Yearly Archives: 2011

Coming into Tuesday night’s game against Ohio State, Duke fans had a few reasons to be concerned. The team had just finished a particularly exhausting series of five games in nine days, and it was the team’s first game on the road against a very good and very experienced team that had to date swallowed every team in its path. Personally, I found the spectre of facing the ghost of Greg Paulus to be the most frightening thing about facing OSU. After he was shown wearing what looked like his father’s Thursday suit, I had to work quite hard to fight off the nausea.

It looked so wrong to see him on a basketball court again, especially since I thought I had seen the last of him inspiring terrible Duke performances. Would his mere presence mean the team was bound to underwhelm? Would Seth Curry start backing into his defenders after crossing half court? Would we see Austin Rivers throwing himself into Lebron James’ lap in futile pursuit of an errant football style pass from Andre Dawkins? Would we see Jared Sullinger soar from the free-throw line and throw down a sick jam, obstructed only by a pathetically flopping Tyler Thornton? I was mentally preparing myself for a particularly Paulusian performance on all accounts – what I thought to be the worst case scenario.

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We all like to think that we carefully gather and evaluate facts and data before coming to our conclusions.  But we don’t.

Instead, we tend to suffer from confirmation bias and thus reach a conclusion first.  Only thereafter do we gather facts, but even so it’s only to support our pre-conceived conclusions.  We then take our selected “facts” and cram them into our desired narratives, because narratives are crucial to how we make sense of reality.  They help us to explain, understand and interpret the world around us.  They also give us a frame of reference we can use to remember the concepts we take them to represent.  Perhaps most significantly, we inherently prefer narrative to data — often to the detriment of our understanding.  Keeping one’s analysis and interpretation of the facts reasonably objective – since analysis and interpretation are required for data to be actionable – is really, really hard even in the best of circumstances.

That introduction is a helpful predicate to a perfectly obvious conclusion: fans are inherently irrational.  If we are exceedingly prone to various mental biases in life generally, when we’re in fan mode we can readily go off the rails entirely.  And when we’re in fan/rivalry mode, almost anything is possible.

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Of the countless images we were bombarded with in the past few weeks, perhaps none were as disturbing as the one of a young Mike Krzyzewski in his West Point basketball uniform, standing next to his coach, Robert Montgomery Knight. In juxtaposition to the sight of these two men embracing after the Michigan State game, it is quite a powerful image. Forty some years and thousands of basketball games later, these two men have become giants of their profession, and their legacies will be forever intertwined. On its own, however, the image leaves me with a completely different kind of feeling: “yucch.”

The height of my childhood basketball fandom was watching the many epic and emotionally transcendent playoff series between the New York Knicks and the Miami Heat. I was particularly fascinated by the coaching match-up. On the one hand, there was Pat Riley – dapper, well-dressed, and to this day the only sports figure my mother can recognize. He was stylish, seemed very intelligent, and exuded a blend of confidence and athleticism unlike any person I had ever met. On the other hand, there was Jeff Van Gundy – short, un-graceful and sporting a particularly unconvincing and uninspired comb over.

Growing up on Long Island, it was an all too familiar appearance (and one that I myself have begun to approach). It seemed strange to me that these men had the same profession, and I wondered what their backgrounds were. Where were they from? What were their majors in college? How does one become a basketball coach anyway? I was able to guess that they must have played basketball at some point in their youth, and had no trouble picturing Riley as a player. He probably could have torn off his Armani suit, picked up a ball and played a few minutes with his team. Van Gundy was a different story.  I couldn’t picture him playing in a middle school church league, let alone as a pro or college basketball player. For some reason, I just couldn’t bring myself to conceive of such an image. I took these concerns to school the next day. It was then that I learned one of the most meaningful lessons of my childhood. I don’t quite remember who broke it to me, but it came down to this:

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Hey gang, check out my piece on Austin Rivers, Seth Curry, Andre Dawkins, and the legacy of Duke guards here. Also contains thoughts on the Michigan and Tennessee wins, and picture documentation of the best zone break-down in history (maybe).

Happy Thanksgiving!