Last week, Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker story on the full-court press became an brief Internet sensation, but probably not for the right reasons: Instead of earning the typically Gladwellian praise for its incisive thinking, Gladwell's piece jumped from logical point to logical point ("Now here's some stuff about Lawrence of Arabia! And here's the 12-year-old girls again! And now David and Goliath! And now Rick Pitino!") without really connecting the dots, which is to say: a full-court press might work for a youth team with Roger Craig as a coach, but it isn't going to necessarily work against good teams with good point guards.

Pretty much everyone has argued this, including me, and I'd like to think that's the case not because we're piling on -- I enjoy Gladwell, even when I'm skeptical of his methods -- but because we're right.

The response to the column was loud. Today, in an email back and forth with ESPN's Bill Simmons, Gladwell responds:

After my piece ran in The New Yorker, one of the most common responses I got was people saying, well, the reason more people don't use the press is that it can be beaten with a well-coached team and a good point guard. That is (A) absolutely true and (B) beside the point. The press doesn't guarantee victory. It simply represents the underdog's best chance of victory. It raises their odds from zero to maybe 50-50. I think, in fact, that you can argue that a pressing team is always going to have real difficulty against a truly elite team. But so what? Everyone, regardless of how they play, is going to have real difficulty against truly elite teams. It's not a strategy for being the best. It's a strategy for being better. I never thought Louisville -- or, for that matter, Missouri -- had a realistic shot at winning it all in the NCAAs this year. But if neither of those teams pressed, they wouldn't have been there in the first place.

First, about Louisville, that is just simply not true. Maybe Gladwell had some sort of innate basketball analysis regarding Louisville the rest of us weren't privy to, but, sorry, Louisville won the Big East. All right? They were very talented. They could have played almost any style they wanted -- press, half-court trap, 3-2 zone, lurching crane, whatever -- and made it deep into the NCAA tournament. Louisville was far from an underdog in 2008-09. Michigan State -- the agile, quick team that upset Louisville -- was. Which one of those teams pressed again? (Hint: It was Louisville.)

Gladwell's larger point, though, is this: "The press doesn't guarantee victory. It simply represents the underdog's best chance of victory." That's his central thesis, and there is obviously an argument to be made for it, but it's far too dogmatic. That's not always the case. Sometimes, an underdog with less athletic ability is better served by packing in a zone, forcing outside shooting, and actively preventing the fast break. To these teams, attempting to engage a faster, better team the full 94 feet wouldn't represent their best chance of victory. It would be suicide.

This is the criticism we basketball types are throwing at Gladwell's piece. Yes, the fast break can work. Yes, it can aid an underdog. Is it guaranteed to do so? No. Can it actively hurt such a team? Yes. It can. Gladwell doesn't acknowledge this. To him, the fast break is the last great untapped basketball strategy, but down here, in the real world, it's just as old as the zone. Theoretically, Gladwell's idea is great, but practically, it falls short in a variety of ways, and if this is the best response-for-the-response, it's hard to imagine anyone being further swayed. As a thinkpiece, it's fine. As a primer for basketball strategy, it's incredibly weak. It remains so.

Oh, and one more minor gripe: In the story, Gladwell treated Rick Pitino's 1996 Kentucky squad talent as marginal. (It was not marginal: It was considered one of the greatest assemblages of college basketball talent ever.) He gives them the same treatment on his blog. But in Simmons' convo, he calls the team "stacked." So which is it?

Related: Big East Basketball, College Basketball Media