More on Mr Gladwell and Girls' Basketball from, of all places, David Adesnik at The Moderate Voice blog. Opens Mr. Adesnik:

There has been quite a backlash against the story by Malcolm Gladwell that I praised on Thursday.

Perhaps the real lesson is this one: Woe unto him who cites Malcolm Gladwell as an authority on any subject without some serious fact-checking first. (asks the "Lady" at WHB: Why do people who know little or nothing about women's (girls') basketball think that it's okay to do this stuff without fact-checking?)

Most of it has focused on Gladwell’s profound misunderstanding of basketball and reckless generalization about basketball strategy based on the example of one junior girls team. Rush the Court explains:

Gladwell completely misses the mark on this one - the full court press as a strategy works great when you’re dealing with 12-yr old girls whose teams are generally all at roughly the same skill and confidence levels (i.e., not very good), but as you climb the ladder and start to see the filtration of elite talent develop in the high schools, it actually becomes a weapon that favors the really good teams, the Goliaths, more than that of the underdogs.

By the way, this is Adesnik's bio:

David Adesnik is a defense analyst in Washington DC. He is a contributor to Doublethink magazine and its blog, Conventional Folly. David worked full-time on the foreign policy staff of John McCain’s presidential campaign from April through November of 2008. Before joining the campaign staff, he spent four months in Iraq as a civilian analyst with the Coalition’s counter-IED task force. David received his doctorate in international relations from Oxford, writing his dissertation on democracy promotion in the Reagan era. Beginning in 2002, David was a contributor and later editor-in-chief of OxBlog, on behalf of which he covered the GOP convention in 2004. David has published articles in The Weekly Standard, The Washington Quarterly and Foreign Policy and provided commentary for NPR and the BBC.