Free Values of the Game by Bill Bradley

after a failure isn’t a problem—indeed, it might even sharpen your alertness because you’d be intent on making up for the mistake. It’s after you’ve pulled off a great play that focus is difficult, because there’s “a strong temptation to dwell on what you just did.” By the time you finish congratulating yourself, your opponent has scored three baskets.
    The ultimate danger of being victorious is losing sight of how you got there. Only a few teams in the NBA have repeated as champions. As Bill Russell puts it: “It’s easier to become Number One than it is to stay Number One.” Somewhere along the line, most teams fail to prepare themselves for the season following a championship. The fault can be mental, as in the lessening of the desire to win, or physical, as in reporting to training camp overweight or undertrained. Occasionally jealousy among players about who got what rewards out of the last year’s championship can eat away at team unity.
    Bouncing back from both victory and defeat requires a reservoir of self-knowledge. Making adjustments in your playing style is sometimes wise, but altering what you believe about the game in order to break a skid will never work. Nearly every day Phil Jackson puts on the chalkboard a clearly defined set of offensive principles: Provide proper spacing, penetrate the defense, ensure player and ball movement with a purpose, provide strong rebounding position and good defensive balance on all shots, and so on. A set of principles allows a coach’s criticism to be less personal and each player’s performance to be measured against the team mission. If your game is guided that way, it’s easier to be consistent. Otherwise, you’re just reacting—to helpful friends or critical sportswriters, all with their own ideas about how you won or what went wrong. While it’s a good idea to take praise in the press with a grain of salt, it’s also wise to listen to the criticism and determine whether or not it’s merited. If it’s not, treat it just like the praise.
    There’s also a need for such a thing as resilience within a game. In most contests, there are good and bad moments; the flow is inevitable. Yet some players, and some teams, can’t seem to come back from a bad break. When a team makes a few dumb plays or gets a few bad calls, its play often deteriorates. Teammates will glare at each other; occasionally, hostile words will pass between them. By the fourth quarter, they’re starting to prepare their postgame excuses. Defeat is inevitable. When things go bad for such teams, no one steps in to change the momentum, and then they get even worse.
    There is no greater tonic for team morale than a come-from-behind victory; it’s the core of team resilience. In 1972, the Knicks fell 19 points behind Milwaukee in a game with six minutes to go, yet we won. When our team hit a few shots while holding the Bucks scoreless, the crowd in Madison Square Garden began to rumble. After a few steals were converted into baskets, the margin dropped to 8 points, and the rumble turned into a roar. By the time we trailed by only 2 points, the roar was deafening. By the end of the game, which we won, people were shouting, “I believe! I believe!” convinced that we could overcome any obstacle, surmount any lead.
    That belief has remarkable power. Combined with trust in your teammates, it can have a dramatic psychological effect on your opponents. It becomes a part of your team’s reputation. Once that happens, no opposing team ever feels safe, no matter how great a lead it has. More important, your team knows it will be in every game until the very end.
    Comeback stories, examples of tenacity under pressure, provide a model for beating the odds. They become part of the collective imagination, and they are drawn on in countless situations by people in all walks of life. The stories tell us never to give up—that failure can turn to success, that misfortune can be overcome, that the