Basketball Friday shares concepts, drills, and a set play.
Elite performers find edges. Zaichkowsky and Peterson examine raising performance in "The Playmaker's Advantage."
Execution arises at the interface of technique (skill), tactics (strategy), physiology (athleticism), and psychology (emotion). Coaches and trainers align these most favorably.
Peak performance happens when players and teams enter into flow and clutch states. Flow states take players outside distraction as confidence reinforces actions with a positive feedback loop.
Experimentally, distractions that force subjects to focus on their mechanics degrades performance. They hypothesize that "choking" in response to pressure correlates with athletes focusing on technique.
A comprehensive training program will include:
- Skill building (decreasing the cognitive load on working memory)
- Personal training (endurance, strength, speed) to enhance physiology
- Tactics (sport-specific IQ building)
- Space-time decision-making with intense practice and software
Note: yelling at children from the stands disrupts their working memory and may degrade focus/performance.
Playmakers rely on pattern recognition (like chess masters) during their search-decide-execute model. This helps account for the value of video study.
The problem is how to develop practices to link the physical, mental, tactical, and technical skills. That's a challenge that we have to confront to improve the learning curve.
It's a book for geeks. But the video distills it well, twenty minutes to invest.
"Drills." What kinds of actions might help? Drills that produce mental and physical fatigue with high level decision making might fit. My favorite is 5 versus 7 (advantage-disadvantage) with constraints (e.g. no dribbling). Small-sided games also apply.
Set Play. Many NBA teams use ZIPPER action to enter the ball. But the goal shouldn't just be ball entry but attack. With the pandemic, Massachusetts High School basketball eliminated BOBs and the default entry is from the foul line extended during SLOBs.
Lagniappe. Screening the weak side of the zone via @CoachBrotherton
"Buster" has been a staple set for us, when attacking a 2-3 zone. Inside ball screen, with a shooter sliding behind a weakside screen.
— Doug Brotherton (@CoachBrotherton) January 8, 2021
Again, I love the energy from our bench! There is no crowd. Listen to our team's reaction. Awesome!#XsAndOs #ServeCoaches #GrowTheGame🏀 pic.twitter.com/2IBAGkxogB
