Every basketball player that has been successful knows that at some point in your playing career you start to get a bit overconfident. For me that was in high school, when maturity was at a premium. The guards on my team (myself included) used to be so confident in our outside stroke that we would shoot the ball and turn around to run back on defense before ever seeing if the ball went in or not. We didn’t need to look, we were confident it went down.
Problem is, it doesn’t always go in. And fundamentally speaking when there was a miss, we should have been following our shot to give our team the best chance at securing an offensive rebound. Ah well, we learn with experience right?
Well Lebron still has a bit of that overconfidence left in him. But for Lebron it wasn’t his shot he was banking on, it was his teammate Shane Battier’s three pointer. After Kobe was hounding Lebron on defense, James made a smooth and crisp corner pass to Battier for the wide open three pointer. Before Battier even released the ball, Lebron turned around and strutted back to play defense. Lucky for Lebron, Battier made the shot.
Sometimes in basketball, overconfidence works out just right….
