Recently, I posted a (for this blog) popular piece on Dean Smith...which leads me to another contemporary, Bob Knight of Indiana and later Texas Tech.
I've previously posted about his book, "The Power of Negative Thinking" which belongs on every serious coach's bookshelf.
Challenges of aging include immediate, short-term, and long-term recall, which is one reason I write...about basketball, stock trading, and rarely about medicine. But the bigger reason is maintaining discipline, a specialty of Coach Knight.
Warren Buffett tells a story about being asked to participate in a hole-in-one contest in a celebrity golf tournament. For ten dollars, you got a shot to win ten thousand dollars. Buffett declined, "If I'm not disciplined in the small things, how can I be disciplined in the big things?"
Since the information contained is from my memory, I apologize in advance for any errors or inconsistencies. Knight attended Ohio State, where he played on an NCAA Championship team in the mid-1960s. Knight is one of the few coaches to have played on and coached NCAA Champions.
Coach Knight has a strong sense of history, as he studied History and Government at OSU. He later coached at Army, which reinforced his value for discipline. Pete Newell (Cal) was one of his coaching idols; he believed Newell was the greatest teacher of basketball. For anyone who hasn't read Newell, I think you're missing out (Basketball Methods and others).
Knight is credited with developing motion offense, although I think it dates back earlier, for example to Newell's "Reverse Action" offense. Coach Knight had strong beliefs about how the game should be played. For example, he wasn't a huge on-ball screen coach because he thought that impaired spacing. He preferred downscreens away from the ball.
A few important thoughts he had included, "Basketball is a game of mistakes." In the book, Knight, he discussed this in detail, arguing that most high school championships aren't won because of great plays but by few mistakes. Another memorable Knight quote is "just because I want you on the floor, doesn't mean I want you to shoot." Because you play ninety percent of the game without the ball, your value isn't confined to scoring. He believed that "free shooting" was detrimental to player development because it didn't simulate game play.
The Knight drills that we use from time to time are half-court four-on-four (without dribbling), something I call "Indiana" which involves three-on-three with serial cross-screens and downscreens, 'advantage-disadvantage' (e.g. four on five or five on seven), and 'change' where the coach blows the whistle and the ball is dropped and offense becomes defense and vice versa.
In Knight he expressed hurt about his dismissal from Indiana, especially considering that he claimed to have raised FIFTY MILLION dollars for the university, in addition to having won three national titles at IU.
One oversimplification of coaching is stratifying coaches into "task-oriented" versus "relationship-oriented". Connection and communication always matter, but for the most part, Knight combined the two although he is often first associated with the infamous "chair toss".
One "knock" on Knight players was that they often didn't improve a lot as professionals, because they already had such a great basketball foundation from Coach Knight. If you choose to invest your time studying Coach Knight, it should be reading The Power of Negative Thinking.
