You've watched it happen from the sideline: your team builds an unassailable lead, the bench relaxes, the opposition looks finished — and somehow, an hour later, you've lost. Coaches usually explain this with effort or focus. Ian Renshaw and Keith Davids think that's the wrong frame entirely. In the June round-up of The Constraints Collective, they use the most dramatic comeback in NBA Finals history to argue that momentum isn't a mindset problem. It's a stable state a system gets trapped in — and trapped states have to be deliberately broken, not willed away.

Each month, Ian and Keith close out the podcast by running through whatever's happening in sport that month — this time, an NBA Finals collapse, a community AFL session, and a cricket dressing-room story about the seconds between balls.

Game 4 of the 2026 NBA Finals gives the clearest possible case study. The San Antonio Spurs shot 67% from the field in the first quarter and 65% in the second — an NBA Finals record 14 three-pointers before halftime — and led by as many as 29 points early in the third. Then their shooting collapsed to 35%, then 30%, while the Knicks climbed to 62% and 55%. New York won it 107–106 on a tip-in with 1.2 seconds left: the largest comeback in Finals history, on the road, against a team that had been untouchable two hours earlier.

"It's amazing that those stats are absolutely fascinating," Davids says of the swing. The question the episode keeps returning to isn't what the Spurs did wrong in the third quarter. It's why a team shooting 67% would ever stop.

Davids reframes the whole episode through dynamical systems theory, the same lens that underpins constraints-led coaching.

This isn't just a coaching metaphor. It tracks closely with Gernigon, Briki and Eykens' dynamical systems model of psychological momentum, which argues momentum holds a system in a stable attractor state that resists small perturbations — right up until a critical fluctuation pushes it into a rapid, disproportionate shift. That's the swing this game showed: not gradual decline, but a sudden reorganisation once a threshold was crossed.

This matters because it relocates the problem. If momentum is "confidence," the fix is a pep talk. If momentum is an attractor state — a configuration the game has settled into and keeps returning to — the fix is structural. Someone has to change the constraints acting on the system, not just the mood in the room. Renshaw connects it straight to racket sports: when badminton moved to rally-point scoring, players found themselves stuck on unbreakable runs, because the old constraint that let you reset on serve was gone. Pickleball has the identical problem in identical language — get to 9–2 and the system can lock you into "we've basically won," right up until it doesn't.

If stability is the trap, elite performers and coaches treat instability as a tool. Renshaw points to tennis players taking a medical timeout precisely when momentum turns against them, and Davids has the data to back the instinct up.

Cricket supplies the most theatrical version. Renshaw describes Shane Warne manufacturing tension by moving a fielder half a yard for no obvious reason — Mark Butcher's description of "creating theatre to break people's rhythm" — while bowlers like Jasprit Bumrah use an arrhythmic stop-start run-up that does the same job mechanically rather than psychologically. Different sport, same move: introduce variability the opponent can't predict, and the stable state can't hold.

The conversation's sharpest idea about practice design comes from a study Renshaw supervised into expert cricket batting. Interviewing six of Australia's best living batters, his student, Jon Conner, found the real skill wasn't in playing the ball — it was in what happened between balls.

In the "plus," batters build intent — reading the bowler, the pitch, the game state — then switch fully onto the ball the moment the bowler starts their run, then review and reset before the next delivery. Davids ties this directly back to practice design: "why not have that in practice as well? At that rhythm, that tempo?" Net sessions that go bowler-after-bowler in a flat rhythm never rehearse the plus at all — they train the ball, not the player who has to manage the gaps around it.

Connor, J. D., Renshaw, I., & Farrow, D. (2020). Defining cricket batting expertise from the perspective of elite coaches. Plos one, 15(6), e0234802.

Renshaw brought a live example from a community AFL session he'd just watched in his role as a coaching consultant for Queensland AFL — a warm-up he's seen play out across sports for years. Players were working on their "craft" (basic technical skills), queuing to receive the same pass — ground balls, chest-high passes, overhead passes — from the same distance, over and over.

His fix is the path of least resistance for any coach looking to change their practice: stop treating the warm-up as separate from practice. A series of three-minute 4v4 end-ball games gets every pass type to emerge as players need it, with decision-making attached from the first touch — and mini-leagues add a competitive edge, with winning teams "promoted" and losing teams relegated. The same diagnosis applied to the 8v8 congestion drill the session built toward: one assistant coach scored it "five, five and a half out of ten" for replicating the actual centre-bounce structure, another gave it a six. Asked how to turn it into an 8/10, the coaches landed on a 4v4 game in the centre square that rewarded getting the ball out to the wingers. In a separate game ("keepy-offs"), play stopped the instant a player dropped the ball — teaching players to switch off the moment possession changes, instead of teaching them to exploit the transition.

It's not that the warm-up is lying to anyone. It's that every minute spent rehearsing a pass nobody throws in a real game is a minute not spent maximising the transfer of training into match performance — return on training investment that disappears the moment the whistle blows.

A 29-point NBA lead, a hydration break, the half-second between cricket deliveries, and the three seconds after an AFL turnover are wildly different timescales — but Renshaw and Davids treat them as the same question asked at different resolutions: what state has this system settled into, and what constraint would have to change for it to move? Spend a season building stable habits, then spend equal effort designing the moments — the plus, the transition, the deliberate break — where your team has to handle instability on purpose. The Spurs didn't lose Game 4 because they got tired. They lost it because nothing in those two hours had ever asked them what to do when the system stopped cooperating.

The round-up above is the free public version. Members get a fuller month around it: an early-release listen to next month's guest conversation, "What Makes a Champion," before it goes public; the full monthly catch-up recording (plus a summary newsletter for anyone who couldn't join live); and a hosts' presentation and position statement — "Constrain to Afford or Constrain to Potentiate?" — digging into the distinction Renshaw and Davids only had time to gesture at here.