That Basketball Life

Found this video which shows Kobe Bryant and what his mindset is when he is out on the wing with the ball in his hands. He says that when he has the ball in his hands, he looks past the man who is guarding him. He knows he can beat him. What he is looking at is how the defense is lining up behind the man who is guarding him. This will determine what he does with the ball.

The most important thing that a coach needs to do in order to avoid boredom and as a consequence your kids from being disruptive is to keep them engaged.  During practice kids should always be busy during drills.  Don't have them wasting too much time in line waiting for their turns to run a drill.  Choose drills which minimize the amount of time that kids spend waiting.  Keep them engaged.

I have spent a lot of time over the last couple of years breaking down general offensive movements.  I have shown my general philosophies on how to get open on the wing to start an offense to what players should do when the ball is in the middle of the paint.  What I haven't done is expressed my philosophy on offensive flow.  This is what this article is about.

There is a nice article on ESPN about Steve Kerr and how he and his coaching staff came up with the offense that made Golden State such an efficient offensive powerhouse. The article states that Steve Kerr's philosophy is to get everyone involved in the offense in order to get max effort.  To pass the ball and then to move.  There is no standing still.  If your not open you're moving. I love the article because the offensive beliefs that it lists as being a huge part of the Golden State offense are beliefs that I try to instill in my teams when I coach offense.  Granted any team is always going to be as good as the parts that it has.  But as shown in the article, a team can get a lot better with the right philosophy. It's an interesting article.  Link is here .

A huge factor in determining how good a basketball player you are is how well you can dribble under pressure. Dribbling under pressure is so important that it can make the difference between you being a difference maker in a game or being a non-factor. We will be covering this topic in more detail in upcoming posts. To get started I have included a video which gives some good tips on what you can do while you are on the court to negate good pressure defense.

When you talk about dribble penetration and what separates the best from the rest the one catch phrase that we like to use at TBL is "be strong down low and soft on top."