Basketball is a very difficult sport to watch if you don’t know what you are looking for.  Everybody always watches the ball and fails to recognize what really goes on in a game.  If you just watch whoever has the ball, then you miss 90 percent of the game.  All of the little factors that lead up to the spectacular plays that everybody loves.  While a spectator ball watches, they will only see the end result of a play.  If a person can watch everything that happens away from the ball, then the spectacular plays will seem very simple.  People love to watch the alley-oop.  But what people don’t recognize is how the person who catches it gets open.  He can’t just run wherever he want and jump and catch the ball and dunk it.  He has to cut and set up his defender so that another player can set a solid screen allowing him a chance at getting open.  That only involves three of the five players on the court.  The other two have to keep their defenders occupied so that they stay out of help side and allow the person coming off of the screen to be open.  If all five offensive players are able to execute their roles successfully, that doesn’t mean that the play will still work.  There are still a billion things that can go wrong.  The defense could switch the screen which means that the person guarding the screener just starts defending the person who was supposed to catch the lob.  If this happens then the person who is catching the pass will not be open even if all five players executed their roles perfectly.  The help side defenders could not take the bait and remain in help defense causing the lob pass to not be open.  Let’s just say that everyone does everything right, the defense doesn’t switch, and the help side defenders take the bait.  Things can still go terrible wrong.  The passer might not be able to make the pass because his defender might be all over him making it impossible to throw any pass except for the simplest.  And even if the defender isn’t all over him and he can make a pass, there is still the problem of making a good pass.  The pass has to be high enough for his teammate to catch and dunk but not too high or else it will sail out of bounds.  If the passer throws the pass too hard, his teammate won’t be able to catch and finish.  If all of that works out and there is a good pass, the timing still has to be perfect otherwise when the person catching the ball is at his highest point, the ball will be nowhere near a place that he can make a play with.  Despite all of these things that can go wrong, it is amazing that so many people are able to flawlessly execute these plays.  To me this is what makes basketball the greatest sport ever.