3 Key Questions to Answer before Deciding on an Offense.

It is weird how sometimes thinking about one thing can leads you to an unrelated conclusion on another topic. I’ve been thinking a lot lately moving into the season about our offensive principles, our team, our talent etc. As a result most of the discussions I’ve been in have been about very specific things: types/ angles of screens, evaluating talent, types of movement, shooting technique . . . you get the idea. While processing all of this though, I came to a minor epiphany regarding selecting your teams offense.

I like breaking things down to their base components when talking about basketball. There are too many conversations in our sport that come down to having the marker last or arguments over preferences in shades of gray. Maybe because I’m simple, but when I coach I want everything to line up. What I believe, needs to match how we play, and therefore how I coach and what I teach. I think when we talk about offense as a basketball community, there are too many factors that come into discussions about preferred offensive tactics. We’ve got a billion dollar industry built on coaches trying to sell you on their tactics; fighting over which one is superior is a waste of energy.

I think before you wade into any conversations, thoughts or even purchases in regards to what you want to do on offense this year your need to stop and think about some core questions that may resolve all these issues for you.

 

Question 1: When push comes to shove who do you trust more to make shots: your best player vs/over defense or the open player you have on the floor?

We can argue philosophy and system all day here is the reality of offense.

There are coaches who want to get the ball to certain players in certain situations to make plays and shots regardless of how they are defended.  Whether you are a star coach, into post touches to get points/foul shots, or a sets and continuity coach that is getting people the ball in particular spots: what is comes down to is basically the same thing. A contested shot by the players you trust to take them is a better option than open looks and touches by the other players on the floor.

On the flip side you’ve got coaches who either have been blessed with superior talent, believe they can train all players to be shooters, or just preach team first. Regardless of the reason they teach motion offense, or principled offenses where the purpose is to get the best shot possible from whomever that happens to be. They believe in their kids and/ their coaching and/ their system enough that whoever they have on the floor is trusted to take and make shots/decisions when that is what they are given.

One is not right and one is not wrong they are different approaches. Before you even talk about offense you need to decide who and when you are ok with taking shots. You also need to decide if you are training everyone to make decisions or training positions/particular players to do certain things. This can take a lot of the thoughts and debate over what you are going to do on offense.

 

Question 2: Who do you want making plays?

If you want players running your stuff and you control the chess piece then certain types of offenses lend themselves to that.

If you’ve got play makers or key players that you want making decisions and everyone else reading off of them, then certain offenses lend themselves to that.

If you want all of your player making decisions and reads, then again certain types of offenses lend themselves too that.

The easier way to look at it might be “how big a control freak are you?” Who gets to make decisions and decide when and where to attack? Who gets to decide when and where to shoot? If you are ok with players making this choice all the time, that is going to lead to different offensive choices.  If you want to eliminate some players freedom or dictate movement and choices entirely that will be an entirely different choice.

 Question 3: What can you get away with on your team?

This is a biggest logistical question and is connected to larger organizational issues:

- How much practice time to you have?

-What is your ability level?

- Are you developmental or competitive?

- Are you teaching for a season or as part of program?

- Are your kids capable in practice and games execute the pre-requisite skills for running this offense?

 Once you know your three answers to these key issues selecting an offense for your team or group should be easy. Knowing your answers to these will be different then everyone else to varying degrees, should eliminate much need for debate over which is better and why.

Tryout Time Again

Tryout time is rolling up on us again. While I often tell kids life is the tryout, bceause I want them putting their best effort and foot forward at every possible moment, I also get that tryout time has a special meaning to players and coaches. There is energy, nerves, and generally as much interest and involvment from parents, community, school, staff and people outside your program that there may well be all year. It can be an energizing time for you and your program, filled with hope eternal. It can also be stressful with decision, pressures, even some politics I'm sure.

I've previously written on the topic:

Tryouts and Evaluations

Lessons learned from tryouts.

So as you can see it tends to be a recurring theme is basketball circles. New and old coaches a like must re-look and revisit practices.

At our tryouts this year we've got a number of outside coaches coming into my program at the JV and middle school level with some very strong kids in those age groups. In the past I've run a longer "tryout" period to divide up kids where they belong developmentally and to let some kids weed themsleves out on their own. This year I'll have to truncate my process a little bit for two reasons:

A) We've built our program to the point where there are more bodies at tryouts then we have spots for and not all of them are the sort of kids that would drop off on their own. We've got potentially 2-4 seniors (2 returning 2 transfers who I haven't seen before), 4 juniors, 5 sophmores returning from the varsity team, 10 sophmores who played JV for us last year or are transfers, and 10 freshman. The top 3 freshman are skill wise varsity ready but may take a year to get used to high school as we won't need them right away. So with only 24-26 spots available we've got 33 kids ready and expecting to play somewhere. We need to be able to make decisions that give kids a fair shot, but also don't drag out the experience for them.

B) The incoming frehsman class has had high success through elementary and middle school under the same coach who is following them to JV. With success comes expectations and attention. The group of parents and our basketball community is obviously very invested in this group of athletes and is concerned over any possible break up or break downs within this group. WIth so much attention on this particular tryout and who gets cut and why we also need to be extra vigilant.

So to truncate the process we've taken our normal player evaluation that we would use over time and added some very clear rubrics for scoring it. This way we should be able to get all the coaches at the tryouts looking at the same things, and scoring the same way. When we sit down to rank and talk we will all be speaking the same language. We will also be able to build ranked ladders for players by grade and position if required.

Here is our evaluation tool.

Player Evaluation

Name:

 

Category	Notes	SCORE
Physical Qualities
Athleticism (Agility, Verticality, Flexibility)
Speed/Quickness
Size (Height, Length, Strength)
Trainable/Learned Skills
Defensive Skills
Rebounding
Leadership
Offensive Skills – with the ball
Intelligence (Decision Making, Application of Concepts, Ability to Adjust)
Focus
Offensive Skills without the ball
Hustle
Experience and Off Court Issues
Experience (Level of Competition, Programs, BNB Experience)
Complication Free (Drama, Laziness, Attitude)

 

Physical Qualities Rubric

 

Level 1	Level 2	Level 3	Level 4
Average Qualities for a person in their developmental range.	Average qualities of an athlete in their developmental range	Exceptional qualities for an athlete in their developmental range	Exceptional qualities for an athlete of a higher developmental range.

 

Trainable/Learned Qualities Rubric

 

Level 1	Level 2	Level 3	Level 4
Basic or lower level of acceptable skill for their developmental range	Average level of competence for their developmental range.	Highly skilled for an athlete in their developmental range.	National level skills for an athlete in their developmental range.

 

Experience Rubric

 

Level 1	Level 2	Level 3	Level 4
Little to no exposure or experience to high school or other elite level competition.	1 or two years of exposure to high school level competition. Or exposure to elite level competition	Multiple years of high school level competition. Or Commensurate competition experience vs elite level competition.	Multiple years of high school level and commensurate experiences vs. elite level competition.

 

Complications Rubric

Level 1	Level 2	Level 3	Level 4
Significant chance of discipline required or team issue during season.	Multiple areas of commitment have been a problem in the past.	.1 commitment area a problem: home/ community/ team / school.	School, team, home, community commitments will be high. No issues.

So this will be our process this year. I hope your tryouts run as smoothly as I'm planning ours to be.

For your amusement here is a video that a grade 10 student made with me a couple of years ago as a project about tryouts.

JV vs Varsity