Okay, so about this whole ‘guaiqueries basketball’ thing. It wasn’t some big plan, you know? It started pretty randomly. I found myself with a lot of time on my hands a while back, wasn’t working the usual grind. Needed something to chew on mentally, I guess.
I’ve always liked basketball, not playing much anymore, but watching. Started digging through old game footage, hours of it. And I just kept noticing these little, kinda weird things players did. Stuff that didn’t seem to matter to the game? Like quirks, habits. I started calling them my ‘guaiqueries’ – like, strange little questions or observations I had.
So, what did I do? I grabbed a stack of cheap notebooks. Yeah, real high-tech. Started just… watching and writing. Meticulously noting down stuff. Seriously detailed stuff. Like, how many times a specific player bounced the ball before a free throw, but only in the fourth quarter. Or if a coach folded his arms more after a timeout that worked versus one that didn’t. Sounds nuts, right?
It felt kinda silly. Spent evenings parked in front of the screen, scribbling notes. Filled pages with tallies and descriptions. Things like:
- Player X taps left shoe twice before guarding inbound pass.
- Coach Y rubs chin only when opponent scores 5+ points unanswered.
- Player Z always looks at the scoreboard after missing a shot, but not after making one.
Tried to make sense of it. Made some rough charts. Used highlighters. Felt like I was trying to decode some secret language that wasn’t even there. My family thought I was losing it a bit, watching the same plays over and over, just to see if a guy hitched his shorts the same way every time.
Did I find anything revolutionary?
Nah, not really. Let’s be honest. Mostly it was just random human behavior. Player tics. Stuff that means nothing. A lot of dead ends and wasted paper. Confirmation bias was probably working overtime too, seeing patterns where there were none.
But, and it’s a small ‘but’, I did spot one or two things that were oddly consistent for certain players. Tiny little tells. Like one guy who’d adjust his headband only when he was about to drive baseline. Another who’d take an extra dribble when he was feeling pressured. Nothing you could build a game plan on.
In the end, the ‘guaiqueries basketball’ project, well, it was just that. A project. Something that kept my mind occupied when I needed it. It was kind of a weird, personal journey into the granular details of something I liked. Didn’t make me a genius analyst or anything. But it was my thing, my weird little investigation. Sometimes you just gotta follow those odd thoughts, even if they lead you down a rabbit hole filled with, well, just rabbits. It passed the time.
