I always wonder when people here have conversations about crime in our community, are they serious about improving outcomes or are they looking to morally grandstand? Because, while every individual is responsible for their own life choices, it's disingenuous to pretend that an economically healthy community that has a vested interest in the people that comprise it doesn't positively correlate with lower crime rates as a whole. We as a community are not economically healthy. We haven't been since we've been here. We as a community do not properly invest in our young men, nor has greater society. This has been the case for a long time.
The purpose of coaching staff in basketball on offense is to make sure their guys are set up to get the right open shots to maximize their potential success. Using this comparison, it can be said there is no playbook for our team, no scouting report, no offense. We can't even rely on having proper equipment. We just gotta figure the shyt out on our own. We've pretty much been taking contested shots all game and the Ron Artests of the world are catching heat because they elbow their way to the basket instead of creating their own shot like Kobe. Which is fair, but really isn't productive if you can't lend a critical eye to examine why things are the way they are.
Kobe had Jellybean to teach him the game properly and give him whatever resources he needed. He also had the skill and drive to pull off what he does. The Artests of the world in this scenario lack access to the instruction and resources that a jellybean would provide, so even if they have the potential and drive, many will inevitably look to the nikkas that came before them, that were in their shoes, elbowing their way to the basket and scoring. And eventually that becomes the de facto playbook when a proper offense hasn't been established. And of course when a discerning spectator sees the end result, they're going to point the lion's share of the blame towards coaching and management because it's obvious they've been rolling the ball out on the court and telling them to figure it out. The genesis of bad "team culture." Yet in real life people love to blame individuals for social diseases that have been incubating for centuries.