from the you-must-pass-five-times-before-shooting dept.
A look at personal performance and assisting teammates in a highly competitive environment has found that personal performance increases at the expense of working together as a team. While bad for the team as a whole, it often awarded the non-team-player with better future contracts.
High-stakes team competitions can present a social dilemma in which participants must choose between concentrating on their personal performance and assisting teammates as a means of achieving group objectives. We find that despite the seemingly strong group incentive to win the NBA title, cooperative play actually diminishes during playoff games, negatively affecting team performance. Thus team cooperation decreases in the very high stakes contexts in which it is most important to perform well together. Highlighting the mixed incentives that underlie selfish play, personal scoring is rewarded with more lucrative future contracts, whereas assisting teammates to score is associated with reduced pay due to lost opportunities for personal scoring. A combination of misaligned incentives and psychological biases in performance evaluation bring out the "I" in "Team" when cooperation is most critical.
(Score: 1) by Buck Feta on Tuesday April 29 2014, @05:26PM
But there is a "me" hidden in there.
- fractious political commentary goes here -
(Score: 2, Insightful) by hoochiecoochieman on Tuesday April 29 2014, @05:45PM
Western societies are more and more obsessed in individualism. The reward systems are all biased to reward selfishness over team play, no matter what the rethorics say.
Being able to work as a team is an intrinsic characteristic of humans. And is a key part of our huge success as a species. Throwing it away in the name of rewarding only those on top because they're so fucking special can only bring the decadence of our civilisation.
Bear in mind that I'm not defending some hive-like society, just some balance.
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Tuesday April 29 2014, @07:18PM
Obviously, the balance already exists, because basketball is a team sport and you need some level of teamwork to be able to make it to the playoffs. What's interesting here is that the balance changes over the course of the season. Is that what fans want: showier, riskier play by the big stars in the playoff games? Maybe so.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday April 29 2014, @08:06PM
"Is that what fans want"
maybe "fans of other teams" as opposed to fans of the team or fans in general. I'm not a sports geek but even I know "everybody" watches the playoffs even if its not their team.
During the season the only team names the non-fans have heard in TV news coverage, are the superstars of the team, so naturally they'd be most interested in the superstars of the team.
Perhaps in some way they enjoy seeing teams, which beat "their" team, screw up as a group.
Fans might be looking for individual players "their" team could purchase next season, so showing off would seem to be to their individual advantage.
Lets face it, pro players got where they were by beating out 90% of their HS team, then beating out 90% of their college team, they didn't get recruited because their previous teams were strong, they got recruited because of their individual skill, so it could be habit that "toward the end" you try to get yourself recruited at the cost of the team, even if that strategy no longer works. The guys who don't do that, ended their careers in HS or college, or perhaps after their 1st pro contract.
(Score: 2) by monster on Wednesday April 30 2014, @08:18AM
And then you get the current state of affairs: Some exceptional athletes whose tactical baggage starts and ends at pick-and-roll.
If you enjoy the subtleties of team play, I can only suggest to watch some Euroleague matches: You won't see a lot of dunks, sure, and scores are usually lower, but that's because players have to face fast, coordinated defenses there. The NBA is more about "show above anything else"*. And, if you want to see some of the subtleties of defense, this is a good show [sbnation.com] of why good defense is much more than steals and blocks.
* In fact, if you put your team-colored glasses off and watch without prejudices, some star players like Lebron James or Blake Griffin should be faulted out in a few minutes in every match based on their "I'm going to slam dunk anyway, how dare you happen to be in my way?" actions to score.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 29 2014, @08:21PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 29 2014, @11:11PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford