Offense may get the glory, but defense is the foundation for winning. Loose ball recoveries, steals, and hard-fought rebounding from the defense can turn the momentum in a game and give the offense scoring opportunities. Most of the top teams are fundamentally sound defensively and take a real pride in their defense. Hall of Famer Pete Newell -- who coached the University of California to an NCAA championship in 1959 and the U.S. Olympic team to gold the following year -- explains winning individual and team defenses. He also examines the best defensive teams he has seen over time and points out what they have done to dominate other teams and stop their offenses. -- Coaches and players at all levels can gain insight into defensive play through Pete Newell's extensive knowledge and experience -- Defensive plays are concisely explained and fully illustrated with photos and diagrams -- Newell is a basketball legend and has been a championship coach at the college and the Olympic levels

Learn the finer points of post play with Pete Newell's Playing Big. Featuring key techniques, teaching points, and drills for playing in and around the paint, this book and DVD gives insight into the skills of basketball's top players while giving you the best skill instruction for all levels to develop the modern multidimensional player.

In the mid-1950s three unrecruited black basketball players, coached by a white former prison guard who had never before coached a college team, led a small Jesuit university in San Francisco to two national titles. The Dandy Dons describes for the first time how the unprecedented accomplishment of the Dons, led by coach Phil Woolpert and future hall-of-famers Bill Russell and K. C. Jones, paved the way for black talent in major college basketball and transformed the sport. James W. Johnson traces the backgrounds of the coach and players, chronicles the heart-stopping games on the road to the championships, and details the Dons’ novel techniques: a more vertical game, more central defense, and intimidation as part of game strategy. He also gives a textured picture of life on an integrated basketball team amid a culture of racism and Jim Crow in mid-twentieth-century America.

On the night of March 2, 1962, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, right up the street from the chocolate factory, Wilt Chamberlain, a young and striking athlete celebrated as the Big Dipper, scored one hundred points in a game against the New York Knickerbockers. As historic and revolutionary as the achievement was, it remains shrouded in myth. The game was not televised; no New York sportswriters showed up; and a fourteen-year-old local boy ran onto the court when Chamberlain scored his hundredth point, shook his hand, and then ran off with the basketball. In telling the story of this remarkable night, author Gary M. Pomerantz brings to life a lost world of American sports. In 1962, the National Basketball Association, stepchild to the college game, was searching for its identity. Its teams were mostly white, the number of black players limited by an unspoken quota. Games were played in drafty, half-filled arenas, and the players traveled on buses and trains, telling tall tales, playing cards, and sometimes reading Joyce. Into this scene stepped the unprecedented Wilt Chamberlain: strong and quick-witted, voluble and enigmatic, a seven-footer who played with a colossal will and a dancer’s grace. That strength, will, grace, and mystery were never more in focus than on March 2, 1962. Pomerantz tracked down Knicks and Philadelphia Warriors, fans, journalists, team officials, other NBA stars of the era, and basketball historians, conducting more than 250 interviews in all, to recreate in painstaking detail the game that announced the Dipper’s greatness. He brings us to Hershey, Pennsylvania, a sweet-seeming model of the gentle, homogeneous small-town America that was fast becoming anachronistic. We see the fans and players, alternately fascinated and confused by Wilt, drawn anxiously into the spectacle. Pomerantz portrays the other legendary figures in this story: the Warriors’ elegant coach Frank McGuire; the beloved, if rumpled, team owner Eddie Gottlieb; and the irreverent p.a. announcer Dave “the Zink” Zinkoff, who handed out free salamis courtside. At the heart of the book is the self-made Chamberlain, a romantic cosmopolitan who owned a nightclub in Harlem and shrugged off segregation with a bebop cool but harbored every slight deep in his psyche. March 2, 1962, presented the awesome sight of Wilt Chamberlain imposing himself on a world that would diminish him. Wilt, 1962 is not only the dramatic story of a singular basketball game but a meditation on small towns, midcentury America, and one of the most intriguing figures in the pantheon of sports heroes. Also available as a Random House AudioBook

Contains biographies of active and retired athletes, living or dead, plus media personalities, coaches, and administrators.

Lute!" is the chronicle of one American boys dream to become a great basketball coach: his achievements, his coaching strategies, and how he has dealt with love, loss, and renewal. Two 8-page photo inserts, one in color.

Author George A. Selleck provides the means for a love of basketball to be transformed into a learning experience for life. Court Sense shows parents, coaches, and players how to apply skills and intelligence on the basketball court to life situations, to prepare the athlete for life long after the last jump shot has been made.

Those who avidly followed the on-court acrobatics and off-court celebrity of the OC Dream TeamOCO in Barcelona in 1992 would hardly recognize what passed as basketball fifty-six years earlier, when the United States first played the game in the 1936 Olympics. In those early days of menOCOs Olympic basketball, many teams lacked basic skills, games were played in the pouring rain, only seven players could suit up, and the rules allowed only two substitutions and no time-outs. How this slow, low-scoring sport became the breakneck game that enraptures millions worldwide is the story of American Hoops.In this fascinating history of Olympic basketball on the world stage and behind the scenes, Carson Cunningham presents a kaleidoscopic picture of the evolution into the twenty-first century of one of AmericaOCOs most popular sports. From clashes between celebrated egos and thrilling action on the court to the intense rivalries of the Cold War and technological advances in everything from television to sports equipment off the court, American Hoops follows the fortunes of Olympic basketball, in the United States and internationally, as it developed and emerged as one of the most challenging and entertaining sports in the world.Cunningham traces how the modifications made by the International Olympic Committee and the International Basketball Federation have transformed the game of basketball over the years, from the Berlin to the Beijing Olympics. His book offers a remarkable view of the changing world through the prism of Olympic sport."

Former University of North Carolina men's basketball coach Dean Smith was one of the most successful coaches ever to hold a whistle. In his 36 years at North Carolina, his teams won a record 879 games. They also captured 17 conference championships and two NCAA championships, claimed 30 seasons with at least 20 wins, and made 11 Final Four appearances. Coach Smith developed 26 consensus All-Americans, five NBA rookies of the year (including the great Michael Jordan), and 25 first-round draft picks. But Smith's basketball accomplishments tell only part of his story. You may not know that Smith worked to abolish the death penalty in North Carolina and openly supported gay rights. As a high school senior in 1949, five years before the Supreme Court's historic ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, he pleaded in vain with officials to include African-American players on the school's basketball team. Sixteen years later, after completing his fourth season as the head coach at North Carolina, Smith ventured to New York City and came back to Chapel Hill with Charlie Scott, the most significant recruit of his tenure. Scott became the school's first African-American scholarship recipient. Smith had successfully integrated major college basketball in the South. Smith passed away in February 2015, and Dean Smith: A Basketball Life takes stock of this extraordinary man whose ideas and philosophies have shaped the best of what college basketball has been and should aspire to be in the future. In this revealing biography, author Jeff Davis calls on the reminiscences of Coach Smith's closest friends and associates, former players, coaches, and rivals, and a wealth of secondary sources, to render a rich and vivid portrait of this towering figure of 20th-century American sports.

A portrait of the controversial basketball coach traces his tenure with Indiana University and offers insight into the darker side of his personality as well as the methods that led to his numerous awards.