Last Updated on June 22, 2024 by Mathew Diekhake
This is a thread dedicated to JJ Redick’s Mind the Game basketball podcast, which I think is going to share lots of great information about the technical side of basketball.
Even those of us who love the game can lose interest if we don’t keep up with the X’s and O’s because we may fail to think beyond pick and rolls and 3-point shots. If that’s all you think about, the game can become boring, even to the most autistic of people who seemingly never get tired of watching a basketball go through a hoop.
Sometimes if the topic is worthwhile, I will create separate topics for things I have learned in the podcast, but this thread can be used to write down minor things learned on the podcast that one may deem as interesting or worth dissecting.
June 22, 2024 @ 8:04 am
I will start with the name. JJ Reddick is decent at coming up with names for podcasts. The first (The Old Man and the Three) is taken from the Ernest Hemingway novel The Old Man and the Sea. Harold Bloom suggested that was a conceited book and not one of his best, but other authors such as William Faulkner were fond of it. I myself haven’t devoted much time to it. I would assume Bloom to be correct.
This new name, Mind the Game, I assume is a pun taken from the phrase Mind the Gap. There was a skateboarding documentary that came out in 2018 called the same; however, I assume that is not where the name is taken from. Mind the Gap supposedly was a phrase before that related to the dangerous gap at train stations that we must avoid if we don’t want to fall. If so, what relation does that have to basketball, if any at all? My guess is there isn’t one, though I could be wrong. JJ may have used the phrase because it is relevant to thinking about basketball rather than the phrase itself which it is borrowed from having any direct meaning.