Many of us are authors, and this has been a hard couple of years. The rules of publishing keep changing. What worked even 2 years ago does not work now. AI arrived and it is the Caitlin Clark of this industry. It changed what is possible, and now everyone else is scrambling to respond to it. The retailers are changing their rules. The categories are flooded. The costs went up. Most people are angry about it. I understand why. But in the story I share in this video, the people worth paying attention to are not just the star player but how other actors change because the rules of the game have changed.
Sometimes what you see happening in your life is not the truth, and you can make very bad decisions if you don’t learn how to see the bigger picture. There is a great story to illustrate this.
You probably have been following the WNBA and Caitlin Clark, who, as you know, is this phenomenal player that entered the scene. She played a big role in driving the popularity of the sport, and she’s unusual because she’s so talented. She’s changed the game in the way she drives the offense. She’s a scorer. She’s a guard. But what makes her unusual is she can score outside the semicircle and near the halfway mark.
So how do you guard against someone who never gets close to the basket?
What’s happened is that a lot of the opposing teams have started fouling her. They send out the defenders deep in, and they start fouling her. And a lot of the media is up in arms because they say Caitlin Clark is being unfairly fouled. She’s being fouled more than the average player. She’s being fouled aggressively. She’s being fouled more than the average point guard. And obviously, this is wrong.
If you apply statistics here, you’d say yes, of course. She’s being fouled. No one else is being fouled like her.
But you have got to understand statistics, and that’s not what it’s saying.
To understand the story, you have to go back to the mid-1980s when Michael Jordan arrived on the scene.
When Michael Jordan arrived, he was an offensive phenomenon. Nobody knew how to deal with this guy. How do you stop someone like Michael Jordan from scoring when he was just so good at scoring?
And then there was a guy called Chuck Daly, who was the coach of the Detroit Pistons. Chuck Daly said, okay, hold on a second. We’re going to change the way we defend Michael Jordan, because we’re never going to win if we defend him the way we defend the average guard. We can’t treat him like the average guard because he’s not average.
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He’s like Caitlin Clark. You cannot have a strategy for him that you apply to everyone else.
So Chuck Daly came up with something called the Jordan Rules. The Jordan Rules were simple. They would use the defenders to push Michael Jordan onto the side of the court where he was not able to take his best shots. That’s the first rule. The second one is they would try to get him to come within the semicircle to score. And the third one is that they would use heavy defensive tackling. Two people would take him on, and the goal was to aggressively foul him. That’s the only way to shake him up. They said that if we can’t stop him, then we are forced to foul him, and we’re willing to do that.
We know this to be true because if you look at the NBA, they didn’t actually measure fouls in that time, but you can use a proxy for fouls as free throw attempts, because if you’re being fouled, you get a free throw attempt. So the player who’s fouled the most is going to get the most free throw attempts. And Michael Jordan in that period, for his position and for any player in the league, had the most free throw attempts by a wide margin versus Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and so on.
So it’s very clear he was fouled more than anyone.
Dennis Rodman and Joe Dumars developed this technique where they would go out and they would intimidate Michael Jordan. They would take the defense to him. They would force him down this corridor. They would move the defense to him versus waiting for him to come to the defense. They would antagonize him. They would throw him off balance.
And the thing is, when you play this kind of defensive game, when you’re moving your defensive players up and down, you have to be really, really conditioned, because they’re moving all over the court. They’re not just waiting at the basket.
At the time when Dennis Rodman and the Detroit Pistons started this strategy, they were ridiculed and they were criticized for being aggressive and being the bad guys of the game.
But what you don’t understand is that the defensive teams had to evolve to deal with someone like Michael Jordan.
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The game changed, and they had to adjust to give themselves the best chance to win. Otherwise, they would not be able to win.
That’s Dennis Rodman’s reputation even today. He’s the bad guy of basketball. It took many years for people to realize he was not a bad guy.
They didn’t appreciate this was an evolution of a defensive move, and it was brilliant defending.
So Michael Jordan comes. He changes the game. The Pistons develop a new defensive strategy, and they change the game, and Michael Jordan is being beaten up on the court.
So what does he do?
He says, okay, I’ve got to be a guy who’s got to be bulked up. I’ve got to go to the gym. So that when I get a hit, I can recover and I can take the shot.
Not only that. A more brilliant move is that I can actually deliberately get them to foul me, so I can keep possession and take the free throws.
This is an important strategy. Players like this, they are deliberately looking to be fouled. But to be deliberately fouled, you have to have the upper body mass. You have to have the physical standard to withstand them.
So Michael Jordan, after his first pounding, worked with a specialist trainer, and he put on something like 15, 18 pounds of muscle. He came back and obviously cleaned the clock.
But more interestingly, Dennis Rodman was then transferred to the Chicago Bulls, and he teamed up with Jordan and Pippen. They got the best offensive player, and they got this aggressive defending. Obviously they cleaned the clock.
Now that’s exactly what’s happening with Caitlin Clark.
She’s a phenomenal player. She changed the game. She changed women’s basketball because of the way she scored from so far away, from so many different positions. And she showed people what was possible.
In the previous game, the guards would wait for someone to come close to the basket, and then they’d go after them. This lady was never coming close to the basket. So in a brilliant defensive move that nobody’s seen, these teams found a way to send their defenders out far down to meet Caitlin Clark where she was and aggressively try to stop her.
That’s what they did. It’s exactly what they did to Michael Jordan.
And how is Caitlin Clark responding? During her summer break she did the same thing. She bulked up. She’s now deliberately drawing in fouls to draw in the players, get the free throw attempts. And that’s the way the game evolves.
But from what we know, in any articles and other media published on the issue, not a single person has ever appreciated the fact that the women’s basketball teams have come up with this brilliant defensive strategy to stop this unbelievable offensive player.
No one sees the brilliance of this. They just say they’re fouling her more than any player. They’re not seeing what is actually happening.
So how does this relate to your career?
There are a lot of times you think you know what is happening. You read all over the press that Caitlin Clark is being fouled more than anyone else. But this is what happens when you have a game-changing player. The opposition has to undertake a new strategy that will lead to different statistics.
Caitlin Clark’s fouls are more than any other guard because she’s not like any other guard.
What do you expect the defensive teams to do? Hold back? Stop the game? They have no better option they can think of or agree on but to foul her. And she’s doing it on purpose. She’s collecting the fouls the same way Michael Jordan did. Now, as she bulks up and she learns how to maneuver around this, the defensive teams will now have to do something different, because the ball is in their court.
That’s how life works. You take an action, and then the other party responds. And often you can predict how they will respond, so you can plan a few moves ahead.
It’s basic competitive strategy. It’s game theory. It’s all wrapped into this beautiful bouquet called competition.
Don’t stand there and call Caitlin Clark a victim. There’s a strategy at play here. You have got to see the strategy at play. Both sides understand it, but both sides are also trying to play the PR angle.
Think what else the situation means. This is one explanation. What are other explanations?
I have an amazing question people can ask when they are thinking something and they suspect they may be wrong, or they really want to make sure they are not wrong.
Ask yourself, what needs to be true for me to be wrong?
When I was in banking, when I just started, first day, I immediately saw that this was a terrible fit for me and that I would really not enjoy working there. And it turned out to be much worse, much more painful than I even suspected.
My view was, I made a commitment, for at least two years I should stay and over deliver so that they would be better off that they hired me. I also felt that because they hired me when I didn’t have permanent residence it was some kind of risk they took. Although, if you look closely, my starting on day one was conditional on me receiving permanent residence before then, so it’s not like they invested or were risking that much.
At the end of the day, there were a lot of reasons why I should have left that first day.
There were many things I could have seen if I had looked at it from the perspective of that question above. If I had asked the question, what needs to be true for me to be wrong?
If they have to develop new strategies to deal with you, you’re like the Caitlin Clark of your profession.
Great players and great athletes understand there’s a difference between playing the PR and marketing side to build up emotion in the followers, and the business and strategy behind the scenes. You have to remember that this is business, and there’s a strategy at play. Everything is happening for a reason.
Think about this. The players and the owners of the teams that developed the defensive strategy to foul Caitlin Clark are business people. They’re not just going to do something irrational. They’re going to do things that make sense to allow them to win a championship.
Your job is to see the logic in what’s happening and avoid the emotional response. Because if you see the logic of what’s happening, you can understand what the next three or four moves are going to be. It’s not hard to predict what will happen.
So separate the emotion from the logic. And if you don’t see the logic, it doesn’t mean there’s no logic there.
The great thing is that you can predict moves two, three, four steps ahead.
You need to look at the full chessboard and not just at the one little piece. And not get angry at the little piece for blocking your queen.
We summarised the key points from this session, added some additional thoughts, and turned it into an action guide. You can download it free in our resources library (link in video description).
Warmest regards,
Kris Safarova
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