Post Slides: Player Development

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.

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.

Read and React Review

The season ended on Friday with a bit of a whimper, along with the very strange experience of being ejected from my first and only game in 12 years (without a warning, or any time between the first and second technical foul - and no, there was no profanity involved - it was...inexplicable). We faced the top seed in our playoff bracket, a team we had lost two games earlier in the season by an average of 36.5 points, and were down 24-17 halfway through the 3rd quarter when it happened. So while I'm pleased with the way the team had played, it certainly didn't end the way I wanted. C'est la vie.

The real reason for this post is to review my first season with the Read and React offense. Hit the jump to read more about our offensive transformation.

RnR Offense Installed

It has been almost exactly one month since the Read and React offense made its way into my playbook. I have a lot of things to say about it, but only one statement sums it up. I'm never looking back. This is the most dynamic offense I've been able to teach. And the thing that I'm going to discuss in this post is something I was never expecting.

The RnR is the most coach-friendly offense I've used. No contest.

The Forest and The Trees

"See the forest for the trees"

A famous saying, and very important to coaching basketball. A forest is made of trees; it is the larger picture to the smaller detail. But here is what is interesting for me as a coach: what the 'forest' is changes based on perspective.

Consider for a second the parents of your team. If they are parents of varsity athletes, their 'forest' is probably your win/loss total. Most parents I deal with fall into this category, simply because they see a small portion of what the team does. We generally have 240 minutes (of practice time) to prepare for a game, the game lasts 32 minutes (in high school), and their son/daughter may only play some of those minutes. Their forest is the game, their trees are their child. It makes sense, but it can also spell trouble for coaches.

The "Double Dribble" Drill

I created this drill out of necessity a year ago. I had a team that insisted on trying to beat the press and play transition offense with the dribble instead of the pass. You can guess how that went - badly. We did not consistently break the press, and we never got out and ran in transition. There were multiple games in which we had zero easy layups in transition. And still, we scored 42 points per game - completely out of half-court offense.

Creating a Practice Plan

Maybe this is a little simplistic for a blog post, but its still a very important thing - especially for new coaches to get right.

An organized practice is critical to accomplishing what you set out to do each day. I've gone through multiple different plans, both written and typed before my current template, which is done on computer and printed out before practice. I've placed download links below, one for Microsoft Word, and one for Macintosh Pages.