Transition Synergy

This is an idea I've had in my mind for a long time, but haven't really gotten around to writing it. In my opinion its very important that you have a cohesive philosophy as a coach. Something that is often overlooked, even by good coaches, is whether your offensive system and defensive system work together to create a team system. If you have an offensive system that operates on completely different premises and values than your defensive system, you might not be getting the most out of your team.

When I played for my high school team, my coach had an well balanced coaching philosophy. Our offense was designed to create multiple predictable scoring opportunities in the paint in half court sets, and we were encouraged to slow it down and run our sets if we didn't have an obvious fast break advantage. On defense we rarely pressed, relying instead on changing defenses often based on offensive outcome and sometimes that would change each quarter or half. This forced the opposing team to use a significant portion of their offense to attack us, and waste quite of a lot of shot clock identifying and deciding how to do so. My point in discussing this first is to give you an example of a philosophy that worked well. Maybe you can see the synergy already. On both ends of the court we used or extensive offensive and defensive sets to test the other teams preparation and focus. We were a strong rebounding team, so we tried to minimize the possessions per game and try to come out on top of points per possession. Offense and defense felt the same, it was never jarring mentally to transition from one to the other. This isn't how I currently coach, but in retrospect I can see why it worked for us.

The most common mistake I see regarding this is when a coach has their team sit in a low energy slumping zone, and then goes ballistic after a rebound or turnover trying to get them to run the floor on offense. This is baffling to me. How can you ask your team to play one way on defense and another on offense? It always bothered me as an assistant too, when I recognized it happening. I don't want to indicate that a zone defense and a transition offense can't work together (2011-12 Syracuse Orange would, for example, disagree), but if you want to run on offense, you better have a high energy defense. At the high school and youth level the vast majority of players cannot mentally shift from low energy to high energy. It is critical that as a coach you create the right atmosphere at both ends of the court.

A second example relates to my current team. We run the Scramble defense and press constantly, and our goal is to score quickly in transition on offense. If you've visited the website before, you'll also know that we installed the Read and React offense to complement our defensive and transition philosophies. It fits perfectly and allows us to switch seamlessly from running the court to running our offense.

The second way to make sure that your team plays the way you want it to when switching from offense to defense (and vice versa) is to make sure you practice that way. For example, when we are doing 5 on 5 drills, they are always 3 possessions long. This gives the team an opportunity to transition naturally in practice and allows you to coach them to play the way you want them to. If you practice in the half court only (even if you don't like to run in transition) you are missing out on practicing a substantial part of the game.