When You’re Not Getting the Ball

You’re not getting the ball as much as you want to.

Maybe as much as you think you should. Maybe as much as you’d get it if the team were built differently. But right now, the ball runs through someone else, and your job is to make the most of the touches you get and do the things that don’t require the ball.

That is harder than it sounds. Let’s be honest about why.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

He must become greater; I must become less. John the Baptist said this about Jesus — the one whose role was to prepare the way for someone else, to point toward a greatness that was not his own, to be celebrated for his diminishment rather than despite it. That is a strange kind of greatness. And it is a genuinely rare one.

Basketball culture doesn’t produce many John the Baptists. The culture rewards the ones who get the ball, take the shots, and have the stats that show up in recruiting databases. The player who sets the screen that creates the open shot, who takes the charge, who makes the rotation that prevents the basket — that player is doing something essential and doing it largely invisibly.

Here is what is true about invisible excellence: it is the hardest kind to sustain, because the normal human motivation of recognition is not reliably available to fuel it. You have to find a different fuel. The player who does this work because they love the team, because they understand what the team needs and are willing to be the one who provides it without receiving credit for it — that player is operating from a motivation that is actually more stable than the one that requires recognition to continue.

Find the fuel that doesn’t require the ball. That’s where the real competitive character lives.

Specific and actionable. The commitment named out loud is more powerful than the general aspiration.