These are some questions for your coaching staff to use to plan the upcoming basketball season. You can use to develop a defensive system and to tweak the system so that it fits your changes in personnel and the changes in your opponents’ personnel from year to year
Philosophy
- Defensive Adjustments for a team or an Individual?
- Scouting or System?
- Do we want to have any “junk” in our system?
- What are the strengths of our players and how can we best utilize those strengths while hiding their weaknesses?
- What is the optimal number of possessions per game for this group?
- Can we defend for that number of possessions at that pace?
- How is our ability compared to the best teams in our region of the state tournament? our conference? our area?
- How do we need to play to advance as far as possible in the state tournament?
- What is our depth like?
- How does our depth affect our style and pace of play?
- What will our substitution pattern be?
Conversion Defense
- How many players are we going to send to the offensive glass?
- Do we need to add any rules that will improve our conversion?
- Do we like the drills we have to teach conversion defense?
Man Defense
- What hurt us most last year defensively?
- How do we defend dribble penetration better?
- What screening actions created problems for us?
- Where do we want to pick up the dribbler?
- How do we want to defend the post?
- How do we want to defend ball screens?
Zone Defense
- How much zone do we want to play?
- Would it help us to have an even front and odd front zone so we can attack them both offensively during practice?
- Do we want to be able to trap out of our zone defenses?
- How do we best teach rebounding out of our zone?
1/2 Court Trap
- How much do we want to play it?
- How big are our trappers?
- How do we want to rotate out of the trap?
- Do we want to stay in the trap or go “one and done”?
- When do we want to look to play it – dead balls, FT’s, end of half…
- Do we have a better trapping line-up than others?
Presses
- How much do we want to use the press?
- When do we want to press?
- How aggressive do we want to be with our press?
- Do we have a better pressing line-up than others? Who are our best trappers?
- Do we deny the point guard back once they pass out of the trap?
Inbound Defense
- Do we want to play strictly man?
- Do we want to trap the inbound pass?
- How do we want our inbound defender to play UOOB and SOOB?
Special Situations
- Who would be our best denial defender?
- Does any team on our schedule potentially warrant a special defensive tactic?
