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.
Sam Vacine is a great resource. He has YouTube video breakdowns to help acclimate you
When you’re watching, try to avoid focusing on the ball, and aim to watch the whole tableau (?) at once. Basketball happens in a very small space; the whole court would fit into a football (soccer) penalty area. Look for off-ball movement and screens being set.
Ben Falk (creator of Cleaning the Glass) made a $100 course designed to teach about the Xs and Os of basketball. I’ve been tempted to take it for years.
Step 1, get off this sub, NOW.
If you want analysis, you will find the opposite here. Nobody here cares about basketball analysis, nobody here cares about discussion, it’s just a giant circlejerk around whoever the sub likes that day and a hate brigade toward whoever’s on the other end of that.
Step 2, watch a ton Thinking Basketball.
Not just the best basketball analysis channel, but unironically the only popular one that isn’t disgustingly biased toward certain players and playstyles. He genuinely wishes to find the ANSWER to his question, and doesn’t care if he doesn’t like it.
Step 3, come back to this sub and laugh at it now that you can see how fucking stupid these people are.
In fact, if you want a little extra fun, every once in a while a verifiably wrong take ends up on top of the sub. Comment on it with the correct interpretation of what the situation is describing, or why the take is wrong, and watch as you’re called an idiot who doesn’t know basketball.
Bottom line, there is no quality basketball discussion online. r/nbadiscussion tries to do this, but it ALWAYS devolves into a circlejerk over older players.