Monday Matchup - Defense Ends With a Rebound

We've all been there before, watching our teams execute energetic and inspired defense for 25 seconds. The clouds part, angels sing, and the basketball gods are smiling down upon you as your opponent throws up an off-balance shot. Then the feeling collapses on itself like a black hole, sucking the energy and joy from your team as your opponent grabs an offensive rebound, and you have to do it all over again.

Rebounding is a tricky skill to teach, a difficult skill to master, and an easy skill to forget. Failing to practice rebounding is not an option though, and in today's post we will look into ways of improving your team rebounding. It is important to focus on 3 aspects: Culture, Concepts, and Skills.

Fast Break Friday: Training Perimeter Reactions

This is the first Fast Break Friday where we will cover offensive concepts. Every Friday there will be a new post covering concepts, player development, and specific practice drill or techniques. One of the coaching skills that was the focus of my attention recently is building drills that train and teach skills or reactions on the court. Before we get into the specific topic of today - training perimeter decisions, we should discuss the concepts of translating something we want to see on the court into a practice drill that effectively helps the player learn. Going online to write down some drills is fine, but building your own drills is rewarding and usually more effective if you are trying to teach a specific skill.

All offensive reactions can be broken into 'If A, the B' situations. For example, if in shooting range, then shoot. Now, you can add as many qualifiers to the first part, but the fewer there are the more quickly your players will learn. This is the basic foundation to any drill (excluding hustle drills). The method behind this madness is another simple tenet - if you want creative, thoughtful players, you need to free their minds from the simple decisions and turn them into automatic reactions.

So what do we want our players to do when they receive the ball along the perimeter? Training decisions requires at least that the player can receive the pass cleanly and quickly face up to the basketball as a threat. After that, it is time to train reactions.

First, the defense attempts a steal and misses. When this happens I train my players to attack. When starting out, we might just have a single power dribble jump shot or a basket drive. Over time we train the whole attack, practicing our reaction to different help defenders, like a corner kick out or an interior dish.

Second the defense performs a closeout, high and hard. This is another simple read, and the player reaction is the same as our first situation - we attack the basket. Teach whatever footwork you want, but players must attack the rim when defenders close out hard and high

Thirdly the defense performs a closeout, low and slow. If the offensive player is in shooting range this is a shot read.

These habits are easy to train in two or three player groups where the players rotate through offense, defense, and passer.

I'm leaving passing out of this for the time being because you don't want to cloud the primary skill intended for training with too many things at once. Remember, quicker reactions free our players from thinking about everything, there just are not enough seconds in the span of a possession for deep thoughts.

When planning on teaching skills like this I also suggest you don't teach them all in the same day. If you want to create habits, you must continue to provide the read over and over and over again. Once you are satisfied that the reaction is reliable, you can layer decision making situations behind I outlined earlier.

If you are interested in reading more about habit formation I suggest The Power of Habit. It is an excellent book and many of my ideas about drill creation for skills development are a combination of my experience with the Read and React Offense and what I learned about habit formation from the book.