That Basketball Life

Coaches spend a lot of time teaching each practice teaching offense.  One of the most important items which need to be taught is what I call Offensive starts.  What are offensive starts?  The are the wrinkles that you will need to add to your offense to help you get things started.  Against a basic zone you may not need to use any of these.  However against a solid man to man you will need to show your team a number of options they can use to get the offense started.  The six that I like to teach my team at a basic level are: V-cuts L-cuts Pin downs Backdoors Dribble At Dribble Handoff

As we move up the age ladder we like to continue pushing our players both athletically and in terms of basketball.  When the kids hit the 9-10 year old group we continue building on their basketball knowledge. Since we teach a lot more concepts at this age group we will have multiple posts covering our 9-10 year old topics.  Additional topics covered will include the intro to man to man, and more detailed looks into game situations.  In this post we will be covering how we expand our offense and build off of the basics that the kids learned at the 7-8 year old level.  Our goal is to teach the kids proper positioning and as they get older and start to understand this concept, we start taking the leash off of them and let them use their creativity.

A while back I wrote a post about my general philosophy on coaching kids under the age of 10.  As a coach you shouldn't spend too much time exposing your players to exotic defenses or offenses.  What you should be doing is exposing them to the fundamentals of the game along with various coordination and athletic development drills (covered in another post soon). However, if you are going to expose them to games you do need to prepare them by introducing some basic ideas which will keep them competitive.  In today's post I will discuss some of the basic team offensive concepts you should expose your kids to.  I will break these down into 2 groups: 7-8 year olds 9-10 year olds Today we will be discussing the 7-8 year old group.

In this installment we are covering what our players should look for when the ball is entered on the low block.  Knowing their options before they even step on the floor will help slow things down in players mind.

When running your offense it is always a good idea for your players to know exactly where their options are going to be when they catch the ball in certain spots on the floor.  Today we cover what our offense should be doing when we get the ball in the high post.

A few days ago we covered middle of the lane penetration .  In this post we cover what the offense should of when we drive baseline.

A good offense is about trying to put your players in a position to get good shots from areas on the floor where they can take advantage of their strengths.  A defense is most compromised when there is penetration either thru a screen or a simple blow by.  Once the penetration has occurred, your players need to know where they should go in order to take advantage of the defense scrambling to recover.  There are 2 types of basic penetrations, one is middle lane and the other is baseline.  These names describe the area on the floor where the ball enters the lane from.  Any drive that comes from an area outside the baseline is considered a middle lane.  We will be cover the baseline penetration in another post.  Here will be focusing on middle lane drives and the proper rotations an offense should take to get good shots while not exposing the backcourt and keeping the floor balanced.

The shuffle offense is a nice little offense that was made popular by Dean Smith and it's origins date back to the 1950's.  The thing that I like about this offense is that it forces all 5 players to be familiar with playing both in the post and on the perimeter.  It also necessitates that all players know how to set screens and how to use screens.  To me this is an offense that can be used at the youth levels where a coach's main goal should be to expose players to multiple positions as opposed to tying kids down to one position at a young age. Once all of the wrinkles are in this offense can be a bit complicated for the beginner but in it's basic form it can be taught to 3rd and 4th graders.

This is a play that works really well against a man to man defense.  The good thing about this set is you can start it from your basic 3 out set.

When you are coaching team offense one of the most important topics that will need to be covered will be floor balance.  Floor balance is making sure that your players are positioned properly to do 2 things: Support your teammate who has the ball in his possession. Force the defending team to cover as much space as possible on the defensive end. On the surface accomplishing the 2 points mentioned above seem counter intuitive.  In order to support your teammate, one needs to make sure that there are plenty of options around the ball yet when you want to force the other team to defend the whole court it implies that your players need to be spaced away from the player with the ball.  Two contradicting forces fighting each other is the reason why the term floor balance is so appropriate.

This is a nice play run by coach K and the Duke Blue Devils.

When playing against a man to man defense it is important that the offense you are running doesn't get bogged down.  There are some tendencies that keep occurring over and over again when facing a tough man to man which denies passes to the wings and ruins offensive flow.  The first one is that the wing player is forced to catch the ball too far up the floor.  This ruins angles for effective entry passes into the post, and it takes you out of triple threat position.  The next thing a good defense can do is ruin your timing.  A good offense is about rhythm and timing and a good denial of the first pass can destroy it.  To combat a good deny defense there are 3 ways your players can use to get the offense started.  The first is running your wings through screens, the second is have your point guard dribble to the spot he/she would ideally want to pass to, and the third one is having the wings run one of 3 perimeter cuts to get open.  The 3 cuts we a...

Here is another video.  This one shows how Villanova practices wing catch, rip, and drive under pressure.

Nice video on how to get open on the wing when you are being overplayed. Video includes some nice drills to run in practice.

One of our mottoes here at That Basket Life is to take nothing for granted.  This is why we spend a lot of time covering topics like pivots, and close-outs and all sorts of topics related to footwork and screening.  They may be boring on the surface but if you master the details you will become a better more efficient basketball player.  In this post's discussion we are covering another one of these boring yet important topics.  Specifically, we will be discussing some of the more popular cuts involved in basketball.  Cuts are very important in basketball.  So important that in order to stand a chance to challenge a defense, any offense should have at least some sort of cutting action in it. Some of the cuts we'll be covering below are: Basic Cut V-Cut L-Cut Flash Cut Backdoor Cut Curl Cut Loop Cut UCLA Cut Flare Cut Laker Cut

Cool video featuring Kirby Schepp on how to coach your players.  Don't have them be robotic, rather teach them the basics and let them use their creativity and passion for the game.

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