The Wide Words of Sports: Defense, Dribble, and Dunk: Basketball Lingo

If you throw me the ball and I make a basket, I may get the glory of scoring 2 or 3 points, but you receive something besides a warm feeling inside: an assist. Assists are passes that directly set up scoring. Any player can make an assist, but usually the quarterback-like point guard gets the most assists.

This kind of bracket looks like the punctuation mark [see?]. In relation to college basketball, brackets are used to pick winners in the massive NCAA tournament.

The center is located at the middle of anything, from a circle to a city. That concept is stretched just a little in basketball: center is the name of one of the three positions, along with forward and guard. Fittingly, there’s only one center, while there are two guards (point and shooting) and two forwards (power and small). The center is usually the biggest player on the court.

Many sports—such as baseball, football, and soccer—are played on a field. Not basketball, which takes place on a court. This is one of many meanings of court, including a place where you’d find a judge or king and any closed-in area (such as a courtyard). The other major sport that takes place on a court is tennis, though if you try to play basketball on a tennis court, you might need to retake Sports 101.

This versatile word can be an adjective, noun, or verb. It can describe a stinky smell (“Yikes, what is the foul odor?”) that assaults your nostrils, and that gross meaning might help you remember the basketball meaning: a violation of the rules. The referee blows the whistle when one player fouls the other, resulting in free throws for the victim.

You can rebound from a failed relationship by starting a new one, and you can rebound from losing your job by spiffing up your résumé and replacing that tie with the mustard stains. But in basketball, a rebound is much more literal: it’s any time the ball bounces off the backboard or rim, doesn’t go through the hoop, and a player grabs it.

People get upset for lots of reasons, from politics to parking, but in the NCAA Tournament an upset occurs when a lower-ranked team beats a higher-ranked team. Upsets are inevitable, and they’re a big part of what makes March Madness bonkers.

In basketball, the main use of zone is in zone defense, which is the opposite of man-to-man defense. In a zone defense, the defenders don’t have specific assignments: they cover areas of the court. This is often a losing strategy, since not having a specific player to follow can lead to chaos and anarchy, which aren’t as fun as they sound. When a player is lighting up the scoreboard—scoring points—you can also say they’re in the zone.