Why I love Offense Strategy in Basketball

What is strategy? According to one of many definitions from Webster dictionary, strategy is "the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal". Essentially, this means that strategy is about using resources at your disposal directed toward an objective, in this case, winning a basketball game. People are divided as to which one is more important? Offense or defense? For me, I believe that offense is more important. There are two main reasons why I prefer offense.

First, it is my belief that to win the game, no matter how good your defense is, eventually you need score more points than the opponent does. Since you need to score points, why not dedicate more resources toward creating a great offense?

Second reason, which is more on a personal note, is that creating an offense strategy is more complex, hence, more fun. To understand this, I need to explain about shooting percentages and defense. No matter how good your defense is, most of the time, the opponent will be able to get some shots off, and when the ball is in the air, on defense there's nothing more you can do except fighting for rebounding positions and hope that it is a missed shot.

In professional level, players in practice need to achieve an 85% shooting field goal (shooting from anywhere in the court, not including free throws) to translate it into a 45-50% shooting field goal in actual game. Therefore, even without defenders /dummy defenders, there is still a 15% probability of not making the shot. This probability goes even higher in an actual game, which is 50-55% of not making the shot. This means that your ability to prevent the opponent from scoring is also dependent on the opponent team's ability to shoot.

On offense, though I believe not everything is within your direct control (such as the stamina or basketball IQ of the defenders), you have to use more resources or at least do more thinking/analysis since not only you have to contend with the defenders, but eventually you have to shoot the ball and score more points than your opponent does. Not only that the offense has to exploit the weaknesses of the defense, but also make sure that the team is able to create good scoring opportunities (high probability shots) by creating 1-on-1, 2-man, or 3-man plays which necessitates teamwork and clear objectives on each offensive possession.

Even though creating a defense strategy is challenging by itself. In terms of effort/amount of thinking expended, creating an offense strategy is even more challenging because of the two reasons explained above (defenders and shooting percentages).

...and that is why I love offensive strategy in basketball.

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