It was the great basketball philosopher John Wooden who said, “Happiness begins where selfishness ends.”
Quin Snyder wholeheartedly agrees, having emphasized to anyone willing to listen, and some not willing, the importance of team-oriented play.
Wooden also said, “Selfishness is the greatest challenge for a coach. Most players are more concerned with making themselves better than the team.”
Not just with making themselves better, but with making themselves look better.
This past week, there were two contrasting circumstances involving the Utah Jazz and an opponent that underscored this point, the fruitlessness of it, in an unmistakable way.
The first came when the Jazz played the Suns, and ended up crushing them by 33 points. In that beatdown, visiting guard Devin Booker scored 59 points, all as the Jazz rolled.
It was quite an individual performance. Booker displayed a variety of skills in getting 19 field goals, five 3-pointers, and 16 made free throws. With the game hopelessly out of reach, Booker was subbed out late in the fourth quarter by Phoenix coach — and former Jazz assistant — Igor Kokoskov.
What wasn’t so impressive was Booker essentially checking himself back in so he could try to reach 60. Nobody liked the move, except for Booker. The Jazz even fouled to prevent him from getting another point. And his own teammates appeared to be avoiding him once he re-entered.
On one hand, achieving such a lofty scoring perch is kind of cool. On the other, it is not cool.
Going for 60 in the normal course of a game is a fine achievement, particularly if doing so is advancing the cause of the team. If it is advancing the cause of a single player, at the expense of the team, it is nothing short of destructive.
It could be argued that nobody else on the Suns was scoring worth a darn and that Booker properly decided, if none of his teammates could do it, he would. It could be better argued that it would have been more constructive for an established scorer like Booker to involve his teammates in the offense as a way to improve and coordinate the overall attack and to help develop other players, especially the younger, yet-unseasoned ones, as a means of pushing forward the team’s outlook not in this already lost season, but in the seasons ahead. Which is to say, showing leadership.
Instead, there was the lasting image of Booker re-entering a game that was a blowout only for the purpose of trying to hit a self-aggrandizing number.
Contrast that with what happened against the Lakers in the subsequent Jazz game, when Joe Ingles was part of a memorable night in which he was attempting to bring attention to the cause of helping autistic children a month or two after his own young child, Jacob, was diagnosed as one of those kids. It was a beautiful thing.
And Ingles made it more beautiful by playing like a star in what turned out to be another easy Jazz win. He scored in double figures, he had double-digit assists, and he fell one rebound short of collecting a career-first triple-double. Everybody in the building knew he was one board away. But when he was removed from the game with it well-decided, time still on the clock, there was no temptation to put him back in to seek a triple-double that would have been meaningless to the welfare of the team.
Not even Ingles wanted that.
“I’m never going to go box out Rudy so I can get another rebound,” he said during his weekly appearance on the DJ and PK Show on 97.5/1280 The Zone. “It’s just not me to go chase something like that.”
He added that when Snyder took him out in the closing minutes, he was disinclined to go back in because, “That’s an opportunity for other guys to play.”
Putting him back in for a number not related to winning, he said, “is not the Jazz, it’s not what we do. It’s not me, it’s not our team. It never will be.”
Nobody’s saying Booker is an evil dude or that Ingles is an angel. And it should be noted that the Jazz do include hefty bonuses in player contracts for individual achievements that are numbers-centric.
But it is easy to say Ingles knows what’s most important, as do the Jazz as a whole, when it comes to team basketball and rock-steady competitive priorities, even in a big-money league where stacks of cash are available to those who make themselves look valuable.
There is, indeed, a useful place for egocentrism in John Wooden’s game — if that egocentrism is in alignment with the greater good. But when it honors itself as a means to a shallow, singular end, at the disadvantage to the team and the others on it, that’s where selfishness begins and happiness ends.
GORDON MONSON hosts “The Big Show” with Jake Scott weekdays from 3-7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone.
