I’ve written about sports frequently because I think the lessons are incredibly transferable. Athletics are extremely competitive with a long history of results-oriented focus. It’s a huge business, with a lot of attention, money and science aimed at maximizing results. While transferring lessons from a game can be dangerous, because any game is an over simplification of the complexity of the real world,  closed environments are great testing grounds for honing narrow theories, skills and practices.

During Halftime of the NBA Finals there was a great segment where Dwight Howard, a future great, was spending time learning from Bill Russel, the greatest winner of all time — 11 championships.  Michael Wilbon talked about the importance of listening and its tendency to be underrated. Wilbon praised Howard’s willingness to listen to Bill Russell.

They were discussing how you become great and Russell told Howard that when the season ended he should take a month off and not even look at a basketball. This violated Howard’s worldview — “That’s time others could be working,” he replied incredulous.  Intuition says Howard is right: maximize time working. But I’m inclined to trust the greatest winner of all time. It fits with the current paradigm of the productivity-obsessed that the correct paradigm is to focus on energy management not time management.

High achievers who strive to be the best seem to undervalue the long term benefit of taking time off. Growth requires focus and intensity and you simply can’t do that 24/7/365. Stepping away, recharging, and revitalizing is crucial for long term growth. And think long term growth whenever possible.

Jeff Van Gundy made another astute point on a common error most people make. Van Gundy was addressing criticism other people had of Kobe Byrant, that he should shoot more or pass more. Van Gundy said focusing on passing more or shooting more was flat out wrong. Instead he said, just focus on making the right decision. Let the situation dictate your decision making. If they go single coverage go 1 on 1, if they try and double team, find the open man. This lesson struck me as very universal. So many times we can get zeroed on doing something regardless of the situation, like deciding we should pass more or shoot more. Instead focus on the right thing: being flexible, assessing the situation and adapting. “Mind like Water” as they say.

If you’re trying to write a popular blog don’t focus on the wrong metrics like “driving more traffic” to your site. Instead focus on better content first. If you’re in a conversation with someone important or beautiful and you’re nervous, don’t focus on saying the perfect thing instead just focus on having 100% belief in what ever comes to mind. If you’re trying to get the ear of someone who is incredibly busy and you see them at an event, don’t make a pact that you’re going to get him to help you no matter what, instead if you do enter in conversation just go with the flow, make a good impression and follow up later.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

I’ve just been reading several of the books that were written about the fall of Bear Stearns, and those books illustrate another side of this story. Bear Stearns didn’t fail because the employees were incompetent, because they weren’t good at what they do. They failed because they were good at what they do. They were so successful for so long that they grew overconfident and arrogant and complacent. The biggest obstacle to success is success. My biggest worry for LeBron is that he wins the title this season. And if he wins again next year, and the year after that, then what do you have? A guy still in his mid-20s who has already done it all, and has no reason to doubt his own skills and judgments, ever. You’ll bring him in as a free agent when you become GM of the Minnesota Christians and team him up with Larry Bird’s nephew and two 5-foot-9 “character guys” from Holy Cross, and it’ll all be downhill from there. Mark my words.

By contrast, remember what happened to LeBron last summer during the Redeem Team practices? He watched Kobe getting up at 6 a.m. every day to train for three grueling hours, then said to himself, “All right, this guy works harder than me. I need to step it up.” And he did. And that exposure had a profound effect on his career, just like every splendid Michael Lewis story probably keeps you on your toes. If Kobe dropped dead of a cocaine overdose eight years ago, does LeBron have that epiphany? Maybe not. You can become great without the help of someone else, but you can’t stay great without someone pushing you. Golf excepted, of course.

Given that, then, why do so few underdog teams use the press? Pitino’s explanation is that it’s because most coaches simply can’t convince their players to work that hard. What do you think of that argument?

There are two other things here that fascinate me. After my piece ran in The New Yorker, one of the most common responses I got was people saying, well, the reason more people don’t use the press is that it can be beaten with a well-coached team and a good point guard. That is (A) absolutely true and (B) beside the point. The press doesn’t guarantee victory. It simply represents the underdog’s best chance of victory. It raises their odds from zero to maybe 50-50. I think, in fact, that you can argue that a pressing team is always going to have real difficulty against a truly elite team. But so what? Everyone, regardless of how they play, is going to have real difficulty against truly elite teams. It’s not a strategy for being the best. It’s a strategy for being better.

I wonder if there isn’t something particularly American in the preference for “best” over “better” strategies. I might be pushing things here. But both the U.S. health-care system and the U.S. educational system are exclusively “best” strategies: They excel at furthering the opportunities of those at the very top end. But they aren’t nearly as interested in moving people from the middle of the pack to somewhere nearer the front.

Or how about eliminating the draft altogether? I’m at least half-serious here. Think about it. Suppose we let every college player apply for and receive job offers in the same way that, oh, every other human being on the planet does. That doesn’t mean that everyone goes to L.A. and New York, because you still have the constraints of the cap. It does mean, though, that both players and teams would have to make an affirmative case for each other’s services. So you trade for Steve Nash or Jason Kidd, because they make you instantly attractive to every mobile big man coming out of college. Instead of asking the boring question — which team is going to be lucky enough to draft Derrick Rose? — we ask the far more interesting question: Which team, out of every team in the league, should Derrick Rose play for?

The bigger point here is that what consistently drives me crazy about big-time sports is the assumption that sports occupy their own special universe, in which the normal rules of the marketplace and human psychology don’t apply. That’s how you get the idea of a reverse-order draft, which violates every known rule of human behavior.

We had lunch a few weeks ago and discussed the parallels between music and basketball. The structure is fundamentally the same: You have a lead singer (the NBA alpha dog, like LeBron or Kobe), the lead guitarist (the sidekick, like Pippen or McHale), the drummer (an unsung third wheel, like Parish or Worthy), the bassist (a solid, reliable and ultimately disposable role player: like Byron Scott or Anderson Varejao); and then everyone else (the other rotation guys). Bands can go different ways just like successful basketball teams. McCartney and Lennon were two geniuses who ultimately needed one another (like Young Magic and Older Kareem, or Shaq and Young Kobe), whereas MJ and LeBron were more like Sting or Springsteen (someone who could carry the band by themselves). And if you want to drag hip-hop or rap into it, the best parallel would obviously be Jordan’s post-baseball Bulls: MJ was Chuck D, Pippen was Terminator X, and there is no effing doubt that Rodman was Flavor Flav.

Here are few of my favorite quotes.

It turns out there is no statistic that a basketball player accumulates that cannot be amassed selfishly.

“We think about this deeply whenever we’re talking about contractual incentives,” he says. “We don’t want to incent a guy to do things that hurt the team” — and the amazing thing about basketball is how easy this is to do. “They all maximize what they think they’re being paid for,” he says. He laughs. “It’s a tough environment for a player now because you have a lot of teams starting to think differently. They’ve got to rethink how they’re getting paid.”

Battier was assigned to guard their most dangerous scorer, Manu Ginóbili. Ginóbili comes off the bench, however, and his minutes are not in sync with the minutes of a starter like Battier. Battier privately went to Coach Rick Adelman and told him to bench him and bring him in when Ginóbili entered the game. “No one in the N.B.A. does that,” Morey says. “No one says put me on the bench so I can guard their best scorer all the time.”

“We can give him this fire hose of data and let him sift. Most players are like golfers. You don’t want them swinging while they’re thinking.”

“If he has 40 points on 40 shots, I can live with that,” Battier says. “My job is not to keep him from scoring points but to make him as inefficient as possible.” The court doesn’t have little squares all over it to tell him what percentage Bryant is likely to shoot from any given spot, but it might as well.

“The Lakers’ offense should obviously be better with Kobe in,” Morey says. “But if Shane is on him, it isn’t.” A player whom Morey describes as “a marginal N.B.A. athlete” not only guards one of the greatest — and smartest — offensive threats ever to play the game. He renders him a detriment to his team.

“The numbers either refute my thinking or support my thinking,” [Battier] says, “and when there’s any question, I trust the numbers. The numbers don’t lie.”

“It’s a subtle difference,” Morey says, “but it has big implications. If you have an intuition of something but no hard evidence to back it up, you might kind of sort of go about putting that intuition into practice, because there’s still some uncertainty if it’s right or wrong.”

Knowing the odds, Battier can pursue an inherently uncertain strategy with total certainty. He can devote himself to a process and disregard the outcome of any given encounter. This is critical because in basketball, as in everything else, luck plays a role, and Battier cannot afford to let it distract him.

Tonight Bryant complained that Battier was grabbing his jersey, Battier was pushing when no one was looking, Battier was committing crimes against humanity. Just before the half ended, Battier took a referee aside and said: “You and I both know Kobe does this all the time. I’m playing him honest. Don’t fall for his stuff.” Moments later, after failing to get a call, Bryant hurled the ball, screamed at the ref and was whistled for a technical foul.

hese men happened to be among the most famous basketball coaches in the world and the most persistent recruiters, but Battier granted no exceptions. When the Kentucky coach Rick Pitino, who had just won a national championship, tried to call Battier outside his assigned time, Battier simply removed Kentucky from his list. “What 17-year-old has the stones to do that?” Wetzel asks. “To just cut off Rick Pitino because he calls outside his window?” Wetzel answers his own question: “It wasn’t like, ‘This is a really interesting 17-year-old.’ It was like, ‘This isn’t real.’ ”

In the statistically insignificant sample of professional athletes I’ve come to know a bit, two patterns have emerged. The first is, they tell you meaningful things only when you talk to them in places other than where they have been trained to answer questions. It’s pointless, for instance, to ask a basketball player about himself inside his locker room. For a start, he is naked; for another, he’s surrounded by the people he has learned to mistrust, his own teammates. The second pattern is the fact that seemingly trivial events in their childhoods have had huge influence on their careers. A cleanup hitter lives and dies by a swing he perfected when he was 7; a quarterback has a hitch in his throwing motion because he imitated his father. Here, in the Detroit Country Day School library, a few yards from the gym, Battier was back where he became a basketball player. And he was far less interested in what happened between him and Kobe Bryant four months ago than what happened when he was 12.

Battier was half-white and half-black, but basketball, it seemed, was either black or white. A small library of Ph.D. theses might usefully be devoted to the reasons for this. For instance, is it a coincidence that many of the things a player does in white basketball to prove his character — take a charge, scramble for a loose ball — are more pleasantly done on a polished wooden floor than they are on inner-city asphalt? Is it easier to “play for the team” when that team is part of some larger institution? At any rate, the inner-city kids with whom he played on the A.A.U. circuit treated Battier like a suburban kid with a white game, and the suburban kids he played with during the regular season treated him like a visitor from the planet where they kept the black people.

Battier looked back to see the ball drop through the basket and hit the floor. In that brief moment he was the picture of detachment, less a party to a traffic accident than a curious passer-by. And then he laughed. The process had gone just as he hoped. The outcome he never could control.