Have you ever wondered--"What if you just played offense in basketball?" (spoiler: it doesn't work). Greater minds than mine have wondered. Paul Westhead, LaLa Lake-Lake, Wind, Denver. Westhead implemented it in college ball at Loyola Marymount. LMU averaged a record 122.4 ppg in 1989/90. The thinking would be this: playing suffocating defense takes the wind out of your shooters. You know when players "don't have their legs" on shots? That's because they're also playing D, not because they're tired jumping and shooting. When a shooter gets tired the shot goes south. But, it doesn't work. I don't know if Westhead tried the up-tempo, run-and-gun in the pros. He spent six years on three teams in the NBA, eighteen years at three schools. I know of him mostly from his college years at LMU. If you have the shooting talent and play in a shitty conference where you're far superior well yeah, you can shoot the lights out. But in the association there are no shitty teams other than Cleveland most years, in the association all the players were the elite on their college teams, any pro except Justise Winslow, even 7-footers, can hit even the long distance threes, they all can shoot if you don't guard them. So that's the problem. What exactly would your strategy be, play ole defense just to pick off the low-hanging fruit and get the ball back as soon as possible and launch? You're gonna miss some now. And then what, you just let the other team go down and score, don't even bother getting back 'cause that uses too much energy? See, it doesn't work. You'd get crushed in the NBA not playing defense. Games like tonight's Miami-Chazz game where obviously both teams just decided to have fun remind me of the question. The answer still is, it doesn't work.