The problem with deception
Why deception is hard to teach, hard to find, yet easy to forget
1. Why deception is hard to teach
At its core, deception isn’t throwing head fakes or stomping one’s foot on the ground.
Ted Kroeten wrote that movement is language.
We’ve been taught to see the game as a physical contest. I want you to see it as a linguistic one.
...
A language must do four things:
Communicate: Transfer information from a sender to a receiver.
Convey Meaning: That information must have intent and significance.
Follow Grammar: It must operate by a shared set of rules for combining elements.
Be Generative: It must allow for the creation of new, never-before-heard statements that are instantly understood.
Deception, taught as actions in isolation, doesn’t transfer to the real game.
Deception only works in the context of a conversation:
“I can do A and B. I may do A or B. You don’t know which, but you’re welcomed to guess.”
2. Why deception is hard to find
In his book The Talent Thief, Kroeten introduces the dichotomy between overload (bigger, faster, you do the work) and underload (playful, indirect, you make others do the work). He suggests that organized sports, from rec to pro, fixate on overload (try harder, play more direct, out-battle the opposition) at the expense of underload.
At the highest level, deceptive players are rare due to a developmental paradox:
One cannot hope to make the NHL without being a freak athlete, in the overload sense
Overload-driven athletes don’t need to master underload to progress up the ranks
Underload is learned out of necessity by players who aren’t yet able to win direct confrontations. An early weakness becomes a strength later on. Time and again we hear about the NHL scorer who was the runt of the litter in U12. Conversely, rare are great underloaders who were always biggest, fastest and most exceptional in their formative years.
3. Deception is easy to forget
More than once have I seen a top prospect go from fearlessly creative to utterly predictable from ages of 18 to 24.
There are two mechanisms at play:
The prospect’s coaches don’t value underload
The prospect himself loses faith in underload
The most productive way for NHL teams to develop its promising youths is to give them loads of ice time (both 5v5 and PP) and to slot them alongside their stars (i.e. experienced underloaders).
Prospects who play fourth-line minutes alongside fourth-line caliber partners become denatured and wind up playing on survival mode: chip it out, dump it in, sprint in straight lines; full overload.
