Rules and Norms, Three-Pointers and Icing

Delaying the triumph of unreasonable people

Sometime in the summer of 2002, a former colleague from Mechanical Engineering (who left Union for another institution many years ago) came up to me at some faculty event and asked “Hey, do you play basketball?” I sighed a little, because this is a question you get a lot when you’re 6’6”, but acknowledged that I did sometimes. “Well,” he said, “There’s a regular game at lunchtime on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in Alumni Gym. You should come play…”

I showed up a few days later, and have been playing in that regular game for over 21 year now, with occasional gaps when injuries or my teaching schedule or, you know, a massive global pandemic prevented it. I think there are only three of us left who were playing that long ago, and one of the other two is retiring at the end of this year. A lot of players have come and gone in that time, some faculty, some staff, some students, and it’s been one of the cornerstones of my Union experience.

Substack generated image from “hockey players on a basketball court”

Pick-up basketball is kind of an interesting space, because more or less by definition, it’s self-governed. The teams shift from day to day, sometimes game to game, and there are no officials to appeal to. It relies on a kind of universal common knowledge of the official rules of basketball, and also local knowledge about the norms governing a particular recurring game. And also a handful of universal norms, like the common unwritten rule that it’s bad form to call cheap little fouls every time anyone touches you, or to call cheap technical violations of the rules (trying to declare a turnover because the guy taking the ball out of bounds after a made basket stepped over the baseline, or calling for a three-second violation). These aren’t official rules, just a kind of unspoken expectation that people playing ball will behave in a particular manner that ensures an enjoyable experience for as many players as possible.

The increasingly mis-named “Noon Hoops” game (the start has crept earlier over the years, to the point where we’re now generally playing by 11:30) is the game I’ve played in most consistently for the longest time, but as I regularly remind The Pip when he asks how or why I did something in a game, I’ve been playing basketball for more than forty years, so I’ve played in a lot of places. For a lot of years I played in my home town, at the “Sunday Morning All-Stars” game started by my father’s cohort of teachers as a way to blow off steam in the winter. At Williams I’d sometimes play in Chandler Gym, in grad school, I used to occasionally play at Maryland’s North Gym, and as a post-doc in the Payne Whitney Gym at Yale (the only one I had to pay to join, because you don’t amass an endowment in the tens of billions without nickel-and-diming your employees…). They were all a little different, in terms of the local culture, and they all had some norms that were specific to the individual games.

North Gym was maybe the weirdest of the lot. The gym there was split in half with a full-court game on one side and a bunch of half-court games on the other. The full-court game was pretty crap to my eyes— not a lot of defense being played, mostly just guys trying to set themselves up for run-outs in hopes of getting a dunk. The half-court games weren’t terrible, but they had the worst system I’ve ever seen for choosing who played. Most places you would have a set of players who were there at the start, and whoever was left after the initial ten were chosen would collectively have the right to the next game; if more than five people were left over, they would get on the court in more or less chronological order. In the half-court games at North Gym, an individual person would claim the right to the next game, and then pick four players to round out the team. Which could include guys from the team that had just lost. If you didn’t look like you could ball, you were screwed, as they’d pass you over in favor of whoever had just put up the most points in a losing effort.

A smaller variable norm was that the target score for the game was different everywhere. Back home and at Williams, the three-point shot was a recent enough invention that we always played one point per basket, generally games to eleven, but you had to win by two (unless there were a lot of guys waiting, in which case we’d cap the final score at 15), so an 11-10 game would continue until one team got two unanswered baskets. (I was once on the good side of a 25-23 game…) Maryland was mostly one point per basket, and eleven straight up. Yale played twos and threes (that is, two points for a regular basket, three for a shot from behind the three-point line), but the games were to 21, so about the same number of baskets. (There’s one weirdly universal norm about the scoring, though, which is that none of the games I’ve played in with any regularity ever used an even number as the target score. Games are played to 7, or 11, or 15, but never 10 or 20.)

At Union, we’ve got two moderately distinctive local rules. One of these is that we continue to play one-point-per-basket, despite most games these days being twos and threes. It’s always been the rule here, and these days I’m the strongest proponent of this, and push back hard whenever a new guy shows up and wants to play twos and threes. This is directly related to my experiences playing at Yale, where the 2/3 distinction more or less guaranteed a ten-minute argument every night (two of them when the business school crowd showed up to play). Somebody would take long jumper and call it a three, the defender would say “Your foot was over the line,” and then they’d go back and forth like that for a while (sometimes reversing sides, in the “Fine, it means that much to you, it’s a three,” “No, no, you want to cry, we’ll call it a two…” mode). I’m trying to squeeze this game in on my lunch break, and I don’t have time for that shit. If every shot is one point, there’s less to argue about, and more basketball gets played in the finite time I have available.

The other local rule is “Icing,” and has a specific historical origin that only three of us remember. Way back in the early 2000’s, the general rule was that we would only play full-court on the one regulation court if we had 5-on-5, but some of the (then) younger players pushed for extending this to 4-on-4 full-court (3-on-3 was always played on the shorter courts going sideways across the regulation court). This tended to produce some ugly games, though, where young-and-fast guys would just race down the court ahead of everyone else and catch a long pass for a lay-up. This was exacerbated when the small gym was converted into a fitness center, and we moved to a facility where the only full-court option was a regulation court. As a compromise, we instituted a ban on passes crossing the mid-court line, applying only in 4-on-4 games (called “Icing,” in analogy to the hockey rule). This slowed things down enough to keep everyone involved, and we’ve maintained that even as the pool of regular players has almost completely turned over.

I’m calling these “norms” for the purposes of this post, because they’re not part of the universal rules of basketball, but these specific practices are really closer to “house rules,” in that they’re formal and agreed-upon structures that alter the way the game is played. Though maybe a better way to put it is that they’re a reasonably successful example of the transition from norms to rules— transition because they’re codifying something that might otherwise be achieved informally, and successful because they’re kind of the minimum possible changes, and relatively uncontroversial.

And this is, ultimately, an illustration of the problem with true norms, in the sense of practices that aren’t formally codified but are a part of a culture around some activity. They only work as long as the people engaged in the activity have a common vision of what the activity “should” be like, and a willingness to cooperate to achieve that. They’re extremely vulnerable, though, to people who don’t share that vision, and are willing to go against the herd to push things in the direction that they would prefer. At that point, you have to either acquiesce, at the cost of changing the previous culture, or formalize things with the addition of a new rule tailored to eliminate a particular problem.

A big problem with this transition is that it’s not readily reversible— once you’ve put a rule in place, it’s hard to roll it back to a norm, because the whole reason it was put in place was that someone wanted to do the thing it forbids. We could, in principle, do without the “Icing” rule if everyone just agreed to play at a pace that the slower members of the regular cohort find congenial, but we know from experience that that won’t work, so the rule has to stay. (At least until there’s enough turnover that a significant majority of players agree to get rid of it, but that’s a high bar to clear.)

The issues addressed by the scoring structure and “Icing” rule are at least amenable to being addressed through relatively minimal changes to bright-line rules. There’s a much more pernicious kind of norm violation that’s much harder to counteract, which might be unflatteringly characterized as “defying the expectation of behaving like a reasonable person.” That is, there’s no formal rule against attempting to strictly enforce the narrower technical rules of basketball, just an informal expectation that That’s Not the Kind of Thing We Do Here. It’s a pick-up game being played on people’s lunch break, so we generally agree not to call three-second violations, in the interest of keeping the game moving, and the vibes positive. If somebody comes in and wants to make it a Thing, though, there’s not a whole lot that can be done to stop it. The game either devolves into arguing about how much time somebody spent in the paint, or devolves into arguing about why it is that we generally play it a little loose with that rule, which is not any better. Or it dissolves as those who don’t want to play in the sort of atmosphere where there are regular fights about three-second calls decide there are less irritating ways to burn calories in the middle of the day.

Pick-up hoops is a pretty trivial example of this kind of thing, but it’s a much more general phenomenon: lots of systems that function very well on norms run into trouble once you can no longer sustain the expectation that everyone involved will behave like reasonable people. It’s much worse in some other contexts, which are less optional— I’m not actually obliged to play pick-up hoops during my lunch hour, so at some point, I can just leave. (I’ve been doing that more often recently, which is part of what prompted this post…) There are plenty of aspects of my actual job, though, that have historically been norm-governed and as a result have that critical vulnerability to unreasonable people. I don’t have the same ability to opt out of those, though, which means those norm violations have to be addressed through the adoption of formal rules and processes.

And the irreversibility problem carries over, so a formal rule that was adopted to curtail a specific bad behavior back in the day has to remain forever, long past the retirement of the person or people who prompted it. Which leads to a kind of ratchet effect, an ongoing accretion of more rules and more processes and more bureaucracy, because the actions of unreasonable people live forever in the rulebook, and because there’s an endless supply of new people who will be unreasonable in new ways.

There’s a cost to this in both cases, a kind of drag resulting from either the accumulation of new rules and procedures making everything take longer, or the energy that needs to be expended fighting about the no-longer-shared norms. And in both cases there’s only one escape: to stop playing the game once the arguments make it not fun any more, or stop participating in the processes once the accumulated rules become too cumbersome.

The hell of it is that in the end, the unreasonable people almost always win in the end. Either things move in the direction they want, dragging everybody else along, or the baroque structure needed to legislate reasonable behavior becomes too much of a drag for the people who would behave reasonably without all that overhead to want to continue participating, and they cede the field.

I’m still holding the line on one-point-per-basket and “Icing,” though. For now, anyway…

---

So, yeah, that’s a thing. Here’s a button if you would like to see more like this:

And if you feel moved to share your own local norms, or question ours, the comments will be open: