On the other side of the world, speaking a different language, Patrick Sellers searched for the best way to teach his point guards how to slow down, to pace themselves, when executing an effective pick-and-roll. Sellers was an assistant for Shanxi Zhongyu, a team in the Chinese Basketball Association, and found it almost humorous how universal the pick-and-roll was, and how in any country, it was often run too fast.

To teach it properly, Sellers learned the Mandarin words “fang man,” for slow, and “kuai,” for quick, alternating them in practice — “fang man, kuai; fang man, kuai!” he would say — when he wanted his players to change speeds.

When Sellers was an assistant at Connecticut, he had tried to teach the same concept to Kemba Walker, then a sophomore and still too fast for his own good. Then, on an early December afternoon in 2009, Sellers saw the pick-and-roll run to perfection, again and again, by a relatively unknown Harvard guard named Jeremy Lin.

Sellers marveled at how Lin, Harvard’s senior point guard, ignored the Huskies’ pressure and controlled the pace of the game by controlling his own speed. It was a trait, Sellers said, he wanted for Walker and one that had been mastered by Chris Paul and Steve Nash.