In the edition of The Edge two weeks ago, there was an article by Ooi Kee Beng titled, “Why Malaysia always feels more likely to fail than to succeed”. It was a sharp, provocative article and certainly deserves further reflection. In his article, he provides a somewhat nationally existential argument for Malaysia’s propensity for failure that is worth discussing. Personally, I’m not certain if I necessarily feel that Malaysia always feels more likely to fail than to succeed (at what?) but I think that a propensity for failure can come in many ways, beyond a sense of identity. Let me illustrate with the unserious basketball team that is the Boston Celtics.
In the US National Basketball Association (NBA), teams play out an 82-game regular season where they compete to qualify for the playoffs. Unlike, say, football’s English Premier League, where the league season determines who the champion is, the NBA’s regular season essentially determines the seeding for the playoffs. Higher seeds get home court advantage in the playoffs. Whoever wins the playoffs wins the NBA Championship for that year.
To win the Championship, a team must win four straight playoff rounds. Each round is a best of seven series, meaning that the first team to win four games wins the round. The Boston Celtics, the team I support, had been having a good year and, in fact, were many bookies’ favourites to win the NBA Championship. They had locked up the second seed in the Eastern Conference, and when the first seed Milwaukee Bucks got knocked out by the Miami Zombie Heat (more on them later), the Celtics became the odds-on favourites.
The unserious Celtics took on the Atlanta Hawks in the first round, beating them by four games to two, with an embarrassing loss in Game Five of the series. Nevertheless, the Celtics got through the Hawks and optimism prevailed. Then they played the Philadelphia 76ers, against whom they suffered a humiliating loss in Game One of the series at home, and managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Games Four and Five of the series. Now, there are essentially two ways in which a team might lose a game — either you shoot yourself in the foot, or your opponent simply outplays you despite your best efforts. Over and over again, against the Hawks and the 76ers, for the Celtics, it was always the former.
What about talent, you ask. Well, the Celtics are generally acknowledged to be one of the most, if not the most, talented teams in the league, with great depth in their roster of players. Thus, on paper, they should expect to sort out the Hawks within five games at the most, and to handle the 76ers with relative ease. Instead, they fell behind in the series three to two, before rallying to win the series four to three with a spectacular 51-point performance by their best player, Jayson Tatum.
But as I’ve mentioned, the Celtics lost games in particularly boneheaded fashion in the first two rounds of the playoffs. They committed silly turnovers (giving the ball away carelessly to the opposing team), did not make the requisite in-game adjustments, suffered from disciplinary lapses in offence and defence, failed to prepare against alternative defensive schemes set by opponents, and resorted to hero-ball one-on-one offence when the going got tight. The Celtics could not win close games; they would either blow out the other team or lose when the going got tight. They were amazing at letting 10-point leads slip within the last five minutes and terrific at becoming discombobulated with pressure.
Anyway, they made it to the third round where they faced the eighth-seed Miami Zombie Heat (They are called the Zombie Heat because no matter how terribly they play during the regular season, they suddenly become unstoppable in the playoffs). And in that series, despite having home court advantage (four of the seven games would be played in Boston, with the first two games being played in Boston), they fell behind three games to nothing. Game Three, in particular, was humiliating where it seemed as if the Celtics just gave up. Every bad habit that had surfaced in the first two rounds was on full display in these games. And they were facing the Zombie Heat, who are essentially the embodiment of mental toughness, discipline and tactical sharpness, led by their guts-of-steel star Jimmy Butler.
Then something strange happened. The Celtics rallied. They won Game Four in Miami, showing some mental fortitude. And they won Game Five back in Boston. And then in Game Six, they won in Miami with a buzzer beater in the very last millisecond (the ball was released with 0.1 seconds left to go) to tie up the series at three games to three. This was already exceptional. Of the 152 instances in which a team led three games to none, only four saw the losing team tie the series three games to three, including these Celtics. And of those earlier three teams, none of the losers managed to win Game Seven and thus complete the comeback. The Celtics had a chance at history, at home in Boston, with superior on-paper talent against the eighth-seed Miami Zombie Heat.
And of course the Celtics got blown out in Game Seven on their own home court, losing 103 to 84. The Zombie Heat didn’t play a particularly great game — all they did was maintain discipline and effort, execute their team-based offence instead of going full-on hero ball, and just wait for the Celtics to discombobulate as they knew the Celtics would. And true enough, that is precisely what happened. The Celtics offence became stagnant while their defence had too many lapses in concentration. They deserved to lose.
But here is the main point and takeaway from the unserious Celtics. Even if you make it through to the third round and come back from three games to nothing to tie it at three to three, the same habits that led you to lose extremely winnable games throughout the playoffs will come back to haunt you in high-pressure situations. Things like effort, discipline, good game planning and game management are habits that teams build. If you weren’t good at it before — and winning only because of talent — it would come back to haunt you. And that’s exactly what happened to the Celtics. Winning requires good habits, built over time, and cannot be left to the whims and fancies of superior talent. And just like Liverpool in the EPL in 2014, it wasn’t the Steven Gerrard slip that cost them the title. It was just game after game of defensive indiscipline, conceding stupid goals under pressure that was their ultimate undoing.
Anyway, what does this have to do with Ooi Kee Beng’s article? Well, if we accept the premise that Malaysia, as a nation, has a propensity to fail rather than succeed, I think we have to look beyond the societal existential question (which is also important, of course) and also ask ourselves some more basic questions. Are we inculcating the “right” societal habits (whatever the societal equivalent of what the Zombie Heat are doing)? Are we walking the talk when we say we are serious about structural and institutional reform? Can we actually demonstrate that we are willing to take some short-term pain for long-term gain? I hope we are, because otherwise, when we need those habits the most, we will fail to find them because we don’t practise them enough, and we end up like the unserious 2022/23 Boston Celtics.