Basketball: Shooting Range Builders

Everyone wants to extend shooting range. But how many have an organized program to do so? Practice is the only magic. But many coaches have productive ideas. 



Coach Castellaw has his "triple tap" and 180 degree turn, designed to keep the shooter low and balanced. 



This video examines energy transfer with the hop, momentum, hip loading, appropriate arc (45 degrees), and follow-through (wrist). Study your video. 

NBA 100. Dame Lillard's range-busting drill. "In a new drill called “NBA 100” that Beckner designed to test shot-making and endurance, Lillard starts by hitting as many consecutive shots as he can from the right corner, earning one point for each make. When he misses, he steps forward into the midrange and hits as many shots as he can until he misses. Then he takes a layup before repeating the process at the right wing, the top of the arc, the left wing and the left corner.

A winning score is 100 points. The record, set by one of Beckner's other NBA clients was 207. 

The performance coach, who has been with the Blazers since 2013, crafted a program that would provide Lillard a better base for his long shots. 

The routine focuses heavily on the lower body, including dead lifts, lunges, and single leg exercises. Lillard also did targeted work to address his hamstrings and calves while also attending hot yoga sessions to hone core strength and flexibilitiy. With Kenyon preaching the virtues of mindfulness, Lillard began taking 10 deep belly breaths while laying on the ground to practice centering himself after strenuous exertion." 

Coach Castellaw examines Trae Young's lower set point and one motion shot. He also emphasizes his shot preparation. 

Summary: 

Range building involves both physical and mental preparation. 
Study your mechanics on film. 
Lillard worked on his legs and core to extend his shooting.
A fluid, "one-motion" shot informs extended range.
There's no shortcut. Drills like "NBA 100" test your skill. 
Be a tracker. Monitor your performance in practice. 

Lagniappe: And this. 



Lagniappe 2: 251 (the record is higher now) 

Rotate around. For example, start in the right corner, make one from each spot. You must repeat the corner shot to rotate back. 

Basketball: What Would Belichick Do?

"To live in the past is to die in the present." - Bill Belichick 

Will we have a basketball season this fall and winter? Should that impact our commitment to improve ourselves? Players and coaches have a mandate to grind. 

Mike Lombardi dedicates a chapter in Gridiron Genius to WWBD - What Would Belichick Do? It's about process, relentlessness, and discontent. 

Take stock. Hit the ground running. Successful people marry self-assessment as part of their process. 

Belichick assigned Michael Lombardi to inventory team assets.  Understanding our assets informs change. Inventory reflects one of Belichick's core principles, "it's better to move on from a player a year too early than a year too late." That creates competition and hard feelings. Hard conversations come with the job. 

No Complacency. Find players who thrive on repetition, compete each possession, and have a reason for each decision. Making the team isn't enough. Nurture the player with the appetite for greatness. Contentment leads to slippage. Complacency is the enemy of achievement. 

Keep searching for greatness. 

Teach across domains. Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham preached margin of safety. Recently, we learned that Titanic exceeded lifeboat standards of the day. That did not work out well. The online world has an abundance of teaching material. The Patriots teach that handling the ball is a privilege. 

Deploy your knowledge effectively. Know what you know. Excel within our Circle of Competence. Stick to it. 

"What an investor needs is the ability to correctly evaluate selected businesses. Note that word “selected”: You don’t have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence . The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital."

Bill Belichick traded Drew Bledsoe within the division, understanding Bledsoe's strengths and limitations. Belichick's Patriots went 5-1 against their former QB, with eleven interceptions. 

Know the minutia of rules. They can work against us, too. 

Lagniappe: Sharpen your tools. 

1. Go to move - What keeps opponents awake at night? (What's your ace in the hole?).
2. Counter move.
3. "Winning move." (What's your ace in the hole?). When the game is on the line and the ball is yours, what's your solution? 

Coaches may keep a play, action, or ATO move in reserve. 

Pentucket held the Iverson Cut in reserve until late in the game, scoring five points on two possessions to break a close game open. 

Lagniappe 2: Chris Dorsey shares a Princeton breakdown drill

🗣 Learn the Princeton offense in✌🏽 minutes‼️

⬇️Breakdown drill - Point Elbow⬇️
🔸Under
🔹Step back
🔸Curl
🔹Over

Pay it forward 🙏🏽
Tap ❤️ - Retweet 🔁

👇🏽Free PDF / Video Downlod👇🏽https://t.co/yIjEs1ZV9O pic.twitter.com/ktIhrDahJ2

— Chris Dorsey (@GentsCoachD) July 19, 2020

Lagniappe 3: Mom had a saying, "bored people are boring." Find something stimulating to read and study. 

Notes: What's Wrong with Our Practice? On Performance and Failure, Shane Parrish with Atul Gawande

Coaches are lifelong learners. Learn from the best. Basketball learning crosses domains. 

Dr. Atul Gawande has written four New York Times bestsellers - Complications, Better, The Checklist Manifesto, Being Mortal. Here are podcast notes from his session with Shane Parrish. 

"I majored in biology (Stanford), but I also majored in Political Science...A lot of things that I tried, I wasn't really made for." 

(Medicine) "It was about where science meets humanity." 

"I like having a lot of irons in the fire...I grew up interested in how the world works... looking for ways to understand the world." 

"What does it mean to be good at what we do? I'm practicing on human beings." (So are coaches.) "Admit there's a learning curve." It also means exploring costs, new developments, interpreting data, end-of-life, etc. 

"How do you cope with the reality of error?" Complexity means you are always fallible, systems are imperfect. Our workplace also determines our performance. (Some environments aren't conducive to peak performance.)

"I can borrow solutions from other places." (Coaches find other solutions regularly.)

"There is always a gap between what we think should be happening"...and what does.
"How do I make a system work when people don't want to do it?" Sound familiar? (The right solution is irrelevant without a buy-in.)

"How do you change behavior?" (Knowledge isn't necessarily the obstacle.)

"We train everybody...we still suck...we get mad." (Mad doesn't fix it.)

"Make it easier to do the right thing." (Reminds me of James Clear's Atomic Habits. Systems are paramount.)

"How will this work in OUR place?"

"Who owns responsibility for reducing mortality of ________ in your work?" Creating an owner is key in a system." (In complex systems, accountability may not be defined. He discusses M&M, morbidity and mortality conferences.) 

"When we all have a piece of a problem, nobody can see where the outcome comes from."

"Mundane things" (make a difference). 

• "Do you hire for talent to achieve desired outcomes?"
• "Do you have measures of performance?"
• "Do you have (targets) goals and objectives?
• "Do you standardize operations?" 

No hospital is doing it at the highest level. Most societies aren't either. 

"We’ve been fantastic at breakthrough innovation and we’ve had no real understanding of follow-through innovation. I think it’s partly that the follow through innovation can seem like it’s only about nuts and bolts, instead of about recognizing that there are ways that you can actually influence and have control, some degree of control, with regard to the world around you." (Checklists are part of follow-through innovation.)

Where are the problems in human systems - the bottlenecks and complexity? "Screaming at people to wash hands doesn't work." (Reminds me of the Robert Fulghum paradigm, "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." We needs systems that encourage people to do the right things.) 

"Why is applying knowledge hard?" (Parrish)

"Why do we fail at anything we do?" "For most of human history, for like 99.99% of it, our world was governed largely by ignorance. We did not know the diseases that could afflict the human body or understand them, let alone what to do about them. We didn’t understand how societies rose and fell. We didn’t understand how economics worked, even in the most basic components."

What do we do that has little value? The fact of rising health care costs is not the problem. What is the problem is, how much of the costs are rising that are not actually connected in any way to value? "What are we doing...and is it actually benefiting people?" (How much or our practice, our system adds no value to our players or to our team? That's where our editing matters.) 

"How do we manage complexity (and fallibility)?"

"My responsibility is that we have to be aiming for perfection." 

Surgeons have an incredible confidence, yet humility is expected.

"A high reliability organization is where people are obsessed with failure (to fix it)." 

"Presidents acknowledging mistakes is seen as weakness." (Mistakes are unavoidable. Learning from mistakes is partly a choice.)

"Subverting the system...does get you fired." 

Psychological safety occurs when people at different levels have a voice. Introductions of each participant help open discussion. (Eric Spoelstra's culture of disagreement)

"You need a coach" (even if you're Roger Federer). "The coaching model beats teaching model." Coaching is different than mentoring. Observing helps get a better handle on reality as "a coach offers you an external view of your reality" and how to achieve your goals. 

To improve teaching, you need to give trainees more leeway to struggle but they still need correction. 

"My primary duty is to the benefit of this patient now." (Contrast with team sports.)

"People have goals and priorities about their end of life...we rarely ask." (Do we ask players what their goals and priorities are?)

Cost, care, and suffering are often unaligned with patient preferences because of this. 

Summary (Super 7):

- What does it mean to be good?
- How do I make a system work when people don't want to do it? 
- Why is applying knowledge hard? 
- We need performance metrics.
- What do we do that has little value?
- High performance organizations are obsessed with failure. 
- You need a coach. (Gawande is famous for hiring a coach to watch his surgery.)

Lagniappe: Hat tip: Brook Kohlheim

Found this in my phone and wanted to share one of THE BEST examples of why @Dame_Lillard has become the player he is today!

This was written a few years ago by a college coach who wanted to share what he learned from watching Dame workout at 10:30pm in Vegas one night in July. pic.twitter.com/QWinQeLuIm

— Phil Beckner (@PhilBeckner) July 8, 2020

Great players are great for a reason. 

Basketball and Analogical Thinking

"It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” - Audre Lorde

Analogical thinking provides a powerful tool for problem solving. It's up to us to pull the source and target "pieces" together. "I know this problem." 

Marry the new target to the source, hoping for favorable, similar results. 

How do basketball and analogies fit? Got more? Share them. 

Global pandemic, an incomplete season. The NBA shut down after several players tested positive for COVID-19. Absent "immunity" the league developed a potential solution, modeled after David Vetter, The Boy in the Bubble. Isolate the patient (the league) from the infection. 

The Next "Great Hope." We evaluate a player, searching for comparables - size, athleticism, skill. We might demand lesser or greater fit. Coaches are more likely to look favorably on a player given a successful "comp" than a less successful one. But to maintain credibility, take care in "overpromising."  

Reproducing a System. Many coaches look to reproduce the system they played in or learned. The legendary Pete Newell counselled, "they usually get a poor copy of the original." But be cognizant of Picasso's advice, "good artists borrow; great artists steal." 

Style of Play. I recently discussed the analogy between warfare and style of play as presented by Malcolm Gladwell in David and Goliath. Conventional warfare parallel with basketball with infantry (power game), cavalry (transition), and artillery (perimeter game). 

The Turnaround. Programs bring in the 'next guy' (guy being Auriemman unisex), looking for the next savior. Saviors are few and far between. Bill Parcells improved the Patriots, the Jets, and the Cowboys, but nobody labelled him the savior. Steve Kerr wasn't a turnaround after Mark Jackson as Kerr tweaked what already worked. Nick Saban has gone to multiple programs and turned them into powerhouses as a brilliant recruiter. 

Drills. We create or name drills across disciplines. 

In "Gauntlet" (a.k.a. 28 Special), two players must navigate the length of the court against four zones of defenders. We limit players to one dribble each touch to emphasize passing and cutting. 

Structural analogies. Analogies exist between forces in nature and in nurture, like feedback loops. In global warming, the melting of polar ice caps produces more heat absorption with positive feedback on polar melting. A player performs at a higher level with increased minutes. The improved performance feed back with even more minutes. 

Business principles. I've shared Warren Buffett's 25-5 rule. List twenty-five concepts to pursue. Then narrow to five and exploit them relentlessly. The cooking analogy is widespread with a new chef renovating the menu and the chef wanting to "choose the groceries." 

Concepts across disciplines. Check out Parcells' MUST, NEED, WANT sheet. 

Every season presents different challenges and opportunities. 

Analogies have limits imposed by our misconceptions. "The anchoring effect is reinforced by another problem: decision makers’ tendency to seek out information that confirms their beliefs and to ignore contradictory data."

Lagniappe: The "Loop" play isn't new having cycled through multiple coaches including Daly and Popovich. FastModel / Fast Draw shares Loop action via a Chin set. 

Basketball: What Keeps You Awake at Night? Art (Film) Imitates Life

"As the area of our knowledge grows, so does the perimeter of our ignorance." - Neil DeGrasse Tyson

A theory is the highest level of understanding about something. Amidst pandemic uncertainty, what keeps us awake at night? 

1. Teamwork. Do we have one heartbeat? It starts with attitude. Excellent teams care about each other and for each other. Coaches foster teamwork but it takes players who want to play for each other. Mike Lombardi's quote about football character stands out. 

Steven M.R. Covey restated it visually as character and competence in The Speed of Trust. Will my next team have heart? 


2. Communication. Do we communicate? Asking for ELO - early, loud, and often - is a long shot going from ground zero. It starts in practice, calling assignments, help, pick-and-roll coverage. But we don't have practice now... 




3. Playing smart. Excellent teams make good decisions. Their basketball IQ outshines their opponents'. They recognize situations with Colonel John Boyd's OODA loop - observe, orient, decide, and act. They called him "Forty Second Boyd" because he could win a dogfight in forty seconds. 

"In the popularized interpretation, the OODA loop suggests that success in war depends on the ability to out-pace and out-think the opponent, or put differently, on the ability to go through the OODA cycle more rapidly than the opponent."

But, it's not that simple. A hasty decision can cause irreversible setbacks. 




Or not. 

4. Charity. We can't give the ball (or points) away. Turnovers, missed assignments, lack of help ("the ball scores"), uncontested shots, bad fouls, and failed block outs give games away. We can't "go back" to fundamentals. Never leave them. 




"You'd be killing yourself." 

5. Execute the game plan. 

What has to be our focus? Coach Dave Smart says, "we don't run a lot." 

• Stop transition points. 
• Contain the ball.
• Defend the pick-and-roll.
• Win the shot selection battle. 

Summary: Sleeping concerns 

Teamwork
Communication
Basketball IQ
Mistakes
Execution

Lagniappe: Popovich designs a SLOB winner. 




Simple actions, first to get the ball in, then to get separation for an open shot first with a fake handoff, then a dribble handoff. 

Basketball Friday - 1.3.1. One drill. Three concepts. One play. Rules and Standards

Rules and 'standards' don't assure high performance. J.P. Morgan's company was the controlling trust that owned the White Star Line that operated the Titanic. "One of the ship's legacies was that she had 20 lifeboats that in total could only accommodate 1,178 people, despite the fact that there were approximately 2,208 on board. RMS Titanic had a maximum capacity of 3,547 passengers and crew." Titanic met the lifeboat standards of the day. The rest is history. 

One drill. 2 v 2 "Sideways" via Aaron Fernandez. 

Small-side games provide competition, offense, defense, and conversion. We'll extend the games to at least two minutes. 

Three concepts. Rules? In a knife fight? 

Uniform rules. 

Religious requirements. RULING: NFHS basketball uniform rules do not require that the uniform pants be “shorts.” Wearing tights below the uniform shorts would be legal. The player has the option of wearing long pants as the uniform “bottom” to be in compliance with NFHS rules as well. (3-4-5, 3-5-3)

Religious medal. RULING: The player shall be instructed that in order to wear the religious medal, the medal must be taped to the body and worn under the uniform. (3-5-4 EXCEPTION b)

Lasorda Rule. Tommy Lasorda said there were three types of players - those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what's happening. 

After passing the ball in transition, the point guard can bury, go thru, cut away, or replace. Force your defender to cover, not help. Reminder, "movement kills defenses." 

Jump stop to separate, finish, or pass. Balance is critical as well as landing on two feet simultaneously. 



Penetration, finishing, and passing off the jump stop offers separating options. 

One play. ATO. Celtics DHO, reversal backscreen. 

Part of a great story is the unexpected. After the DHO (left) into a ball reversal, the wing gets a backscreen leading to a basket cut and a highest quality shot. 

Lagniappe: Ganon Baker demonstrates the jump stop to draw 2. Note how he lowers his center of gravity to retain balance while exploding forward. 
























Lagniappe:

Basketball: Discover Learning Gateways

In every field, we learn the basics. But who shows us how to learn, how to think? Let's review some robust approaches. 

Take (free) courses. Coursera's Learning How to Learn inform learning resources. For example: 

• Pomodoro Technique, twenty-five minutes of study and five minute breaks. Even professional sports teams are giving players 'cellphone breaks.' 
• Self-test. Study a section and test yourself on the material. Personal Q & A. 
• Repetition. Don't cram for the test, review the material over time. Discipline determines destiny. 

Borrow from other fields. In medicine, we say, "see one, do one, teach one." The first try won't likely be perfect. Keep working. 

Write it out. Typing is inferior to writing. Patrick McLean pens In Defense of Writing Longhand. "Composition requires focus. It is, like most acts of creation, monotasking. And as much as I love technology, it drives us to distraction." As he says, most of the great works of history were written longhand. 

Study great teachers. John Wooden preached EDIRx5... explanation, demonstration, imitation, and repetition times five. The Feynman Technique shares a four-step method - name it, explain, research, and simplify. 

Improve our hardware. Mindfulness training literally makes the learning and memory parts of the brain denser. 

Eight weeks of training (average 22 hours) produced significant increases in brain density (scored by a computer program). It helped grow the memory center (hippocampus) and other key learning centers. 

"Read, read, read, read, read." - Werner Herzog 

Begin to see what lies before us and the possibilities, as J.A. Baker does in The Peregrine. “Cold air rises from the ground as the sun goes down. The eye-burning clarity of the light intensifies. The southern rim of the sky glows to a deeper blue, to pale violet, to purple, then thins to grey. Slowly the wind falls, and the still air begins to freeze. The solid eastern ridge is black; it has a bloom on it like the dust on the skin of a grape."

Use analogies. Kepler mastered analogies to become a pioneering astronomer, expanded in David Epstein's Range. What does that have to do with basketball? In David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell discusses basketball and warfare. We evolve from infantry (power game), to cavalry (running game), and artillery (long-range bombing). Brainstorming creative offense or defense reminds me of Aerosmith's weekly, "Dare to Suck" meetings. Every session won't produce a hit. 

Could we assign "actions" to each number on a die, roll the die and create "multiple actions" randomly? One could be pick-and-roll, two a backdoor cut, three a drive and kick, and so on. Want more variety? Add a third die. 

Be aware of blindspots and biases. The power of 'fake news' arises because we are 'wired' to believe what we hear. We're also prisoner to our beliefs (confirmation bias) and influences that we don't recognize (e.g. anchoring). It's hard work to verify facts via primary sources. 

Carve out creative time. Companies like Google and 3M give workers creative time. Thinking takes time and energy. 

Learning and 'thinking about thinking' challenge us daily. Rise up to meet the challenge. 

Lagniappe: Success.com shares lessons to learn from basketball. I'll modify slightly and add a sixth to form the acronym RAISES. 

Resilience  Have the will to persist. 
Alertness  Be prepared and willing to find opportunity.
Initiative  Find a way to make teammates better.
Spirit  Wooden sought great players but especially players who made great teams.
Effort  Work makes magic. 
Self-control  Do what must be done today, so we can do what we want tomorrow. 

Lagniappe 2: Chris Oliver shares @BBallImmersion  



Lagniappe 3. Tony Fryer shares USA Basketball ideas on becoming an impact coach. We help kids make memories. 

Basketball: How Fatigue Shows Up, from the Lab to the League

A pitcher surrenders a leadoff homer. The home team cannon fires. The next batter homers. The cannon erupts again. A third hitter goes yard. Boom! The pitching coach comes out to talk to the pitcher. "I'm fine." The coach responds, "I know. I'm giving the guy time to reload." 

Watching video of AAU basketball, I see fatigue manifesting in many ways, especially in the doubleheader game in Sunday summer heat. It's physical and mental. Both can be devastating. Here are some of the ways fatigue limits us-   

Physical Fatigue

• Reduced peak performance
• Reduced average performance
• Sloppy passes
• Reduced maneuvering speed
• Tendency to miss shots short
• Vulnerability to injury 
• Reduced grip strength (hand dynamometry)... via Cory Schlesinger

I track my grip strength experimentally looking for physical-mental fatigue correlations. 

SI's Ian MacMahan discussed the interplay between mental and physical fatigue. "Leicester City’s sports science staff uses markers of mental fatigue, along with GPS and heart rate information from each player, as tools to detect situations of overload." Some programs encourage athletes to avoid social media and video games to reduce mental fatigue. Athletes may get exposure to BET - Brain Endurance Training. 

"Exercise is not limited by organ/muscle failure...regulated in anticipation by the brain to avoid failure." 

Mental Fatigue: (Our brains literally hold us back by holding something in reserve...) 

• Reduced effort (especially transition defense)
• Reduced alertness (defensive assignments/help) 
• Slower reaction time (a step slow) 
• Lollipop passes
• Poor decision-making 
• Degraded shot selection 

How do we know? Most athletes, when asked, say "I'm fine" or "good to go." Sport science argues for two major mechanisms, increased perceived effort or decreased perceived reward. I think of this as "less will" or "less thrill." Brain dopamine levels correlate with reward orientation and it would be fascinating to study. 

Lecturer's concerns about Brain Endurance Training:

Mindfulness training showed "elite" performance on brain scans and self-reported benefits.

Experiments suggest we can delay time to onset of exhaustion! And don't think that sport scientists, including the NBA don't care. 

Lagniappe: clearing to space via @John_Leonzo with Etorre Messina

I like this explanation from Ettore Messina about clearing the paint. Thought you might like it. pic.twitter.com/oyDwWqq03m

— Coach Z Basketball (@coachzhoops) July 14, 2020

"Sprint to breathe"