The basketball-as-jazz comparison is something that just won't go away for reasons that Johan Lehrer of Wired.com described well in today's piece on basketball and jazz. But Lehrer took it a step further, looking at fMRI results, neuroscience and a (small sample) experiment.

Bottom line: both the improvisation of jazz and that of moment-to-moment basketball acts are "instinctual" but not "simple" - they involve cognitive activity that can't simply be taught or scripted, which makes them extremely complex. And, as Nolan Richardson once described at a coaching clinic, attempting to "teach" it and make it something more methodical than improvised can actually stifle one's rebounding ability.