Steve Donahue on The Basketball Podcast Offensive Spacing, Cutting & Efficiency Basketball Immersion

• You don’t need to be athletic to play fast, you need players who can make decisions quickly. • On recruiting: “We have a tendency to look at it like a horse race…how fast they run, how big their legs are. You get enamored with that stuff in July. Then in February you’re kicking yourself because you didn’t value what you value to win games. • Decision making is difficult to teach. • In recruiting, you must consider the situation a player is placed in. • I can coach hard skills – footwork, positioning, how to use your body, passing with both hands, ball-handling. The difficult ones are the soft skills. They’re hard to improve vastly. If they show no ability to do it initially as freshmen, it’s hard to get kids to change dramatically. • Oliver: A soft skill is the game application of the hard skill. • Playing fast has very little to do with athleticism (although there is a baseline of athleticism that is needed). • Penn uses a 10-point evaluation form for a prospect (6 of the 10 skills are “hard skills”) • John Beilein has an incredible ability to see what translates to his program based on what he is watching. • A documentary was done on Pele, Jerry Rice, and Wayne Gretzky and all three spoke about how their youth coaches allowed them to express themselves and have freedom. That was a key aspect of their growth. • I am not going to harp on turnovers. If you continuously grade yourself on how well you didn’t turn it over, I think you’re missing the big picture. For us to improve, I want guys to try things. I want guys to attempt it. We’re always going to go back and evaluate mistakes. I may let them pass in practice and maybe get them individually in film. • I think the team that wins is the team that is willing to make mistakes. • Oliver: Coaches too often don’t see the connection between creativity and freedom. Creativity comes from freedom. There are opportunities in practice for self-discovery where kids find things they didn’t know they could do until you give them the freedom. • Six years into my stint at Cornell, one of my players suffered a tragic neck injury. That was a monumental event in my eyes. I saw it as a sign that I needed to change. From that moment, I think I began coaching more positively. • You must evaluate yourself as you’re coaching your team. Allow yourself to be vulnerable and not always be right. If you’re willing to be wrong, it opens your mind as you watch your kids play and you have a different perspective on what they’re going through. • In my year off between BC and Penn, I spent time evaluating coaches. • The message coaches are trying to give to their players sometimes is lost because of the language they use. There is too much profanity used in coaching. I think it hurts their ability to teach. The way you say something and the words you choose is important. • A good exercise is to record yourself in practice. • Sometimes I watch our game film and don’t like my demeanor and body language on the sidelines. • In a 24-hour period, I saw a Tony Bennett and a Shaka Smart practice. Think about the difference in the style of play, but the things that were common in them (the level of trust and the love) was what made them successful. • Penn has a 30-person Student Analytics Group that helps out the program. • Dribble/Pass Ratio: When we were getting close to 1/1, we weren’t as efficient as we were when we were 2/1 or 3/1. It obviously depends on your style of play. • I developed as a coach because I got to play against Pete Carril’s Princeton teams. • There are 3 ways we teach the backdoor cut: o If someone is into you, allow them to get into you to a point and then you swim move where we get them moving one way and then we use our inside hand. o If the guy is off you, we run in place and when the defender gets anxious, we go the other way. o Versus overplay: quick one direction jab and go. • Let’s encourage those kids (particularly bigs) to make those passes and not care if they throw it into the third row. • The game moves too fast for triple-threat. Catch it ready to shoot. • Popovich: .5 seconds to make a decision – shoot it, drive it, pass it. • Oliver: One reason kids don’t cut hard is they never get the ball. • Oliver: There has to be bravery to throw the ball. • The more you cut, the more critical respacing is. • I get concerned if we don’t get enough basket cuts. How I think we’re going to win on offense is based on how well we cut because I don’t know if we go east/west, how we’re going to score. • Our 4 and our 5 were 2nd and 3rd on our team in assists. They turned it over a bit, but teams really had to guard our cutting. • I thought Golden State’s cutting in Game 2 changed the NBA Finals. • We’re trying to get a layup or a dunk…or get fouled doing it. • 95% Rule: When a guy drives to the rim, I want them 95% certain they’re getting a bucket or getting fouled. • We have mechanisms in place that allows them to attack the rim and not give into a bad possession. o Keep your dribble o Penetration spacing rules • Defensively: o No layups or dunks (no fouls while preventing that) o No standstill 3’s o One shot only • Oliver: What do you teach your players to do when they get the ball close to the rim but they don’t have a shot opportunity? • In AAU there are too many kids that attack the rim and don’t understand the decision that needs to be made • Villanova is fantastic at their ability to pivot back when they drive to the rim. o Accompanied by a “second cut” by one of their teammates on the perimeter. • Patient pivots • On Villanova: “They play like they’re not that talented. They give up themselves.” • The better athlete I coached at BC taught me a ton. • You should have a checklist when you’re watching film. Have a set of things that you want to hone in on. If not, you’re watching a movie. • Teaching tool: exaggeration of a certain technique in a certain drill.