It's August, and I'm a basketball junkie, so of course I was watching some Isaiah Thomas highlights this morning.
(Hmm ... is his hand on the side of the ball there?)Man, his footwork, his use of change of speed, his ability to draw contact and then surge toward the basket and finish ... it's all really, really impressive, even if you ignore that he does it all while being shorter than even me, a roughly average sized adult male.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFAv08sUS-8One thing that becomes clear pretty quickly in these highlights, however, is that a major component of Isaiah's driving game is his mastery of a particular move: hesitating and leaning back for a split second while the ball is in his hand mid-dribble, throwing the defender off-balance. It is at that exact moment, when the defender has no idea if Isaiah will stop, step back, move to one side or the other, or surge forward, that Isaiah strikes, creating separation and usually getting very close to the basket, if not all the way to the cup.
But wait, isn't that palming? My dad certainly thinks so. One of his favorite complaints during NBA games is that the players travel constantly (ahem, LeBron), and palm the ball constantly.
I'll let Shaun Powell from the Hangtime blog
explain in more depth:
Back in the Allen Iverson days, the league became alarmed with the evolution of the dribble. You can blame it on Tim Hardaway, the unofficial inventor of the crossover. Hardaway’s sleight-of-hand was perfectly legal, if you saw it in slo-mo, because he was that good at pulling it off. But it spawned millions of poor imitators who lifted the ball underneath while changing directions. That’s a palm, or a carry, as they called it back in the day.
It got so bad that today, they actually teach “palming” (ahem, crossover) to little kids. Yes, pretty soon, an entire generation began lifting the ball, pulling the ball, dragging the ball, everything but legally dribbling the ball. And the high schools and colleges looked the other way. Eventually, so did the NBA, for a while.
When Iverson violated every dribble rule in the book to gain an unfair advantage on his defender, the NBA decided to crack down. The “Iverson Rule” was put to test during the preseason and, just like now, players protested. The rule was enforced for roughly two months. Then, it was back to business as usual. Only once in a while, when a palm is just too obvious to ignore, does the whistle blow. Never with two minutes left in a tight game, however.
Basically, the players took ownership of the dribble and rewrote the rule book, and the NBA essentially allowed it to happen. Jamal Crawford, the Sixth Man of the Year, owes his career to palming. So does Dwyane Wade and countless others. And it’s even gotten worse: Now players are lifting the ball for a split second, and just as the defender thinks the player is about to stop dribbling, that player continues his dribble, clearly gaining an advantage because the defender is now off-balance. Phil Jackson calls it the “discontinue dribble” and it is rarely enforced.
I'd say that our own Isaiah Thomas, like Crawford, owes his career to the new laxity in the dribble rules. Probably even more so than Wade or Crawford, considering that his tiny size means his ability to create separation is an absolutely vital part of his game.
What do you think? Is rampant palming, and other sleight of hand that isn't exactly legal under the exact wording of the rules, a problem? Or does it allow the kind of free-flowing wizardry and one-on-one highlight reel ankle-breaking that makes the game especially fun to watch on a random night in January?
