The Easy Way to Teach Basketball Offense

By Don Kelbick

Coaches constantly complain that they can’t get their players to remember their plays. They want an easy basketball offense.

Over and over again I hear, “My guys are thick. I can’t get them to remember anything.” Once in a while I might hear, “How can I teach my offense better?”, but I don’t hear it often enough.

I don’t have all the answers, but I do have an opinion. Since this is my space, here is my opinion.

Lack of Background

First and foremost, if you continuously have trouble getting your team to remember their offense, the first thing you should think is that it is too complex or you have TOO MANY PLAYS. I know that it is difficult for a coach to look at himself that way, but he has to.

You have to remember two things…

First, your players don’t have the background that you do. Your past experience will allow you to be much more adaptable than your players.

The second thing is that you came up with the basketball plays. They have to be second nature to you before you bring it to the court. You will know all the positions and all the adjustments long before your players are comfortable with even one aspect.

To draw an analogy, I teach players that a “good pass” is a pass that your teammate can catch. It doesn’t matter where or how you throw a pass if your teammate can’t catch it. Passes that one player can catch, another one can’t. You have to make allowances for that when you pass the ball. When you teach a basketball offense, it doesn’t matter how simple you think it is. If your players don’t get it, it is too complex. It is not important what you think, it is important if they get it.

Drills, Progressions, Dummy

These are the three magic words of teaching offenses…

Drills

When you decide on the drill you are going to use in practice, what criteria do you use?  Do you run drills that you think are expected of you (such as three-man weave) that really have no purpose — or do you select drills that have relevance to your team?

TIP:  I believe that the best way to construct basketball drills for your team is to take pieces of your offense and turn those one or two passes and one or two cuts and make them drills. If you are running the “Flex,” the back screen is one drill, the lane duck-in is another drill, and the weakside down screen is another drill. You can work these every day. It will not only make your players’ skills better but it will help them recognize situations.

Progressions

Before you run, you have to know how to walk. Before you walk, you have to know how to crawl. Those are progressions. As you construct your drills as pieces of your offense you drill first cut, second cut, third cut. Once you are comfortable with how your team runs the drills, start putting the drills together. Your first drill is now first cut, second cut. The next drill is third cut, fourth cut. When you are comfortable with that. Your first drill becomes first cut, second cut, and third cut. Before you know it, you’ve practiced your offense.

That doesn’t mean you can’t run single cut drills as well, but players learn better in pieces.

Dummy

No, I don’t mean your players. Dummy refers to running your offense without defense. Again I ask you, “what do you do to get your players warmed up?” Do you just run up and down in a useless drill or do you do something relevant?

TIP:  Might I suggest that you run “dummy offense” as a warm-up drill instead of 3-man weave and lay-up drills? And I don’t mean just the half court stuff either. Dummy your fastbreak and your press breakers as well. You will work up a sweat, get in some relevant shooting, some ball handling, conditioning and most importantly, you will be running your offense and reinforcing its principles and philosophy over and over again.

I am a firm believer that you have to remove competition from teaching. When in competition, players’ thoughts are to perform and survive, not learn. Remove the competition, people learn better. Once you are comfortable that your players know what is expected of them, you can introduce competition. They can then go back to their drills, progressions and dummy for reinforcement.

Cynical Thoughts on the Dribble Drive Motion Offense

By Don Kelbick

Just a couple of cynical thoughts as I watched Memphis wipe the floor with Texas. As, they run their “Dribble Drive Motion,” you can’t tell me that the type of offense they run will make any difference with how good they are. They are great athletes with terrific skills and any offense they run will not only be successful but due to their skills set, no matter what they run, it will turn into a “Dribble Drive” because they are all very good at that. Somewhere, in northern New Hampshire or western Idaho, or eastern Montana, some coach is sitting in his living room, taking notes and planning to install it with his program of 5′10″ rural farmers and will be genuinely surprised when he doesn’t get the same results as Memphis. Once again, it’s not the x’s and the o’s, it’s the Jimmys and the Joes.

Picture by shundaroni

Way back when, in the 70’s and early 80’s, there was no shot clock in college basketball. Dean Smith had an offense called the “4 Corners.” He used it to isolate his great guards (Larry Brown, Charlie Scott, Phil Ford, etc) and to run the clock. One of the games that precipitated the use of the shot clock was a UNC game against Virginia with Ralph Sampson. UNC held the ball with the 4 Corners and the half-time score was 7-0. I believe the final score was something like 16-9. After that game, people started calling for the shot clock.

My first real job was at a Div. III school called Longwood College (now a Div. I school). Our Head Coach ran the same 4 Corners as UNC, except we called it “4 to Score.” We ran it with exactly the same rotations and cuts, except to we tried to get the ball handler to penetrate instead hold the ball. The result was that the same exact offense that produ ced the 7-0 half-time score allowed us to average 91 ppg. You know what? It looked EXACTLY like the “Dribble, Drive, Motion.” That was 30 years ago. We just called it something else. And in reality, it wasn’t new even when we ran, we took it from someone else. Old coaching saying, “Nothing new has been invented in basketball since the jump shot.”