Archive for category Coaching
Entry Passes
Posted by Coach Harris in Coaches Fraternity, Coaching, UEA on 11/04/2010
A player looks for the entry pass
In lower level basketball a dominant post player can lead a team to success almost on their own. Many teams have taller players, but combine that height with a talent for playing the position (strength, footwork, finishing) and that player can dominate an entire league. Two of the teams I’ve recently worked with have had such a player, and yet we only posted average results for the season.
When we looked at the box scores, our big guys were getting baskets so it wasn’t immediately obvious that this was where our problems were coming from. However, during our games I started to observe that most of their scores were coming from second chance opportunities and from fast breaks (they both excelled at running as part of a break). The problem became clear, we just couldn’t get them the ball in the half-court. They were getting in good position to receive the ball, but our guards didn’t make the pass, or made a poor entry pass.
Late Passers
Posted by Coach Harris in Coaching on 06/04/2010
Stockton never missed a pass
A while ago I was reading an article by Kevin Eastman about the need to eliminate ‘late passers’ from your team. Immediately this struck a chord with me as I had identified the problem he spoke about but never really defined it in such clear terms in my thinking. Passing is a key skill that all players (regardless of position) must have a solid grasp of. However this post is not about passing as such. It’s about the mentality of those players that are on the floor running your offense.
Coach Eastman uses the term ‘late passer’ to describe a player who does not hit a shooter as soon as they become free. This is a point that we must emphasise during drills to make sure it is embedded in the mindset of our team. Too often shooting drills are treated as a catch-and-shoot drill by players. Coaches must make sure players know they are a pass-catch-and-shoot drill. Without a great pass into the shooter’s ‘shot-pocket’ (the area just above his hip on his strong side where he would usually begin his shooting motion) the chances of the shot being released in time with a crisp motion are decreased. As the level of competition increases, the demand on the quality of the pass also increases.
It is easy to see why Eastman has identified this as a key aspect in his coaching role. He is constantly working with arguably the greatest catch-and-shoot player in the history of the NBA in Ray Allen. The Boston coaching staff compiles huge amounts of information on the mechanics of Allen’s shot and his particular quirks that can be honed further and further to improve his already legendary jumpshooting ability.
At the level I am working at this area is less important because defenses are slower at chasing around screens and closing out shooters. However I include in my definition of ‘late passers’ another problem which I think is vitally important to eradicate at lower level basketball and is even possibly inspired by the greatness of many of today’s premier passers.
Maintaining Defensive Focus
Posted by Coach Harris in Coaching, UEA on 29/03/2010
I was coaching a game a few weeks ago and our opponents (the best team in the league) hit several threes in a row on us. I couldn’t remember the last time that had happened to us and watching the next possession it was easy to see why.
The key weakness was that our low post player wasn’t rotating up to the shooter when the ball was swung quickly around the top. We’d never experienced this before because we had been so used to not having to rotate in the proper way in other games, that our players had simply gotten out of the habit of doing it.
This is a WPSimpleViewerGallery
Playing against teams that couldn’t stretch our defense or move the ball quickly had made us lazy. We thought it was fine to sit on the low block and wait for the inevitable drive into the middle where we could swarm the ball, or the badly missed three-point attempt where we could easily secure the rebound and get out on the break.
It takes a special desire to keep playing defense the right way, even when it seems unnecessary. Playing lazy for several games creates a deadly complacency in your team. You might win those games by large margins because of the quality of opponent, but how many coaches will be aware of the harm their team is secretly inflicting on itself?
This is more likely to be a problem for University teams who often play in BUCS and/or National League and also a local league. In every game, regardless of the level of opponent, we must hold our players accountable for everything. We must demand hustle and effort on every play. We should strive to emulate those great coaches who coach a game where they are up 40 the same as if they were down 40, demanding everything from their team.
No One is Bigger than the Team
Posted by Coach Harris in Coaching, NBA, The Game on 24/03/2010
“No one is bigger than the team. You’re going to be on time, you’re going play hard, you’re going to know your job and you’re going to know when to pass and shoot. If you can’t do those four things you’re not getting time here and we don’t care who you are.”
-Hubie Brown
This quote is one my all-time favourite basketball quotes, possibly my number one. It really harks back to a time of no-nonsense coaching by the likes of Brown and Bobby Knight. Very few of these coaches still around in the NBA. Jerry Sloan and Gregg Popovich are still doing their own thing in Utah and San Antonio, but mainly coaches are too afraid to upset their powerful stars. More on this later.
This kind of attitude needs to be instilled in your team from day one. We need to eliminate selfish behaviour and get everyone on (and around) the team to buy into these concepts. It only takes one guy, one dissenting voice to create tension in the team and jeopardise your chances of success.
I like this quote for two main reasons. Read the rest of this entry »
Foot (and Game) on the Line
Posted by Coach Harris in Coaching, NBA on 21/03/2010
I was watching the Lakers @ Orlando game the other day and it was a great game. Kobe butting heads with Matt Barnes and both teams just going a good job of executing. All in all, a great advert for NBA basketball from two of the top teams this season. However, the Lakers lost the game (in my opinion) because of a fundamental mistake committed by Bryant with just under a minute remaining.
Kobe gets the ball and makes a dribble move towards the basket before pulling a step-back move to shoot the three. Nothing but net, however Kobe’s right foot was squarely on the three-point line as he took off for the shot.
Lakers SLOB play for Kobe’s game winner vs Memphis
Posted by Coach Harris in Coaching, NBA on 25/02/2010
Kobe Bryant showed that it would take more than a broken finger to keep him from making big shots for the LA Lakers this season. However, he had a lot of help from his friends on the way to this one. With the Lakers down 98-96 with 8.8 seconds to go, Phil Jackson drew up the perfect sideline out-of-bounds (SLOB) play to enable Bryant’s game-winning shot from downtown. Each Laker executed their assignment to perfection and the rest, as they say, is history.
Derek Fisher starts at the top of the key, with Lamar Odom on the weak side elbow. Kobe is on the strong side low block and Gasol starts at the mid/high post on the ball side. Gasol springs free and receives the inbounds pass from Artest as Odom moves to set a back screen for Fisher.
Odom’s defender has to momentarily cover Fisher’s back door cut and this leaves Odom free to pop out to the top and receive the pass from Gasol. Meanwhile, Kobe has stepped into the sideline to set a back screen for Artest to cut to the basket. It is actually a poor screen from Kobe as he pulls out too quickly and allows Artest’s defender to easily slip through to cover the basket cut, however the momentary confusion caused is enough to allow the next phase to succeed.
Immediately after passing off to Odom, Gasol turns and sets a down screen on Kobe’s defender. Their brief attempt to cover the Artest cut leaves them open to this quick screen and Kobe pops to receive a perfectly timed pass from Odom in order to hit the three-point shot and win the game.
For the full play at normal speed, here’s the video…
Last year the Phoenix Suns ran a similiar SLOB late in the game to get Grant Hill a buzzer beating layup against the Orlando Magic. The back screen on the inbounder is a great first option to have on any inbounds play in a late game situation as it’s very difficult to defend without switching. Even if the defenders switch, there is an element of confusion which can be the difference between winning and losing the game.
Sheed’s Non-Existent Help Defense
Posted by Coach Harris in Coaching, NBA on 30/01/2010
The Celtics have been struggling of late, with reasons for their losses coming from all quarters. However, despite Garnett’s offer to pin Thursday’s two point defeat to Atlanta on him, the blame should be laid squarely at the feet of Rasheed Wallace. Sheed’s help defense on the final two (most important) plays of the game can only be described as horrific and give a lot of credence to the idea that Sheed might be past it.
I’ve visually broken down a first-quarter pre-cursor and the final two plays of the game (Redick’s game-tying three and Lewis’s winning layup) to show Wallace’s shortcomings in key moments. The red arrows indicate the movement that should have occurred on the plays, where in fact there was little or no movement.
Jameer Nelson Drive
In this first-quarter play, Rasheed is totally asleep in the middle of the key as Nelson beats Pierce on the outside and goes in for the easy layup. Sheed should move in to take the charge while KG and Allen move up to stop the kick-out.
Redick’s Three
Garnett is guarding Redick and get picked out of the play by the wing screen. Wallace should move and hedge out on the screen to help KG instead but stays back a couple of feet inside the perimeter. Sheed should have recognised the threat from Redick (top 15 in the NBA 3pt %) but lets JJ hit the shot to tie it for the Magic.
As you can see in the shot below, Wallace is too far away to affect the shot in any way and has to lunge as Redick goes up to even get close.
Rashard’s Drive
The closest defender, Wallace, inexplicably stayed next to Dwight Howard at the opposite block rather than rotating down to the baseline to stop Lewis’ drive.
– ESPN
As Lewis turns the corner on (an injury-slowed) KG, Sheed aggressively boxes Howard out of the play instead of stepping in to help on the dribble penetration. Lewis has to curl wide on the drive to get around Garnett and still Wallace stays puts on the opposite side of the key.
Attempt at Redemption
The Celtics have one final shot at the game but Rasheed airballs a three for which he clearly got a good look and some decent separation from his defender on a screen by Ray.
Unlike some people, I think that Sheed is going to come up trumps for the Celtics when it matters. However on this showing, he clearly a lot of work to do to match the defensive focus of the title-winning 2008 Boston team.
Taking Coaching Seriously
Posted by Coach Harris in Coaching, NBA, NCAA on 22/01/2010
There’s a well-known exchange between a journalist and the infamous NCAAM coach Bob Knight that goes something like this:
Journalist: Coach Knight, why have you never coached in the NBA?
Knight: Because I don’t think players should be paid more than coaches.
A while ago I attended a seminar on Long Term Athlete Development (LTAD) run by the national sports coaching organisation. The seminar was primarily (as you’d expect) centred on athletes but during the latter part of the session they discussed coaching during the ‘retention’ phase of the development process. Coaching seemed to be included as an afterthought to elite performance. Once the player has been through all the stages of development they can just ‘go into coaching’ and stay in the sport. In my opinion, this system is surely devaluing the coaching profession and perpetuates the (obviously false) view that to be a great coach, you must first have been a great player.
Second Team All-Brooklyn Player Red Auerbach
So why does this even matter? Well it matters because for coaches to be able to coach successfully, they need the buy-in and respect from their players. They can get this by having a successful coaching track record, or a successful playing track record. These two dynamics seem to operate differently depending on the age of the coach. A young coach must have had a successful playing career for the players to respect his judgements and strategy, despite the coaching experience and success he may have had. Several months ago the then Kansas City Chiefs Running Back Larry Johnson used his twitter account to make the following comments about Head Coach Todd Haley:
“My father got more creditentials than most of these pro coaches.”
“My father played for the coach from ‘rememeber the titans’. Our coach played golf. My father played for redskins briefley. Our coach. Nuthn.”
My response to Larry Johnson, if he’s interested, and to anyone else that holds this view, is this:
Who cares? Coaching and playing are totally different occupations requiring almost totally different personal skills and abilities.
A look at the greatest 10 NBA coaches of all time shows that 5 of the 10 have never played professional basketball, let alone in the NBA. Only 1 of the 10 is also on the greatest 50 players of all time list. Of the other 4 that did play in the NBA, much of their action was as reserve (albeit on generally successful teams). However these days things seem to be different, only 8 coaches in the whole league have no NBA playing experience. I would find it easy to believe that is simply difficult to get into NBA coaching without having previously spent time around the league, and players are firmly at the centre of the NBA circle. However I don’t know why this is. GMs are (usually) smart guys and surely want the best hire for their team? When recruiting a CEO for Chrysler or Ford, do you headhunt the best auto engineer? Or the best manager of auto engineers? There are a great many programs for developing elite players in every sport, but how many programs designed to develop elite coaches?
At coaching development camps and clinics in Spain, young prospective coaches are told ‘you can be a player, or a coach, not both’. This sentiment clearly expresses Spain’s (and mainland Europe as a whole’s) commitment to coaching development and their attitude of taking coaching seriously. A cursory glance at the Wikipedia sites for prominent European coaches Ettore Messina, Zvi Sherf and Bogdan Tanjevich reveals no playing information at all. This either means they have no noteworthy playing experience, or it is acknowledged that playing information has no relevance to their coaching careers. I admit to my own ignorance in this area because I don’t know the case for these coaches, however both cases would back up my argument as they would reinforce the idea that playing experience is not seen as a neccessary component of being a high-level coach in the European game.
The only position in basketball that has the neccessary transferable skills to coaching is point guard. Obviously players who play other positions may possess the skills, but point guard demands these skills to be successful. It is therefore no coicidence that many of the successful player-to-coach stories have been achieved by players who occupied that position in their playing days. The three key skills for coaching are excellent communication, leadership, and a strong ability to analyse and read the game. All of these skills can be acquired without even playing basketball (even the ability to read the game, and I will cover this in another post), let alone playing at a high level. It is for this reason that so many coaches look across sports at other coaching styles and techniques to learn from and raise their own levels. Leadership and communication skills are universal and coaches like Mike Krzyzewski and Rick Pitino make significant sums of money giving leadership seminars to corporate clients from the business world, far removed from the basketball court.
It is time for players, media and sporting bodies to respect the profession of coaching and acknowledge that playing ability has little or nothing to do with coaching ability. Coaches should be judged on their ability to successfully lead and motivate their players and to formulate winning strategies for their team.
Mental Reset
Posted by Coach Harris in Coaching, UEA on 22/01/2010
The Boston Celtics have been experiencing some tough times since their veteran leader and defensive general Kevin Garnett was sidelined with a knee problem late in December. Assistant Coach Kevin Eastman recently wrote an article on his blog (loosely) addressing the issue. He observed that that teams who are trying to turn things around often look to improve their skills through drills, however this will only have a limited positive effect unless the team also raises their mental ability to meet their technical ability. They need to ‘get their heads right’, he says. I began thinking about a situation that I personally experienced a couple of years ago that required what I think is a ‘mental reset’.
UEA Women: 1-4 at Christmas
In my second year coaching the women’s team at UEA we were approaching the Christmas break in bad shape. We were 1-4 and sitting joint bottom of the league. We would have to perform a miraculous turnaround to lift ourselves out of the bottom two in a league where even a single loss can derail a season due to the small number of games played. We started the season on a high, having retained many of the players from our promotion-winning team the year before. However our expectations were quickly brought down to earth with a one-point away loss to Nottingham in our opening game. This had been our first taste of league defeat in BUCS and was a sign of things to come. We won our next game at home vs Cambridge but followed this with road losses against Wolverhampton, Nottingham Trent and a home loss to Nottingham.
The manner of the losses saw the players get down on themselves and I was losing belief in my team. We trained well most of the time and were largely cruising in the local league but could not seem to pull together in BUCS, despite our potential. Our defense was holding strong most of the time, but our offense was stagnating. Over the Christmas break I experimented by adding a new all-purpose offense to ensure we kept moving the ball and tried to get some higher percentage looks. Using the new offense (a simple dribble hand-off action on the wing and looking to penetrate) we started to gain some confidence through local league victories. Our next BUCS games arrived, at home to Wolverhampton and Nottingham Trent, two of the strongest teams in our division. The players were exhibiting a new-found confidence on the court and soundly outplayed both teams with a shortened bench. Two more victories over the bottom side saw us climb to an unassailable position in 4th and only a shock defeat of the top team by Nottingham Trent saw us denied 3rd place; a seemingly impossible position given our predicament at Christmas.
While it would be easy to claim that the new offensive system had been the catalyst for our resurgence, it was actually that the team had used the Christmas break to perform a ‘mental reset’. They refused to dwell on past results and used the adversity (relegation, depleted squad) to inspire them to two great victories, the games I consider to be our best performances (along with our title-winning end-of-season effort vs Coventry the year before). They were able to cleanse their minds of negativity and somehow were able to re-focus on the task in hand.
I want to examine the ways to initiate a ‘mental reset’ and turn around a slumping team in a future post, but for now the main thing to remember about the ‘mental reset’ is that everyone has to buy-in to it. It can only be achieved if all players and coaching staff buy into the need for a total change of mentality, and the new mentality must be consistent throughout the team for it to succeed.
Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
– Thomas Jefferson
Choosing a Captain
Posted by Coach Harris in Coaching, NBA, UEA on 16/10/2009
A couple of days ago I read that Stephen Jackson (Golden State Warriors) had relinquished his captaincy of the team in the wake of recent public fallouts with the organisation. The article quoted Jackson as saying:
I don’t want to be a role model. … Being captain was overrated to me, anyway. You don’t do anything but go out before the game and talk to the refs. I don’t want to do that, anyway.
Wow. It sounds like Golden State have dodged a bullet here as that is definitely not the attitude any captain should be displaying. Jackson’s comments come several weeks after he was fined by the NBA for publicly requesting a trade away from the Warriors to a ‘contender’. Unsurprisingly no ‘contender’ was keen to take on Jackson’s cavalier approach to team chemistry.
"The Captain and the Truth"
However the issue I want to draw attention to in this post is captaincy. What should we, as coaches, be looking for when appointing a captain for our team? There are probably a number of cliches that would roll off the tongue when asked that question. Talismanic, leadership, passionate, loyal, hardworking, positive. They need to be an on-court leader, much like a point guard, but also an off-court leader, promoting team-chemistry. At low level basketball, I believe the captaincy should go to one of the best players. This is because weaker players who do not play a lot of minutes are likely to become disenfranchised with their role and promote dissent, rendering them unsuitable for a leadership role within the team. At the professional level this is negated somewhat because players are making a living from the game and accept that stars and role-players must exist in harmony for success, unlike lower levels where the competition for playing time can ruin team cohesion. It is interesting to note however that most NBA team captains are the players with the highest profile (read: most talent) on their teams.
When I am choosing a captain I’m looking for the player that is going to best represent the interests and attitudes of the team. They need to be committed, passionate and balanced. They cannot show any dissent towards coaching staff or officials. I like them to take charge on the court during dead ball situations and rally the team. I like them to hold teammates accountable for errors, but also encourage them towards the correct action.
They must lead by example. Leading by example is not the main thing, it is the only thing.
Unlike Jackson, they must want to be a role model to their teammates and set the standard by which the rest of the team must follow. They must be vocal in practise and games, demanding improvement in every area (including their own). If faced with a new group of players, run a few open practises and observe. After 2/3 practises, often the captain will be an obvious choice.
I’d also like to use this post to congratulate one of my ex-players and captain Holly Deegan, who has just been appointed captain of Bausch and Lomb Wildcats Irish Women’s National League team.
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