I received this underneath inbounds play from Brandon Rosenthal, assistant men’s basketball coach at St. Edward’s University.  This would be a good one to save for the last couple of minutes of a game where you need a score.  That way, your opponent would not have defended it earlier in the game.

The name of the play is “Line.”

4 dives to opposite block

2 peels out and screens 5

4 screens 2, then dives to the rim

1 cuts outside the arc on ballside

2 cuts to short corner opposite ballside

A couple of thoughts of mine on inbounds plays.  Have the players begin their movements when the inbounder catches the bounce pass from the official.  I don’t like the idea of slapping the ball–it wastes a second on the five second count.

Even if you have a particular cut or a particular player that you are looking to hit, don’t turn down an available receiver who is open.  Throw the ball in to the first open player.

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of resources for coaching basketball including basketball practice, basketball plays, basketball drills, basketball quotes, basketball workouts, basketball poems, and more!

These notes on the Carolina Transition Offense came from Creighton Burns’ newsletter who found it on the Xs and Os of basketball.

Idea is to play 94 feet of offense. Why? Unlike the perception that running teams play without discipline, you as the coach has control if you practice the right way every day. Transition offense is a great recruiting tool obviously, its easy to sell players on it. Finally, a quick scoring offense prevents teams from pressing you full court.

Teaching Points
- Always outlet ball side because its faster.
- Players should catch the ball on the run and run their lanes as wide as possible.
- Reverse the ball, get it going side-to-side as much as possible.
- Bigs should run rim to rim with the trailing big looking to hit the other big on the run or on early post-up.
- If there are 2 or less defenders, try to score in 2 or less passes. Run the secondary break if more than 2 defenders.

Secondary Break Rules
- Minimum of 3 passes unless you have an open layup
- Move from side to side
- Shoulder to hip coming of all screens
- Get the ball into the post

Secondary Break For Hansbrough and 3-pointers:

This past season, the Tar Heels did one of 2 things. They got the ball into Tyler Hansbrough early; and they hit a ton of early 3-pointers. They accomplished this mostly through their secondary break and early offense.

They start the offense in the most vanilla of ways. Ty Lawson dribbles up one side of the floor. The ball is reversed to the opposite site and Hansbrough who attempts to seal his defender to shoot his little turn and shoot 2-footer off the glass.

If they are unable to get the ball into Hansbrough because of a fronting defense or so, O4 comes to set a ball screen for O3 on the wing (O4 usually isn’t so high after the ball reversal). O2 sets a cross screen for O5 who goes under the screen while O3 comes off the ball screen shoulder to hip. If O3 can shoot the 3-pointer, he does so. Otherwise, O3 should drive into the middle of the floor, Hansbrough should be right underneath the basket if X5 goes to help on penetration. O1 has shuffled to a spot on the top of the key, this is also where a lot of 3-pointers happen as the defense collapses on the penetration.

Finally, if O3 is unable to do any of the above, they go with a screen the screener action with O4 setting a down screen for O2 coming up to the wing. O3 can hit O2 for the 3-pointer (usually Ellington). O3 cuts opposite wing-corner. If all else fails, O3 passes back to O1 and then UNC runs their true motion offense.

The UNC secondary break is exceptionally simple, yet when executed properly, it is very hard to stop as we’ve seen the past several years with UNC. Getting the ball into the post early on, and shooting well from the perimeter are obviously crucial.

Click here for a short video ofCoach Williams teaching the Carolina transition game.

Here is another video of a ballscreen option off the transition.

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of resources for coaching basketball including basketball practice, basketball plays, basketball drills, basketball quotes, basketball workouts, basketball poems, and more!

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.

Our HoopClinics sneak peek today is an interview with stretching coach Robert Selby. Coach Selby has lectured to basketball players and coaches at every level, including the NBA, about the benefits of pre-practice, post practice, and off-season stretching. The interview is approximately 15 minutes long and can be listened to as an audio file, or it can be downloaded as a short e-book.

One of the points that Coach Selby made during the interview was his belief that the end of one practice is actually the beginning of the next practice. When you do spend the time to warm down by doing a post-practice stretch, the players are ridding their bodies of lactic acid and that will allow them to recover quicker and be more ready to go tomorrow. Make sure to take a listen because he has several other thoughts for coaches in the interview.

You can get the downloads, along with a download of the 2-2-1 full court denial press here:

HoopClinics.com

HoopCinics is a new site that offers online basketball coaching clinics.

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.

I just wanted to take a few paragraphs to recap some of the highlights of the month of June and look forward to where we are headed in the coming months.

June was a very good month at the Coaching Toolbox. It was our fourth month online and each one seems to be getting better than the month before. We know that typically, basketball coaching sites do not get as much traffic in the summer as they do during the rest of the year, so we want to thank all of you who have been visiting and supporting our site. Our e-mail list continues to grow and we are excited about the opportunity to interact with more coaches and players. Please e-mail us or leave any comments that you want to here on the blog as to how we can make the site better for you.

We began the month with the release of our first e-book 130 Great Ideas to Get a Lot More Accomplished in Practice. It has our best ideas on how to make basketball practice better.

With a lot of help from my wife, we added a Facebook Page and have already attracted some fans on the page. If you have an account, you can click on Facebook Page. To me, the most enjoyable part of doing the site is the interactions that I have had with coaches and players from all over the world. I even e-mailed back and forth with a coach that I found out was my cousin’s college roommate! I have also appreciated the contributions that you have made. Myles Robinson has contributed some ideas for basketball players, one of our basketball quotes, and a basketball workout. You all have been a fun group to get to know!

We felt that our only teleseminar for June was a great one and we were very appreciative that Coach Bruce Weber of the University of Illinois took time to talk to us about making basketball practice more competitive.

One of the last things that took place in June is going to have a very positive impact in the coming months. Our relationship with Coach Josh Stinson of Perfect Practice is going to be a very good one for everyone and we hope most of all it will be good for the basketball coaching community. We will be posting more information about our current project in the coming weeks.

Well, I guess that is enough reminiscing about June, I better get to work if we are going to make July even better than June!

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.

I know it has been way too long between posts and I guess as the saying goes, “excuses are like noses, everyone has one, and they smell.” Maybe I should add that to our basketball quotes section! We have been working on a couple of projects, and took a few days off too. Hey, everyone needs a vacation, even coaches!

We are very appreciative to all of you who have purchased our e-book–130 Great Ideas to Get a Lot More Accomplished in Practice. We sincerely hope it will make a difference in your basketball practice next season.  We have had some problems with the shopping cart which we have spent a lot of time working to correct. We think that we are close to having it worked out. And as luck would have it, we have not been having as many problems with our purchases the last few days. I guess that’s the way things work.

We have been working on some new basketball drills videos to put on the site and those should be posted within the coming weeks.

We have spent a lot of time working with coach Josh Stinson of Perfect Practice on a project that we think is really going to be some good content for our visitors. Coach Stinson and I are both excited about this project. If you haven’t been to his site, it is definitely worth the visit. He has a lot of great basketball coaching content for basketball coaches of all levels. He has a newsletter that you can sign up for and receive a free 36 page pdf e-book on his version of the 2-2-1 full court press. You will find the newsletter that you will then begin receiving to be a very valuable basketball coaching tool as well.  Click on this link to see his site:  Perfect Practice

Josh has put together 25 minute video about the flex offense. You can watch it here: Josh Stinson Flex. It is one of the best put together coaching resources I have seen. Even if you don’t run the flex offense, it is worth taking a look at. I hate to admit it, but it is a lot better presentation than our animated basketball plays version of flex. It has definitely given us some ideas on improving the animated basketball plays section of our site.

I promise that it won’t be so long next time between postings. Our next one will be our June wrap up.  Thanks for your patience!

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.

The coaches at the Coaching Toolbox feel that more basketball games are lost than won at every level. This is especially true when the competing teams talent level is close, as it is in the NBA playoffs. In those cases, our belief is that more teams make bad plays to lose then teams make good plays to win. We do not promote a “playing not to lose” mindset, but rather a “playing not to make plays that cause us to lose”–there is a huge difference.

This post is not meant to criticize the NBA players or NBA basketball coaches. They are the best in the world and compete on a level that most of us will never ascend to. The purpose is to show that even Gregg Popovich and Phil Jackson’s players make mistakes at crucial times, so no matter how experienced the basketball players we work with are at our levels, they need constant teaching and coaching to perform at their best when the pressure is on.

I will admit that I was working as the game was being played and did not catch everything, but I did see a few mistakes that our players can learn from.

The handoff from Oberto to Ginobili was executed improperly. Again, they are going at an incredibly rapid pace and have Kobe Bryant defending them, but the fact is that the player handing the ball must not push it into the receivers hands (even if those hands belong to Manu Ginobili). The proper way for a handoff to be executed is for the player holding the ball to protect it and to allow the player receiving the ball to take it from his or her hands.

The resulting turnover was a dunk for Bryant that really buried the Spurs chances of winning. That is until Bryant handed them an opportunity to get back in the game by taking a shot that should not have been taken. We will touch on that in tomorrow’s post.

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.

With the NBA playoffs going on, the coaches at the Coaching Toolbox think there are a lot of things that both basketball players and coaches can take from the games–in addition to the entertainment value. Yesterday we offered some ideas for players to benefit from watching the games. Today, we have the following ideas for basketball coaches to benefit from the playoffs.


1. Set basketball plays–granted many of them involve ball screens, but you can see a variety of other sets that might stimulate your thinking about basketball plays that you can run with your team.
   
2. Defend the ball screen–They have several ways that the two players involved defend the ball screens to study, not just how they do it on the ball, but how they rotate to cover the open players. It also can give you some insights as to how to design and adjust your ball screen basketball plays depending upon how your opponents might defend them.
   
3. Defensive rotations and help the helper–not just for the ball screen basketball plays, but on all plays where there is a trap or some help that takes place.
4. Examples of lack of poise to use as teaching points with all of your players, whether it is a high school varsity or a summer youth camp. We feel that attitude is something that must be stressed every day and the more ways to teach and examples you use, the better the chance of the message sticking.

We like to set our VCR in case there is something we see that we want to see again. Enjoy the games and if you can pick up an idea or two for your team, even better!

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.

The Coaching Toolbox is very fortunate that Ed Schilling, former head mens’ basketball coach at Wright State University, and an assistant at UMass, Memphis, and with the New Jersey Nets of the NBA did a 14 minute interview with us for our teleseminar series. The interview is live and you can access it here. Coach Schilling currently is the Executive Director for Champions Academy, which is dedicated to improving the individual skills of basketball players through individual development workouts. He trained four 2007 NBA first round draft choices and is currently working with several players who project to be first rounders in 2008!

Coach Schillings topic is individual development for point guards. As a player, Ed set single game, season, and career assist records at Miami of Ohio. As a coach, he developed many outstanding point guards. One of his recent grads of Champions Academy is lottery pick and point guard for the Memphis Grizzlies, Mike Conley. Coach also worked with Greg Oden and Carl Landry, so his expertise is not limited to perimeter players.

Our interview is 14 minutes long. (By the way, we have decided that is not long enough, so we are expanding their length to be able to provide our visitors with more of the great information that our guests are providing us with.) During the short time that he has, Coach Schilling covers the topics of developing confidence and skills, creating space with the basketball, and how to utilize the moves that the point guard develops to help him or her “run the show.” We also have some links to Instructional tapes and DVDs that Coach has produced. Click here to listen to the interview.

Our next interview is scheduled to launch on May 19 and is with Jay Wolf who designed the Star Shooter and is a nationally recognized expert on shooting instruction.

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.