The Golden Age of Basketball

Chapter 241 Changes
Overtraining can sometimes be detrimental to a player's development.

Just like building muscle in the gym, diet, rest, and training are equally important.

The key is to find the middle balance point; overtraining leads to fatigue, while excessive rest leads to slackness.

As an old-school coach, Jack Ramsey is known for his high-intensity training.

He himself is an energy freak; even at 60, he still has the energy to entangle with players both on and off the field.

However, during the 1985-1986 season training camp, Ramsey began to emphasize rest and differentiate between different players.

In the past, Ramsey treated everyone equally when he led the team. This is a common management philosophy among traditional coaches. You can be a star off the field, but on the field, everyone is the same and has to listen to the coach.

This time it's different. Veterans received better care, rookies received more supervision, star players were given more diverse requirements, and more personalized training methods were used.

Ramsey did a lot of new learning and exchanges during the summer. You know, in the past, others were learning from him, and he was teaching the coaches.

This year, he adopted a more humble approach, no longer teaching as a PhD, but instead learning new ways of thinking and tactics from the perspective of a future student.

With only Adelman as an assistant coach for the Trail Blazers, Ramsey single-handedly developed many new training methods and plans with extraordinary energy.

He listened to Gan Guoyang's advice, emphasized strength training, and specifically consulted with Coach DeLong of Gonzaga University to correct the outdated notion that strength training would affect shooting touch.

Back then, NBA players only did moderate strength training during the offseason to increase muscle mass and physical strength.

Some interior players do heavy weight training, while perimeter players do very little, and by the middle of the season, everyone has stopped doing strength training.

Coach Delong broke with convention, and Gan Guoyang never stopped his strength training. Even when playing away games, he would find a gym to do a few sets.

Stockton's performance proves the necessity of strength training for perimeter players, especially since thick muscles can effectively prevent injuries, which is very important for the Trail Blazers.

Therefore, Ramsey made an unprecedented move by suggesting that Vandeweghe and Paxson do strength training during the training camp, with Gan Guoyang providing guidance.

Vandeweghe's back injury stemmed from a game during his time with the Nuggets, when he was hit in the back from behind by Daryl Dawkins against the Nets, leaving him with a history of injury problems.

When Vandeweghe was at UCLA, he was a very aggressive rebounder and defender, but when he joined the Nuggets, firstly, Doug Mo didn't care, and secondly, he was constantly plagued by back pain, so he almost stopped boxing out.

Gan Guoyang and Avia, professional strength trainers, developed a back recovery training plan for Vandeweghe, hoping to alleviate the injury to some extent.

When Drexler saw Vandeweghe doing back muscle training in the gym, he couldn't believe his eyes. He saw Gan Guoyang giving instructions from the side and asked Vandeweghe if he was being forced to do it. "If you're being forced," he said, "blink."

Vandeweghe smiled and said, "I should indeed do some strength training to improve my physical strength. However... my back is probably going to be difficult to recover; it would be good if it didn't get worse."

The back is a large muscle group in the human body and is crucial for exercise. Once the back is injured, treatment and rehabilitation are very troublesome. Vandeweghe is well aware of his own body.

He can't train like Gan Guoyang to become a muscle fanatic. The key is to appropriately increase his physical strength and make his offense more stable.

Gan Guoyang said, "Qiqi, I don't expect you to grab rebounds. You just need to focus on the fast breaks. With you here, I'm sure I'll win the rebounding title."

As the Trail Blazers' top-tier rebounding coach who never boxed out, Vandeweghe deserves a third of Gan Guoyang's rebounding title.

Gan Guoyang proved through practice how important strength training is, and the second thing Ramsey learned from Gan Guoyang was diet.

In the 60s and 70s, and even earlier, playing in the NBA was not considered a very serious job.

Many players feel that playing on hardwood floors is similar to doing manual labor on a construction site or driving a taxi on the street; the choice mainly depends on which pays more.

You can't expect a construction worker or a taxi driver to maintain a scientific and healthy diet and not smoke or drink in order to work better.

So, although NBA players are athletes who compete in high-intensity games, their diet is no different from that of ordinary people. They can eat whatever they want and smoke whenever they want.

For example, Celtics' Tom Heinsohn was a heavy smoker, and his poor stamina due to excessive smoking forced Auerbach to create a sixth man role to replace him.

Bob Cousy also advertised cigarettes, at a time when the health risks of smoking were still highly controversial.

This results in a situation where, apart from a small number of highly disciplined and high-earning star players with long careers, most other players are just going through the motions.

As player salaries rise and the NBA's influence grows, playing in the NBA has become a highly coveted job, with countless talented players vying for a place on the court.

Competition is becoming increasingly specialized and professional, leading to the emergence of videotapes, assistant coaches, team doctors, trainers, and rehabilitation therapists. In the future, there will be even more specialized positions to serve the players.

Although the Trail Blazers have a small staff, they still have plenty of work to do, and Ramsey has begun to consider the players' dietary health.

After a training session, he asked Gan Guoyang, "Gan, do you cook for yourself?"

Gan Guoyang subconsciously replied, "Yes." Then he sensed something was wrong. What was the old man planning to do?
Ramsey looked at Gan Guoyang and asked, "Would you like to take on an extra part-time job with the team?"

Gan Guoyang thought to himself, "I'm already exhausted from playing basketball, and I sometimes have to take on the roles of defensive coach, strength trainer, and even general manager."

What else do you want me to do? Make me cook for everyone?
Cooking is just a hobby of mine; it can't become my job.

"I'm a renowned Chinese chef; the team can't afford me!"

"I'm not asking you to cook, but I hope you can provide a suggested diet plan so that everyone can control their diet. Of course, whether the players can stick to it depends on their own decisions."

It turns out he's a part-time nutritionist, offering advice to everyone, which Gan Guoyang finds acceptable.

So he wrote a set of dietary recommendations and sent it to the whole team, which later became a routine for the Trail Blazers, and they sent one every season.

Gan Guoyang would update the recipes every now and then. Many years later, these recipes were compiled into a book and published under the name "Forrest Gump Basketball Recipes," which sold very well in the Oregon area.

The entire Trail Blazers team felt the change from top to bottom. Veterans like Walton and Thompson were amazed that Ramsey, at such a stubborn age of 60, could still learn new things.

However, this is not the biggest change. The biggest change comes from the training content – ​​the proportion of defensive training in the team has been greatly increased.

Previously, the Trail Blazers' training content had an offensive-defensive ratio of about 7:3, with three offensive training sessions per week, plus one defensive session and defensive video lessons.

However, in this season's preseason training camp, the ratio of offensive to defensive training sessions has become 1:1, with two offensive training sessions and two defensive training sessions.

Moreover, the defensive video lessons were not reduced, which means that defense accounts for a larger proportion of Ramsey's training content than offense.

This is the first time in Ramsey's coaching career that offense has been the main theme of his teams, from St. Joseph's University to the Philadelphia 76ers and then to the Portland Trail Blazers.

Of course, Ramsey was not without defensive background; on the contrary, he was quite good at defensive research and pioneered the "St. Joseph Zone Press" during his college years.

This is a zone defense strategy used in NCAA games. Its characteristic is to use pressure to lead the opponent into the defensive trap set by the team.

It can be said that even if Ramsey wasn't the first to propose the concept of defensive traps, he contributed to its refinement and development, and made a significant contribution to illegal defense in the NBA.

His philosophy was later brought to the Lakers by McKinney and inherited by Pat Riley, becoming an important part of the "Forrest Gump Principle".

Gan Guoyang's ability to use defensive traps is also inseparable from Ramsey's daily training and on-field command.

Otherwise, Gan Guoyang alone could not have executed such defensive tactics.

However, in Ramsey's view, the NBA is ultimately an offensive league.

The no-zone defense can only be man-to-man, which results in a smaller return on investment in defense.

The champions of the 80s were all offensively strong teams, ranking high in points per game. The Lakers and Celtics were both very powerful offensive teams.

But some of the lessons learned from last season, and the meeting held in Los Angeles in September, changed Ramsey's mind.

Coaches believe that after the brutal defense of the 70s, the league tightened its officiating and reduced physicality, leading to a general increase in team scoring averages in the 80s.

Last season, the league teams averaged 110.8 points per game, which should have reached its limit. David Stern's arrival will definitely bring about a change.

It might encourage more physicality and defense, making the game more intense and more attractive to fans.

Ramsey believes that one must keep up with the trend and become a trendsetter.

Of course, this process will be long, and changes will not suddenly appear in one or two seasons.

Ramsey doesn't expect the Trail Blazers to immediately transform into a defensive powerhouse, but their defense must improve in order to win the championship.

Walton was curious about the dramatic change in Ramsey, and his staff and old friends all told him that it was Forrest Gump who changed Ramsey.

After a training session, Walton soaked his feet with Gan Guoyang and asked him how he had changed Ramsey.

Gan Guoyang said, "I used to think that Dr. Jack had changed, but he hasn't. He's just trying to adapt to the new world."

"Isn't this change? Change is for the purpose of adaptation."

"It depends on the reason for the adaptation. Some people adapt simply to survive. Dr. Jack is different. His so-called change stems from his unwavering champion's heart. I gave him the hope of winning a championship, which motivated him to change and win the next title. We're all like that, aren't we, Bill?"

Walton touched his forehead. His signature long red hair had been cut off and replaced with short hair, and his long red beard was gone, cleanly shaved.

(End of this chapter)