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Monday, July 27, 2026

Basketball - The Failed Fifteen

"He believed that every case had a black box. A piece of evidence, a person, a positioning of facts that brought a certain understanding and helped explain what had happened." - "The Black Box" by Michael Connelly

"Love our losses" becomes "losses are lessons." Some are painfully obvious - not good enough, not tough enough, inexperience, lack of resilience. 

Postmortem Examinations

Once in medicine, many deaths produced postmortem examinations, autopsy of the final, fatal pathology. Over time, this changed to multidisciplinary conferences of difficult 'teaching cases', often under the title, M&M (morbidity and mortality).  

Sports do the same. On 'NFL Mondays', coaches dissect 150 plays looking for correctable insights...missed assignments, technical errors, mismatches created via strategy, unexpected variations of known opponent attacks. 

In most basketball games, ten to fifteen plays that were made or failed get extra attention. 

Don't treat a loss as a mysterious failure. Reduce it to a collection of correctable possessions. Here's Joe Mazzulla’s postgame press conference after Boston’s 102–92 loss to Minnesota on March 22, 2026.

Mazzulla said:

“You pick the 10 or 15 possessions that you have to get better at...you get better at practice and you do the next one...whether it’s a win or a loss, can you just learn from it and move on?”

Failed Fifteen (examples)

  • Transition defense issues
  • Shot selection ("hero ball")
  • Turnovers (decisions, execution, or both)
  • Unnecessary fouls
  • Rebounding problems - no blockout, poor blockout, corner crashes... 

Corrections 

  • Professional players usually know the principles that got violated. Coaches might emphasize, "Guys, we can't tag and expose the open corner three" or "we chose 'drop coverage' on the pick-and-roll and guys made perimeter shots."
  • Coach always told us, "Every correction applies to every player. I'm not picking on Steve. We all have made that mistake." 
  • Young players need to 1) see what went wrong, 2) see it again, and 3) practice the specific techniques needed. 
  • Show them and explain, "we don't foul threes" or "we can't chop down to block shots. If it looks like a foul, the refs will call it a foul."
  • Make corrections about the action, not the person. "That's a bad play made by a solid defender." 

Followup

  • "Winners are trackers." - Darren Hardy in The Compound Effect
  • Track the areas that are the "low hanging fruit" for our team. How many points did we allow in transition? How many layups? Here's the team shot chart - are these good shots for us? 
  • Monitor correctable issues like field goal percent, turnovers, free throw shooting, and fouls allowed. If the mistakes that are costing you games don't improve, remember Kevin Eastman's solutions -
"Do it harder."
"Do it better." 
"Change personnel."
"$#*@ it ain't working. We're changing this." 

Lagniappe. Use the same formation for different actions or different formations for the same action (e.g. PnR, backdoor cut, etc.) 
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