Creative vs. opportunistic scorers
by Drew Cannon on Monday, October 15, 2012
A while back, I wrote this article describing a new way of understanding positions in basketball, the focus being separating offensive responsibilities from defensive responsibilities. Another guy in the basketball office and I were arguing recently about whether a specific player deserved to be termed a “scorer.”
The argument basically went like this: He said (correctly) that this player couldn’t create his own shot, and wondered how anybody like that could be described as a scorer. To which I responded (correctly) that you didn’t need to create your own shot to score and score effectively. Our eventual compromise was to create a subscript to the “scorer” designation with a descriptor that the scorer was either “creative” or “opportunist.” (This does, admittedly and unfairly, make it sound like the creative scorer is a genius and the opportunist scorer is a thief – that’s not the intention.)