyering of the NBA’s travel rules. A Harden style stepback will get a whistle anywhere outside the NBA (this video explains the NBA interpretation of his zero step), but the ur-pullback is legal in all jurisdictions.
After the coach and kids went away I tried a couple…and they went right in. If you can get the weight shift right, the shot itself is easy. It requires none of the gyroscopy of the turnaround jumper. The forward/back motion is all done with hips and shoulders square to the basket, so when you elevate the shot is almost automatically on-line.
The pullback/stepback is a great old man move. Paul Pierce used it - here he talks with Scottie Pippen about how to defend this type of shot:
Pierce did not invent the stepback as he claims in the video. Historians give the credit Kiki Vandeweghe, who came up with the move a generation earlier in response to his slowing first step, and the advent of fast defenders like Olajuwon. But Pierce was the one who made it the entire basis of his game. A rare fox among the hedgehogs, he bolted together the pullback, the fallaway, the modern stepback, and a variety of spins and pump fakes to make a Hall of Fame career for himself.
I always undervalued Pierce because he really didn’t have a signature move. He doesn’t seem to be doing much in the highlights. He runs around (slowly), throws a bunch of fakes, and sort-of-accidentally make the ball go in. But once you understand what he’s up to, it’s very entertaining:
A new player once asked Paul Pierce where he liked to get the ball. “It don’t matter,” he replied. “I’ve got a lot of stuff.”