The Cross Over Movement Blog

A common debate among basketball coaches is the importance of aerobic conditioning. Personally, I question the efficacy of basketball coaches using the mile or two-mile runs as a conditioning test for basketball players. I don’t see how running a mile or two miles at a 7:30/mile pace prepares a player for the quick starts and stops of a basketball game.

On Vern Gambetta’s site, he interviewed Bill Ebben PhD who teaches in the Marquette University Department of Exercise Science. Dr. Ebben touched on this subject as well:

What are the most common mistakes in conditioning? Too much aerobic training for non-aerobic sports. Too much long slow distance training. The failure to create anaerobic interval training programs. The failure to make the conditioning sport specific.

Will Farrell’s Kicking and Screaming is on TBS this weekend. In honor of its television debut, I decided to link an old article I wrote about the lessons learned by watching the movie.

When I think of good offensive teams, I like Rick Adelman coached teams. The video below asks if the Rockets’ offense is a “Princeton offense.” I actually think Adelman’s offensive system is more Triangle than Princeton.

In Issue #47 of the Hard2Guard Player Development Newsletter, I wrote about teaching skills through a motion offense. Adelman’s system provides a good foundation to teach many different tactical skills.

Adelman’s system starts with a 3-man game and flows into a 2-man game on the ball reversal. As Rockets’ Assistant Coach Elston Turner explains:

“Basically, it’s a series of three-man game and two-man game,” said Rockets assistant coach Elston Turner, a six-year assistant with Adelman in Sacramento. “If the three-man game doesn’t work, you flow into a two-man game. And at the right time, it’s one-on-one.

“As a general rule, we allow our players some freedom to show their skills. We believe the spontaneous creativity, things that happen in the spur of the moment based on what the guy in front of you does is the hardest to guard because you can’t prepare for that.

“It’s exciting to watch and it’s exciting for the guys to play in. If you have the ability to play, we allow you to do that.”

In the first clip, the ball enters into Yao Ming in the high post; McGrady uses a screen to cut backdoor, receives the pass from Yao Ming and finishes with the dunk.

In the second clip, the same set-up ends with a dribble hand-off from Yao Ming to McGrady for a jump shot. People label it a Princeton offense because it utilizes dribble hand-offs and backdoor cuts. However, just because it ends with the same types of shots does not mean it is the same offense. The two systems have similarities, but how they achieve their objectives are different, especially with the difference between the 35 and 24-second shot clocks.

The third clip shows the two-man game with a hand-off into a pick-and-roll-like situation with McGrady feeding Yao.

At the 1:00 mark, the clip shows a variety of the 3-man game using the two posts and Battier in the middle of the floor. This illustrates one of the differences between the systems: Adelman runs a variety of set plays while the Princeton offense reverses the ball over and over, using the shot clock, until the defense makes a mistake and they get the shot they want.

As with the original “Youth Basketball Motion Offenses” article, from a youth development perspective, the difference is the ability to teach the basic principles while training technical skills like shooting, passing and ball handling. However, each of these systems provides a good foundation to develop a series of progressions which teach tactical and technical skills together which enhance the players’ overall development.

In Issue #47 of the Hard2Guard Player Development Newsletter, I wrote about teaching skills through a motion offense. While I do not have video of the drills or sets I use, I found an article and a short youtube clip that offer some more insight into the philosophy behind the Blitz Basketball offense.

The Memphis attack in the video has many similarities, though the Memphis players tend to dribble more than I woul like. When they move the ball, they are fun to watch and tough to guard. However, it seems like they get stuck too often playing 1v1. The Blitz offense is based on a lot of 1v1 action, but within a team concept where the ball is moving, either with a dribble or the pass. The best I have seen the philosophy played was by some teenagers who attended a camp I directed in Macedonia. The ball never seemed to stop and the players never seemed to get in each other’s way. There was always great spacing and they scored lay-ups or had wide open threes without ever having to set a screen.

The article is written by Sergio Scariolo of Unicaja Malaga in Spain. Scariolo’s goals in his offense are similar to mine:

My goals were three:
1. Widen distances for the defensive rotations.
2. Clear space for the penetrations of 1 and 3, and increase post-up plays.
3. Make dish-off passes easier for the penetrator, and having three targets that are more visible on the perimeter instead of two.

A key point that he makes, which is often overlooked, is:

Movement without the ball: Every ball move requires a re-adjustment of the correct spacing into the court. It is necessary to keep the same distance between the four perimeter players.

Regardless of the specifics of the offense, my point in the newsletter was to use the motion offense to build skills: a coach should be able to breakdown the offense into smaller parts and teach the offensive motion and concepts while developing or training technical skills like ball handling and shooting. That is my goal in Blitz Basketball. Sure, it is a tactical system which allows an undersized team to compete. But, more importantly, to me, it is a system that lends itself to technical skill development while teaching the offense, which eliminates the need to do a lot of 5v0 work. With youth teams where time is limited, the ability to teach the offense while developing skills is important.

The following Mike Conley, Jr video has been linked on a plethora of sites with anonymous posters and basketball experts praising Conley’s ball handling acumen. However, while the drill work is impressive, I question the transfer of stationary two-ball drills to true game ball handling.

Once Conley starts to move, I see a lack of control. While the drills exhibit terrific hand speed and rhythm, the full court drill illustrates a lack of control, with the ball in his palm and the ball’s height over his shoulder at one point. While an impressive workout, my question is: How much transfer is there between stationary two-ball drills and effective game ball handling?

I write more on this in issue #48 of my Hard2Guard Player Development Newsletter. Sign-up here.

Since my very first article for Basketball Sense, I have criticized the way we teach individual defensive footwork. I see team after team doing zig-zag drills and straight line shuffles with no thought to reaction time or changing direction.

Defense is quickness. A coach once told me that a defensive player simply needs to be able to “guard a yard.” If you can guard three feet in either direction, you will stop most offensive players, especially at the youth or high school level.

I do a short defensive progression which is discussed in Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development, Second Edition. I saw this video of Steve Nash which is similar to my favorite defensive drill. Short and quick with reaction to an object and constant balance; that is training individual defensive footwork!

I saw this on Sefu Bernard’s blog:

Just imagine how good he could be if he concentrated on basketball!!

Vern Gambetta returned from his week of hibernation and wrote a blog titled, “Intellectual Imbreeding.” While he writes about the field of athletic development, I think the same is true of any sport, especially basketball:

I always strive to go outside my field to learn, get outside my intellectual comfort zone and challenge myself with new ideas. That does not mean I have to adopt those ideas, but by being challenged, I find the challenge either makes me stronger in my beliefs or it forces me to modify or change beliefs if I find them lacking…To meet the challenges ahead we all need to look at some different paradigms.

I spoke to former NBA player Bob Bigelow a couple weeks ago and he said he became a “youth basketball expert” when he stopped talking to basketball coaches and looked at soccer programs.

As coaches, we challenge our players to go beyond their comfort zone in training. However, do we do the same as coaches? I wrote Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development as a book which forced readers to examine their coaching mthods and preconceived notions of what is and is not the best training protocol. I did not write it as a “How to” manual, as several groups have requested since its publication because I think it is more valuable for a coach to think about his own situation, style and philosophy rather than copying verbatim something that I write.

I use as many examples from other sports as I can find when I research basketball topics. When I read basketball boards, the same arguments circulate and different opinions are usually shot down as incorrect. How does the game and the teaching of the game move forward if the majority stays within its own circles and dispels any novel or different idea on the basis that it is different? The best coaches in any sport search for the best answers, whether they are found in their own sport or elsewhere.

On a message board today, there was an interesting discussion about a player and her ranking. One poster argued that this player was a top player and another argued that she was not. Apparently, she was not rated highly in the player rankings. In the final post, a fan of this player mentioned the player’s work ethic as a reason why the player is a great player and then said, in passing, that she might struggle against super athletic teams.

The problem, of course, is that scouts watch high school players and project them as a college players. Therefore, ranking sites are not ranking based on achievements or accomplishments, but on projections, which is why they are often wildly inaccurate. After all, how can a scout ranking a player off a couple games know how the player will progress? While there are physical attributes like length, height, quickness and more which are beneficial at the college level, a player’s improvement, and thus ultimate success, is determined largely by his or her work ethic and internal motivation.

So, in a sense, based on the material available to the ranking service, this player probably does not deserve a high ranking, as even her supporters believe she struggles against the really athletic players. For the most part, the really athletic players are the ones playing in college, which would suggest she is not a great college prospect so she should not have a high ranking.

However, the final poster with inside knowledge of the girl’s work ethic is probably more accurate. After all, she apparently knows the player. Of course, the poster might also be biased. Heck, the anonymous poster could even be her mother! However, if the player works as hard as her fan suggests, she likely will find a way to overcome her problems with quicker, more athletic players.

Now, the problem for college coaches is that they usually have the same information as the ranking service. After all, can you trust a high school coach trying to help his or her player move on to a college program? Maybe, maybe not. Can you trust the player and what you learn from her in phone conversations? Maybe. I know several players who hurt their recruiting chances because they did not illustrate a singular devotion to improving their skills, so a coach favored a different player with similar skills who appeared to like basketball more.

Take the player rankings with a grain of salt. They are not the gospel truth, just a person’s educated guess. Sure, they have too much power and influence who gets recruited, but, at the end of the day, the college coach must live with the consequences of his or her decision. The scouts can blame hundreds of factors which caused their flawed rankings and scouts are not fired for a couple mistakes, while a college coach might be. Therefore, the rankings don’t really matter; it’s the success on the court that matters, and no scouting service can take that success away from a player, regardless of how they project as a college player.