Recommended Reading: David and Goliath

This is definitely an idea I should have had earlier, but I’m glad it popped into my head this morning anyway. As a coach and teacher, some of the most interesting books are on human psychology. Of course basketball books can be great too. This is our first ‘Recommended Reading’ post, but it certainly won’t be the last.

I just finished David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell. It is an excellent book, another in Gladwell’s series of excellent books. At first glance it seems to be about how underdogs overcome the odds to claim victory, which would have obvious value to us as coaches when facing superior opponents. The true content of the book is that what can be perceived as disadvantages are sometimes anything but, and how success can be derived from those disadvantages.

There is a portion of the book dedicated to basketball, and many of you will be familiar with its story. It centers on how underdogs can use the press defense against superior opponents to try and tilt the odds in their favor. This idea, at least in coaching circles I am in, has gained plenty of traction in theory – but many coaches still fail to use it in practice. The difficulty of conditioning and teaching a team to press non-stop is pretty daunting.

There are more lessons than that in this book though, and plenty of ideas that had my brain working overtime. The stories of individuals who use their disadvantages or disabilities to rise high is incredible, and it gave me so much to think about in terms of how we help our players grow as individuals. I have met so many athletes that could have benefited from advice derived from the lessons learned in this book that I really wish I had read it earlier in my career.

I consider this book a must-read for coaches. All three parts of the book; The Advantages of Disadvantages, The Theory of Desirable Difficulty, and The Limits of Power, have powerful messages that can translate to our job as leaders and mentors. I hope you get a chance to read it soon, and good luck this season, especially to our first year coaches.

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.

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.

Installing the Read and React Offense

Where to start. My formative years in basketball were in high school, when I finally (like most boys) learned to harness my athletic skills into a more productive set of abilities. The varsity and junior varsity coaches at my school had the most to do with that. Our philosophy was simple. We ran motion offenses (multiple versions, including flex) against man defense, and flood type offenses against zone defenses. And this was the way I taught offense since I started coaching right after I graduated.

I scrapped that this week after a loss on Friday, but my dissatisfaction with my offensive philosophy is a long time coming. I consider myself a strong coach in terms of teaching and strategy, especially concerning defense. My teams generally improve their defensive scoring average in my first year. Last years team reduced defensive scoring average by 5 points on the season, and this year we gave up 43 points in our first game. But my teams also seem to struggle scoring, averaging between 40-46 ppg year in and year out. I attributed this (and somewhat rightfully so) to the disease of AAU/Summer League ball taking the place of practice and skill development. We got great shots - but we just didn't make them. Recently though, I've been thinking that this problem wasn't fully to blame.

Introduction

I love basketball. I have been coaching basketball for 11 years now (since I was 19 years old), and could not dream of doing anything else. I also recently started reading coaching blogs, and well, I like those quite a lot too.

Without moving too far along, I have to give credit to a few blogs that inspired me to get started. Chris Brown's exceptional football blog Smart Football, and another basketball blog X's & O's of Basketball. They are well run and well written blogs that make me a smarter coach (even though my football coaching days are over).

The purpose of this blog is simple. To provide people with information to help them understand basketball better, and to promote smarter basketball.