Hey,
I am french and I was lucky to see Wembanyama playing when he was still in France (Mets92). I obviously felt in love with him and i therefore decided to follow NBA Spurs this year - the struggle is i love watching a sport once I understand better the standard strategies and standard roles players need to adopt. I am not interested at all (yet) in learning NBA history, legendary feuds or best teams/players. I just want to learn how to watch a game using my brain.
Do you have a book or a series of youtube video to introduce me to this ? Ideally, after consuming this i have a basic understanding of basketball offence/defense strategy and I can understand the role/position of a player when watching a game.
I tried exploring NBA/Basketball for Beginners but could not find wat i was looking for : Either it was talking about a particular season or about a list of stats and details about particular players.
This is definitely the first major step. I think that doing this while also trying to acquaint oneself with increasingly sophisticated basketball terminology will enable more thoughtful viewing (as well as discussion).
Drives, screens, hand-offs, cuts, and other movement options are good examples of need-to-recognize terms. There are also of course unique types of passes, dribble moves, shots, and the ilk that make up the building blocks of basketball from which plays are formed and possessions therefore are defined; and if you only watch the ball, most of these things will be invisible!
I also find that it’s sometimes enjoyable to watch a particular player if I feel like they are more valuable than their role would suggest statistically, such as a catch and shoot player having an outsized impact on winning. You’ll often find that these players, away from the ball, are very clever in finding space on the perimeter or utilizing the threat of cuts/shooting to stretch defensive attention thin. But now I’m just gushing about basketball; it’s a beautiful game.