an important part of the game to me is practicing what we're going to do the most. What situations come out the most? Let me give you the best example I can think of to explain that. How many times I've seen heard people talk about, "What are we going to run if we have the ball side out and the deep corner almost down on the baseline?" Or, "We're on the baseline and we're all the way out there by the side line." Those are tough, tough spots to get the ball in. We might not be nearly as prepared as what we should be for that. And somebody could say, "Well, man, you guys lost by one because you didn't have a great play there." I actually will talk to our team about and our staff is going to talk about. We actually didn't lose the game because we didn't have that with 10 seconds. It's because we didn't rebound. We turned it over too much. We didn't play off too. We didn't finish layups for 39 minutes and 50 seconds before that. Hi, I'm Dan Cricorian and I'm Patrick Carney and welcome to Slap and Glass, exploring basketball's best ideas, strategies and coaches from around the world. Today, we're excited to welcome Youngstown State Associate Head Coach, Dwayne Osborne. Before Youngstown State, Coach Osborne was an eight-time coach of the year at a variety of stops, including D2 University of Charleston. And is here today to discuss teaching efficient offense and the importance of players understanding shot selection, improving fuel-gulp percentage in the paint that we talk. Tough to teach elements of tagging up, ATO considerations during the always fun start, sub or sit. Imagine having your team's entire development, training and analytics in one place. That's the Dr. Dish training management system, TMS, the ultimate coaching platform that transforms your shooting machine into a complete player development engine. Track every rep, drill and player, assign custom workouts, you heat maps, leaderboards and progress across your entire roster, all in one dashboard. For more information on the TMS, visit DrDishBasketball.com or sign up for our Sunday Morning Newsletter for direct links. And now, please enjoy our conversation with Coach Dwayne Osborne. Coach, really excited to have you on. We should have been recording the last half an hour. We had a great basketball conversation before we hit record here, but can't wait to get into a bunch of stuff with you today. Thanks for making the time. Yeah, thank you so much, Dan Pat. I appreciate you guys. I appreciate all you're doing to help obviously the basketball community. I'm a big fan, big listener to all these podcasts and try to make sure I get as many of them as I can. And so I'm excited to be with you today. Thank you, Coach. Thanks, Coach. Coach, we want to start with kind of a broad topic and then we'll narrow in as we get going. The teams that you've coached historically in the past, going back Charleston, farther back now at Youngstown State, efficient offense and fuel goal percentage. Numerous times in your career as a head coach, your teams have led America in effective fuel goal percentage and offensive efficiency and those kinds of numbers. And we want to start broadly with your thoughts on getting there and what that looks like from you, from an offensive perspective to get your teams to be so efficient. I would say like the first thing that really just comes to my mind just naturally is that it's kind of who I am. And so I'm a big efficiency guy. I talked to my wife, our kids. I have a 21 year old and 18 year old. And so something we've always tried to live by is maximizing what we do. And we want to be efficient in every area of life. It's not just something that we say, hey, we're going to do an offense. We want to be as efficient as we can on defense, but I also want to be efficient with my time. I want to be efficient in how we use our families resources and what we're going to do with those things. And so I think there are times that probably gets me in trouble because I think so much about just maximizing everything. And sometimes I can be sucked into saying this is a little bit of a waste, you know, that maybe it's really not a waste. It might be something I would prefer not to do, but other people find great value in it. And so I think that oozes out into the basketball offense defense off the court. How are we going to use our budget? How are we going to structure our staff to maximize what it is they do well? And so I really think that that's something that comes out of my heart. It's a large part of who I am. And so it probably just comes from that overflow. When you talk about how that bleeds into offense, what's the entry point then for you getting to the efficiency offensively? I think a lot of that starts with shot selection. That's a huge, huge thing. I'm a big analytics guy. Obviously a lot of people in today's game are talking about rim shots and threes. And I'm a huge subscriber to that. I think it's very important to play the numbers. I think life is math is a big part of even our culture and how we try to approach and teach our players. And so when I think about life is math, you and I are doing this all the time. How are we going to operate? You're not going to go buy a house and take a 6% interest rate when somebody else is offering you a four just because it's like, well, that's the one I found. I'll just go with that. You're thinking about the math and what that's going to cost you or how that's maybe going to help you if it's investing in a stock or in a bank account or whatever it might be. And so I think for us, we start a shot quality. And when I think about, hey, if a mid-range shot, you know, if you talk to some of our players over the years, they would laugh because they would all jump in right now and start yelling 0.81, 0.81 because that's literally guys will shoot a mid-range shot. And I'll just yell 0.81. I don't necessarily, yo, hey, that's a bad shot or don't shoot that anymore. I just say, hey, that's a 0.81. And these other ones are 1.02s or whatever it is. And so we try to educate them on the math behind it. To me, that's what life's about is playing odds, playing percentages so that you can maximize what it is you have. Reverse engineering perspective. When you kind of clarify, like, hey, these are the shots. These are the values. Like, this is why we're going to value this shot over that. And then like, start to work backwards. I know building out your offense, of course, a lot of it is player specific playing to their strengths. But just over the years with your experience, what sticks out to you in terms of ideal alignments or flex, shuffle, like, you know, how you think about, again, in the terms of efficiency, like the number of sets or just being really simple playing out of the few alignments that you also think contributes to efficient offense. Yeah, that's a great question. I think, obviously, again, it starts with a shot selection stuff and trying to identify and teach our kids what shots lead to great results are the best results, you know, and Ryan Pannon, who everybody in basketball really knows as a great mind and has been a very good friend for about quarter of a century now. You know, he's really big on that. Like, not all layups are equal and not all threes are equal. And so we have to just constantly educate, you know, we'll bring film in of other games and one of the things I like to do is look at a shot and pause it. You don't know what the result of the shot is. So if I just throw a team, you haven't seen play this year up and we say, hey, here's the shot at practice. And I pause it when the balls in the air. We don't know if it went or not. Is that a good shot or is that a bad shot? It's not a good or bad shot because you're open, you know, I always laugh and there's again a bunch of players who would echo this to you. They'll say, well, that was a good shot coach. I was open and I will say my rebuttal always is, well, you would open when you're half court, but you didn't shoot that one. So like, we have to determine it's got to be more than just I'm open. That doesn't make it a good shot. And so as we go through and try to educate them and help them be their best, a part of being your best is doing what you do well and the things that really add value not only to yourself and your game, but our team is very, very important. And so I don't know that I necessarily think about it specifically from alignments, so to speak, but I do think there are concepts that we're trying to get to within different structures. I think a lot of times things we do, you might see it in this alignment. And then if you watch, we'll get to that same concept maybe later from a different alignment. And so the education piece that we're trying to constantly deal with and teach to our players is what's good shots, what are bad shots, how do we get to those? And then how does that relate to everybody else on your team? Because a good shot for me and a good shot for you doesn't make those equal. The good shot for me might be this is the best part of my game. I'm really good at this, but you do what you do at a much higher level than what my good is. And so we want to get to the best thing for our team, not the best thing for me individually. Coach, when you think about concepts, just from like a starting point or a kickoff point, how many concepts do you like to begin with? Again, with this efficiency in mind, like is it let's just get good at these two threes before we start to scale up or we're going to give them all first eight whittled down from there. I guess how do you think about concept development? I think I'm more of let's not flood them on the front end. Let's try to get two or three in, rep those out, get a good understanding of what we're trying to do. And then let's add another one and add another one. I think when I look back to some of the years, I've done a really poor job coaching. I look back, we just did too much too fast and guys feel like they're drinking up fire hydrant and you just can't be effective as a learner that way. I think and so let's give some core main things that they can go out and really understand and try to apply and see some success and then we add to it as we go. Going back to the shot selection piece for a second. And as we're recording this, it's kind of earlier in preseason, players have all come back from the summer working on their game, feeling like they can have a certain role or want to do more. And then we inevitably have to have this conversation with our team and with our players. How do you and how have you discussed the education of efficiency and shot selection with your team and honestly with your best players that have to take a lot of shots in a way that doesn't I guess suck the soul.
from the offense allows him to play somewhat fearlessly and aggressively without it being too much of a math game, I guess. Yeah, I think that there are coaches that sometimes, and I did this early, that you just go right at stuff, and then there's times you avoid stuff. I never think that avoiding is good. I think that how you deliver it is important, but at the end of the day, you have to be direct. That's a part of your job as a coach and ultimately as a leader. You can't just say whatever you want to do, do it the best you can. We believe in you. I don't really operate like that. And so what I want to try to do is help them understand what their strengths are. So many of these guys want to play professionally. Maybe you're at Alabama, like Ryan Pannon has been and he's got a bunch of guys that can potentially maybe play in the NBA. Maybe you're at a D2 school and you have no NBA players, but you have guys that want to play overseas. Sometimes the thing that maybe hurts you from getting overseas or to the NBA having a chance to play at the professional level you would like to is your inability to understand your game enough. And so you want to prove that you can do something and by doing that, you're actually proving that you can't that you don't do that efficiently enough. I think the delivery of how we give that to our players is super, super important. And I think there's all kinds of different ways you can do that with numbers and looking at film and comparative things with them as you know what their game is relative to other people. And I don't personally like to go so much to let me compare you to an NBA player. Let me show you what your game looks like relative to other people at our level or maybe a level above us. But if you're at a high school, I don't think you need to come in and show clips all the time of James Harden. That's really not what they're going to do right there. Not at that level, but I do think maybe there's D2 players are there's D1 players that you want to show them like these are some concepts we can learn from everybody. But I do think you trying to dial in what you do and especially if you can show them people have been successful in your system. And it's your school that have done really well and your game compares to them and look what they're able to do and look where they're at now. They're where you're trying to go. So can you take those things and hone them in and let's really try to dive into what you do well and make sure that we create opportunities for you to do that. Coach, if I could dive in a little bit deeper maybe on like an practice setting. Maybe ways that you would help a team in the teaching of shot selection and efficiency, whether it's by drill design scoring systems of weighted shots are worth more than others for certain things. Or you just stopping or yelling out the PPP of a bad shot. What are ways practically in practice. You teach this. I think one of the most important things is as soon as you can get by and you know obviously if you just got a job and your day one job there's going to take some time there. I think where we got with Charleston when it really took off those last five six seven years that we were super efficient what we were doing. You look back and we had great continuity. And so what happens is is sometimes the players just take care of that for you. Hey, we don't shoot those shots here or man you pass that one up. That's a great one not only for you, but for us you got to shoot that that's probably the most powerful thing we can do is have other people in our program that are their peers. Who understand what it is we're trying to do and what we're trying to accomplish. I don't spend a ton of time just hammering them about it. I will definitely yell out all that's a point eight one or whatever. And if I feel like man, then you just can't seem to figure this out. You're constantly shooting this whatever shot that's not what we're looking for you to do. You're not playing your strengths at some point. I will stop the thing and say listen if you're going to shoot those. I'm not going to tell you can't you're just going to shoot them in practice because I'm never playing it. I'm not playing you in the game. And so like shoot away. I think the other thing is like how you score that in a game. You know, maybe we just say a mid range is worth a half a point or if you make it. It's worth one if you miss it. It's worth two. And what's happening guys, you know, there's consequences and rewards for teams that win and lose as you're tracking a competitive practice. And guys want to win. And so when you go down there and you shoot a shot, it's worth a half a point at best and you're shooting 38% on it. And it's minus two when you miss. It's really hard to win that way. It's hard to win in college basketball at any level period. But when you start doing things that are actually taking points off the board because you're doing what you want to do versus what we are collectively trying to do. It makes it really difficult. And I think you'll get some peer pressure from that when you have a great culture coach. We kind of talked about this briefly before the show, but could you go a little deeper on the balance and connection between having this analytical efficient approach, but also finding the right people that fit into that and see the vision and are willing to buy into it. So identifying talent and prioritizing people is a phrase that we like to use. And it's really one of our guiding principles in the program identifying talent is something that all coaches are doing. That's not special to us. We all know that's important. But we believe that the prioritizing people is imperative. And in the recruiting process, that looks like not only evaluating their abilities, but it's evaluating their heart. It's evaluating their character. It's trying to evaluate their ability and desire to buy into a vision and commit to rowing in the same direction that we're growing in. And so once we have our team together, the prioritizing people doesn't stop in the program. It looks like deep care and love for them. It's building meaningful and purposeful relationships with them so that we can build trust and trust is the foundation of all great relationships. It's super important. And so when we have trust, that allows us then to speak truth and life into them so that we can guide them in a direction that allows them to become the best version of themselves. In doing that, both the player and the program are positioned to max the moment that we have together. We can help them see how we aren't trying to limit them, but we're actually maximizing the areas that bring the most value. And so at the end of the day, as humans, we all want to fill valued and we want to bring value to the people we deal with and the places that we choose to invest our time. And so that's a huge part of the process for us is truly identifying talent and prioritizing people both in the time period that we're looking to bring them into the program and then once they're a part of the program. So in fact, how you generate these high efficient shots, a large part of it, I think too, is the quick decisions of your players, their ability to dry pass shoot. Predominantly, when you focus on the driving, how you're helping your players are talking about the ability to play in a more dynamic catch or less static, more thinking stampede, rips and being able to continue to break the paint, continue to create the keep the defense and a scramble, hold an advantage. Yeah, I think obviously playing advantages is a super critical part of the game really it's what basketball comes down to right can you create an advantage instead of making it a five on five game can you find a way to get numbers whether that's two or one three on two four on three five on four. And then once you get that can you maintain it. And so for us, I think there's a ton of things that probably go into that that are emphasized on a daily basis, for example, we call them FTD's that's first touch decisions. I don't know personally great pop of it and guys that use the point five thing way better coaches that I'll ever think about being they have this thing way more figured out than I do. But for me, I don't know that I always love just saying that you got a point five so we really like to think about first touch decision. And it's like, hey, being decisive in what it is you're doing paying attention to what's going on. And I think if you're just standing there waiting and you catch the ball and then you try to figure out what you're going to do that doesn't lead to you being effective efficient that doesn't lead to us getting great shots and being able to maybe maintain any advantage that we've created through the screening cutting ball reversals whatever it may be. And so what you do is super important in how you're prepping for getting the ball. You can't wait to get the ball. And so for us, the first touch decisions thinking about like what is coming available here and I think trying to create great clarity within your system is a huge part of that when we know what's coming and we have clarity. We have clarity. We all know what we're looking for. We know what the reads are. It's much more effective for us because you can anticipate that's why we scout right we watch other teams so we know what's coming and when we know all thumbs up this and these are the actions they're getting to you have a better chance of guarding that if you didn't it would be really ignorant for all of us as coaches to be spending the inordinate amount of time we are on prepping for that you do that because it helps you to know what you're expecting and how to play from that and how to defend that and it works the same way. Offensively if we know what we're looking for we know what ways of guarding that are then it helps us to anticipate and make those decisions a little bit quicker. Pulling on that clarity piece when you're talking about these first touch decisions are you talking with the guys like to have the decision kind of made on the catch you know kind of reading what's developing or just it's important that you're just catching on the move you know you're ball near feed in the air. What are some of the cues you help your guys with to understand like the clarity or what the defense is presenting you. Obviously what we don't want to do is predetermined I think that gets you in trouble is like we're running this shuffle cut we're throwing it to no matter what that'll get you in trouble right but you know what you're looking for you know which defenders you're reading you're anticipating okay like if we screen well he's going to cut who would possibly take that cut away okay that becomes a read for you I think if you take it. That would be in an off ball situation if you just use the typical ball screen guys in the corner we're going to lift behind the ball screen single side tag well like when you go off the ball screen you're not just staring at your man you're not just staring at the. He's staring at the headger it's in drop coverage or whatever it is you're really reading the guy in the corner is he tagging is he not tagging he's going to.
take and tell you where to throw the ball. So if you just go off the ball screen and say, I'm going to hit the roller this time, you know, like it's kind of crazy. I always talked our guys. They would come out of a huddle and they might say, okay, this time I'm going to do this and you do that. And then I'm going to thought to you here, well, you don't really know that. You haven't read anything yet. You don't know how the defense is going to play. So so much about what you're doing, I think, is the clarity in creating these effective moments and what it is they need to read and anticipate and you look for this and you check market and it's just like a quarterback working through progressions. This is progression one, but progression one is not open a lot. You know, I think if you're playing really good teams, you're probably not just getting your first option all the time. And so guys will do stuff and I'll say, well, like if we're getting that on them, it doesn't really matter what we run. We're going to win anyway because they're not very good, right? The best teams when you're trying to beat the best teams when you're trying to win in the national tournament in championship play, you've got to be able to go to your second and third and fourth progressions and understand how those things are going to look. And so for us to try to create environments where they can do that super important. With teaching again, the first touch decision in the environments, what do you think about player development to recreate these environments? So it is a natural read and it's not just like wrote, you know, just stampede it or just hit corner. I think there's a couple of things that so in practice, I am not a huge fan personally of doing, we don't do a bunch of small side of game stuff. You know, I'm a big five on five guy and we try to look at it like that. I think sometimes there's so much good that you can get out of these two on two three on three small side of games. But in the grand scheme of things, there's going to be two other defenders out there. And we've got to know how the whole works in this and how to help manipulate these things. I think we're trying to create in a game two on two and three on three situations. But there's still other people out there. There's still the five out there. And so we try to do that now. Well, we're maybe in the preseason or maybe we want to practice shorter for two days in a row. And we're going to have a one hour practice instead of a two hour practice. And then we're going to bring guys in and individuals or combo groups as we like to call them. And we'll work through some of those you put four guys in group. We're going to play with two on two today and work on some of these reads or we're going to play three on quote-unquote three against coaches. You know, it's three on three verse the coaches. And you're working on through the progressions. If they do this, this is what you read is. You wrap that out. Okay, they do this. This is what you read is. And I personally have a big believer that at some point you do have to get past. I don't even think that the three on three verse the coaches totally gets this done because they kind of know what's going on. And I think sometimes the coaches, they're going to move a little bit slower and be less athletic than what your players are. And if they're not, you're probably not very good. You know, if your players are the same as your coaches, you're probably not going to be very good. At least in my experiences, that doesn't work very well. So at some point we got to get them out there into three on three. And you know, at some point it's like your math teacher teaches you how to use a formula. And she can say, okay, this is what the formula is and how it works. Now, let's do a sample problem on the board. But you have to at some point get past sample problem. You have to be able to use the formula on your own. That's when you know how to use it and do math yourself. Otherwise, you're just tracking and following and shadowing somebody as they do it. And so for us, we're going to do that. But most of it when we get to practice is in five on five situations. I wanted to follow up on all of this, especially as you're talking about decisions and one of the analytics that really sticks out a lot is going back to even 23, 24 in your Charleston. You led the nation in field goal percentage in the paint. What goes into being an effective efficient shooting team in the paint when there's often more bodies and things like that. And I guess it stays a little bit with maybe the player development stuff we're talking about about what types of shots, what types of footwork, what types of finishing that goes into being, I mean, you're about 57% in the paint as a team that you're as incredible. What goes into that? The great question. I think probably a couple things that come to my mind. One of them would be as we maybe stated a little bit earlier, all layups are not the same. And so who's there and what does that look like is important in identifying what's a good layup and what's a bad layup and what does that look like around the room? And having guys that understand that is super important. And again, that just goes through coaching and film work and talking about being direct about it. You know, I think some people might say, Hey, you know, I don't want my guys over thinking about I want to get there and try to just finish strong and tough. And I don't personally subscribe to that as much. And so we're going to talk about what's good. What does this look like so many times? I think the analytics show that one of the best ways to score just offensively in general is to get the ball in the block and play out of that. You know, whether you're post feeding it is, I think how we typically think about it. Throw the ball in the post points for possession goes up because you got pressure on the rim. But there's really no difference to me when you drop the ball to the basket and you get in there and you play off two feet. It's one of the best things you can do offensively. And now you have your pivoting and you're essentially in the same situation you would be if you threw it into a post player. It's just that a guard drove it in there. And naturally, I think most teams have the propensity to say, Hey, I'm going to protect the basket, the balls in the paint. We got to get it out. And so you can get yourself in there and really get to some great things offensively that help you whether it's getting somebody in a long closeout or you can get other cutters in different ways from that. So we talk about that. And then I'm a big believer in the layup packages we work on. We're not just going to go in and shoot two on oh or two line layups like you wouldn't high school before the game. And you know, I'm just shooting a regular right hand layup. I think you do work on those because it's crazy to me. I think the best teams make layups. I think teams that struggle a lot of times you go back and look and they don't make layups. It could be they just miss. Maybe that's a focus problem. Maybe that's you're taking them over, you know, a big seven footer in there. I don't know what the different reasons might be. But good teams make layups, championship teams make layups. And we talked about that a lot. I think trying to educate again them on that and then work on these different packages of layups is super important for us on what we're trying to do. What are the layup packages? The primary ones we do is you know, like let's just we're going to use we do this four corner passing drill. If we had a hundred practices, we probably did it 98 times to start practice. I'm a big believer like we have maybe 14 or 15 drills and we're going to do 10 to 12 of them every day. Not all of them are even necessarily drills. It's five on five play with different constraints or whatever it is that we're going to play with. But when it comes to this layup package, we're shooting, let's say a regular right hand layup. We're going to shoot off two feet. We're going to shoot the right reverse like you're going across the lane and you're shooting it on the left side, but you're shooting it with your right on the reverse. You're shooting it inside hand. So you're on the right side, but you're shooting it with the left. I call it the stretch layup. It's like hey, I'm driving the ball from the right wing with my left hand across the middle of the court. And so you're on my right shoulder. Well, I can't just always turn and scoop that thing from the inside, open my body up. So I've got to get this like a little bit of a hook layup as you go across the lane. We work on those and you know, like so many times you get especially early in the year. Guys are doing that. It's like man, I can't believe how bad we are at that. It's like so much more difficult and not as calm as you think. And so I think working on that in conjunction with playing off two feet when you're penetrating, you know, I think it's so important. And we all know like Jay Wright did an unbelievable job at Villanova. And so we have Villanova drill that we literally work on combining all these layup packages with playing off two feet and cutting all in the same drills. And so that's kind of how we approach those, you know, making quality plays at the rim. Go she said something interesting when you're talking about kind of your drill package. Apparently when you move to five on five, what are some of the constraints you'd like to work with that are kind of in the usual rotation when you're playing five on five with your guys? Good question. I don't know to be totally transparent with you. I don't know if we have a normal package. You know, sometimes it's we're just playing and we're working on our execution of various sets. Sometimes it might be that we're only working on these three sets for the day. Sometimes it might be we're going to play string of six would be a game we would play. And so it's five on five starts with a free throw. And hopefully I'm going to get up there and make my free throw. I'm up one to nothing. And the goal is for me to get to six before you score. If you go down and score, it's over. Games over. We restart a new one. Get the other team gets on the free throw line and they play. And if we get to six, we hit the first free throw. That's one. We get a stop. We come down and transition. Hit a three. That's four. Oh, we get another stop. We come down and we get a layup at six. Oh, we don't stop and say you want it's like, hey, can you get it to eight? Can you get it to 10? And what does that look like? And I think you're learning even in those situations, how your players respond to stuff. I think one of the worst things you can do sometimes as a team is you get on a run like that and you eliminate the run before you make the other team stop the run. We want to be super tight. That's not the time to loosen up. That's the time to really dial it in. Can we get this thing to eight over 10 over 12 to just try to bury them, right? And we're not going to give up anything easy and ignorant, not silly files, not getting overly aggressive or out of character defensively. Be really solid, really make it tough for them to score. And then when we come down, that's not the time to be, you know, hey, like we're feeling good. Let's shoot some, you know, fade away 19 footers or whatever it is. Like let's really, really, really see if we can take this momentum because those runs are hard to get on. And so when you can do that, I think it gives you a chance to really look back at the end of the game and say this is a separator. Fast model tools have been part of basketball for years and now fast draw fast scout and faster crude are integrated into huddles full basketball system. You can move from play diagrams to film clips to player tracking all in one connected workflow. The tools you trust now working even better together. Check it out at huddle.com/slapingglass to see what's new. Awesome stuff we do want to pivot now to a segment on the show we call start sub or sit. We're going to give you three different options around
topic, ask you to start one, sub one, and then keep one sitting on the bench, and then we'll have some fun discussing from there. So coach, if you're set, we'll dive in. Okay, sounds great. Coach, we talked a lot about efficiency and offense and all that. We're going to kind of stay similar here on this first question. You've also had years where you've been really great with ATOs. Coming out of a timeout, your ATO packages or your sets or things that you're doing after a stoppage in play. And so we just kind of term this sneaky ATO consideration. These are three different things. As a coach, as a play caller, you may be considering when you call this ATO to try to attack defense. Coming out of that timeout. So option one is the foul situation of the opponent, either a player or team. So maybe they're in the bonus. So does that play into what you might call or there's a player that has three, four fouls, whatever it is. So just the overall foul situation player team is option one. Option two is just attacking weak links. You know who they have in. You're going to try in some way, no matter what, to go at that player. Or option three is using their own good defense against them. So you know they tag a certain way. You know they plug a certain way. You know they double on post catches. However is it they do well, you're going to design a set, come out of that against that. So start subset foul situation attacking weak links or using good defense against them. That's a great one. I think that I will start using their concepts, hopefully against them. I think I will sub the foul situations, the bonus, things of that nature. And I will sit the weak links. I think it's actually to be totally honest. I think it's an area of coaching I need to be better at. I think there's so many coaches that I really look at and respect that are so good at just saying, hey, we're going to find the weak link and we're just going to go after that. And it's probably just not my natural approach to trying to handle that. Coach, great answer. Let's go to your start and attacking their good concepts. I guess the balance for you as a coach offensively of attacking someone's good concepts versus trying to not let them get to those concepts. So let's take just for example, they hedge a pick and roll really well. Well, we're going to call something that takes advantage of that hedge by getting to on the ball. We're going to move it out of it. We're going to take advantage versus we're going to set a RAM screen or some kind of screen so they can't get to the hedge and we attack that way. I guess how do you think about that gray area? I think it's a great question. I think that we're going to be prepared for both of those. I literally as you were saying, I'm thinking, oh, that's this play call and that's this play call. So, you know, I think both of those are important. I think you're going in the moment, what you feel like you're doing well that day, maybe who's playing well for you. I try to think more about my team than I think about the other team, which is probably even when I think about the start subset, why I was doing what I was doing. Instead of thinking about spending so much time, let's try to find their weak spot and go at it. I'm going to try to take us and play to what we do and what we practice. And so as we think about, let's say in that situation, they're going to hard hedge the ball screen. Maybe we're going to get it in an isolated ball screen, three on offense on the other side. And we're going to play out of that because we practice that. We know exactly what we're looking for and what we're trying to do versus like, hey, let's try to move this thing around, get to a favorable match up. And maybe we start doing things that we haven't practiced as much. And so for me, I think a huge part of it is the comfortability that our players hopefully are going to have coming out of these ATO situations. I just am not a big believer in going out and chalking something up, drawing something up. Let me show you how smart I am on a board. You know, like I want our guys to be confident. And so the number of times at, let's say the University of Charleston in 11 years and we went about 70% of our games are close. And the number of times that I drew something up that we had never practiced, I'm going to say the overrunner on that's about two and a half in 11 years, not per year total. Most of the time when we come out of something, I can just literally say, hey, we're going to run Denver or whatever it is that we're going to run. And we might spend time just reminding them exactly what it is we're looking for or hey, the two ways they've guarded the ball screens in this situation is the hard hedge and the drop coverage. So if they're in the hard hedge, this is what we're looking, you know, it's the reminders of what we're doing versus saying, hey, let me draw this up and hope to God that the timing works outright and that you can see all this stuff at the same time. And so I think for us, it's about creating something where they're comfortable and they know what it is we practiced and what we're looking for. And hopefully they go out and they're able to execute with confidence. The question we presented you always had a lot of what the opponent is doing. You talked about what you guys have wrapped in practice, but what other considerations are you thinking about whether it's your team or what goes into being an effective scoring at you, which you guys were like we mentioned in the past, really good at is just so much of us knowing what we're doing. And I do think that the concepts that we try to talk about are super important to us. And so let's just say we have five concepts that we really try to play to in different scenarios. We will run things. Let's say I use Denver again, you know, anybody that's ever played against us probably could chalk Denver up for you. We run it a lot, but we're going to run Denver and because of how you played something, the ball screen in the middle third at the end, we can say, hey, we're going to throw this different concept. So like think if you were scouting us, you could be easily pulled into saying, okay, they just ran Denver. Here's Denver. Oh, well, this time they ran Denver and it had a different ending to it. Well, that's just because we changed a concept or added a concept at the end of it coming out of the ATO when we get to this spot. This is our alignment. Okay. Now we're going to get to maker concept. We're going to get the Wyoming concept. We're going to get the flash concepts, whatever it is that we're going to do. It might not normally be part of Denver, but we'll throw that wrinkle on maybe coming out of a timeout at the very top. You mentioned you're constantly thinking about efficiency, maximizing time. When we go back to a practice setting, how much time are you dedicating to special situations, ATOs, baseline, sideline, and how you think about how much time you'll dedicate to that versus well, 80% of the game is going to be this or flow. What are your considerations when you think about practice design? Yeah, I'm not very good at, to be honest, of spending a bunch of time, it would be easy to say, well, if they're doing that successfully, they must be spending in an order amount of time on it, must be a high priority. We want to execute well in those situations, but we don't have 74 O.B.U.'s. We don't, there's been a lot of years to be totally honest with you. We have one slot. That's it. We have one sideline out of bounds play. That's it. Now we have one other one or two other ones that we're going to use in a late game situation, we're down to with five seconds to go, we're going to run this, whatever it is. Once we've used it in a game, we'll throw it out, and we have the other one we've been practicing, and then we'll start thinking about something else to add in the place of this, and we won't use it again the rest of that year, maybe ever. Who knows? But we don't have 17 game winners with 10 seconds to go or whatever it is. Again, for us, what we're going to try to do, I think about an important part of the game to me, is practicing what we're going to do the most, what situations come out the most. And so maybe a little bit off your question, but let me give you the best example I can think of to explain that. How many times I've seen heard people talk about, what are we going to run if we have the ball side out in the deep corner almost down on the baseline or we're on the baseline, and we're all the way out there by the sideline. Those are tough, tough spots to get the ball in. And so we might not be nearly as prepared as what we should be for that. And somebody could say, well, man, you guys lost by one because you didn't have a great play there. I actually will talk to our team about and our staff is going to talk about. We didn't play off to. Now we're going to have something that we're going to try to do, but the amount of time we commit to working on that is so marginal. I think it would be so interesting to know like if you just said, hey, let's pick a random conf-- let's go to the big 12. How many times did somebody in the big 12 last year have to take the ball out in that scenario? I can tell you at Youngstown State, I think maybe once, maybe one time the entire year in 34 games, we're talking about something that's going to happen. 0.2% of the time. You're going to need to be prepared for that moment. But to me, the best thing to do is I know we're going to have the ball about 75 times in the half court. I know that we're going to have 15 or 20 options to run and transition. Those things to me are the more important things for us to practice. A lot of times our ATO or our out of bounds, our sideline out of bounds plays are small and number, simple and what we do. We'll see if we can get the action to score. If not, based on the catch location, let's think about an out of bounds underplay. So many times, the normal catch location is free throw line extended on the ball side. So you take it out on the right side of the basket, you're going to end up with a catch in the right corner of the right wing. We may run something to see if we can score in the secondary place to throw it in. It's there. And if we don't get anything out of that, we throw it in there, we're going to go right into Denver. We'll be right lined up in it or whatever the play is. I'm trying to use Denver consistently or today. But whatever that play is, we might say, okay, we're going to catch it. We're going to be an alignment and just like this looks just like Fissade Dive. Okay. Well, we're just going to go right to Fissade Dive. We ran out of bounds play under one. We didn't score on it. It's ball comes in here. Boom, we're right to whatever that is. And there's so many things in our system that we can just say, we're going to run OBU1 to Fissade Dive or thumbs up or whatever it might be. If we sort of change the question, but
keep the option, foul situation, attacking weak defenders using good D against them. And we just changed the question to more of getting your best player shot down the stretch rather than ATOs. Has anything changed for you going from division two, division one with players being a little different, bigger? Anything changed with just getting your best player's quality shots down the stretch when defenses are hyper focused on playing well down the stretch, obviously. Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think at this point, I would say not a lot of change there. I think that obviously guys are bigger, faster, stronger at the division one level than the division two. And I'm sure the higher you move up, obviously, you know, we played at Syracuse this past year here at Youngstown. We played at Ohio State. You can see there's a definite difference in the players at those levels. But at the end of the day, what you're trying to do is as you progress through, I think, division three to division two to division one and all the way in the NBA, is there a concept that you're trying to execute well and you want to put your best players in those as much as you can. And you put them in there and you're trying to just create a little bit of confusion or hesitancy within the defense just to give you a little bit of a window on that stuff. And I think while the defense is better, maybe the caliber of player is better, the higher levels you move, well, so are the offensive players, you know, like the offensive player that maybe you had at D3, you don't have it, D2. You have some, it's a little bit better or a little bit more talented at the lower, high division one and all the way up into the professional ranks that not just the defense is better, but the offense is better. And so again, you're just trying to take these concepts and see if you can create some scenarios that allow your best players to do what they do well. If you're still listening this deep into our conversation, first of all, thank you. Second, you're probably a coach who enjoys learning the deep interlocities of the game to gain even the smallest advantage for your team. The problem is there's so much information, it's overwhelming and attempting to find what might actually help in winning games. SG+ goes way beyond playbooks and PDFs to streamline the time and energy needed in the learning process. For example, in our unique film room series, here from the likes of Josh Scherz on how he teaches split cut reads, or watch Ryan Peno and talk through Alabama's 5-out installation, our Marin Max Joe Gallo lay out every detail of his impressive zone defense. These, along with hundreds of videos and articles just like them, are why SG+ has become the most valuable and trusted resource for MBA and NCAA championship staffs, along with international and high school coaches from over 65 countries worldwide. To join the community, visit slappingglas.com or for questions, email us at
[email protected] We answer every email. Thanks for the support and our back to our conversation. All right, coach, our last start subset has to do with tagging up. We've know you've tagged up in the past, also the great success, some high offensive rebounding percentage numbers. So, we're going to ask you about tagging up and we're going to give you three habits and your start would be which one was the hardest getting your players to do when tagging up. So the hardest tagging up habit to teach. Option one is pressing the inbounder after a made basket. So you make a basket, you tag keeping whoever inbounds it, keeping them to press the inbounder. Option two is not getting beat off the first dribble. So you tag up, your guy gets the rebound and just not allowing him, you tag up with any rips you and off a one dribble, they're in transition. And then option three is teaching your guys have patience in solving cross matchups or mismatches. Often you'll see guards on a big and he's immediately going to try to run off the big, but teaching them to have it to stay with the match up and solving it at a better point in time. I think I'm going to go with the most difficult thing, which I guess would be the start would probably be matchups. The second thing would probably be pressing the inbounder and then which would be the sub and then I guess the sit would be not getting beat off the bounce. Let's start with the start again. How are you explaining it? What are you talking with your guys to teach them to have the patience to understand when is the proper time for them to solve a mismatch and when is not what probably see the most is when you have a guard, you know, maybe your two guards matched on the center and he's going down in transition, you know, and it's like, oh my goodness, I don't have to guard this big in here or that's, you know, whatever, not the best matchup. Well, I haven't seen a lot of post feeds for 84 feet. You know, that's kind of how I tell them. So like you've got some time, you also have a trust component, which is so important. Again, if you go back to just the culture building of what we're doing is that you're trusting that the people on the front end are going to give you time and allow situations to take place where we can fix the cross match. And so I think if the ball is guarded when it comes in, what happens is is you don't have to pressure the ball. We don't talk about, hey, you got to get up there and really turn this guy three times before he gets to half court. You're not trying to speed-dribble the situation. You're trying to control the situation. So by maybe you're given a little bit of gap, you understand who am I guarding and what's my speed and ability like relative to who I'm guarding. And so now my job is to keep the ball in front of me and not let them just have direct line passes to be able to throw the ball wherever they want, right? So you're taking a little vision away. You're trying to escort them up the court as essentially what's happening. You doing that well by being up, making them move back. We have four rules that we try to use to help them have simple but great clarity in how we're going to use the tagging up system. But you doing that so allows if you guard the ball well, the other three people that are running in transition offense are being escorted again by somebody defensively for us. And as those three people get back there, they'll start switching and figuring out, but you shouldn't be doing that immediately in the front court. Go back with your man. They'll be two or three people back there. You'll be able to get it fixed. And then I think every team works on like sometimes depending on how you're playing ball screens or what may happen in the flow of a possession, you may as a two guard get switched on to a big. Okay, well, what do we do when guards get on big? Maybe we front the post and count on help over the back. Well, you would just do the same thing in that situation as we go back until we can fix it or scram you out of the post or whatever it is we're going to do. Go to your mentioned you had four rules to create clarity with your tagging up system. What are the four rules? So the four rules that we try to use to keep this super simple is you want to get to the touch. That's the first thing when the shot goes up, get to the touch. That means you're going to go literally physically touch the person, whether that's, it doesn't mean you're putting your hand in the shoulder, but like it might be aggressive. It might be a push a little bit. You're going to be physical in that trying to drive them forward the basket as much as you can, but you're getting to the touch because that helps us to know who you're guarding and who everyone else is guarding, right? So we're going to get to the touch first. The second thing we're going to do is get to the top. We're going to get to the top side of it. We don't want to go crashing. If I'm going in from the wing, you're blocking me out, ball a shot from the opposite wing. I don't want to go under because if the ball goes out toward the center and you get it, we've initiated the fast break. And for us, this is a transition defense concept first and then an offensive rebounding concept. We're going to get to the top second. Then three and four we have the word no. So there is no reckless crashing. A reckless crash would be, hey, you don't really block out and I just go running by you. Guys love to do that and see if we can get the tip dunk that you get twice a year, right? Well, the other 14 times the ball went over your head and ignited their fast break again. We don't want to be reckless and then no advance passes. So again, we don't take this and say, let's try to press. Let's try to really get up and turn them over and make it harder to get the ball in bounds. I just need you to be up there right with your person. I don't care if the offensive player post you up. I don't care if he cuts back to the baseline. You just want them to move back toward the baseline on the catch. If they do that, you did your job. You don't even have to go whip them. You know, the ball goes to the net. You're out at the wing blocking me out. I'm on the top of you. We're free though. I'm extended. I don't ever even have to move to the baseline. I just need to have that gotten to the touch with you on the top side. I didn't go reckless and now I'm just going to make you move back to catch them all toward the baseline. That's helping to slow down their transition. It's crazy. One of the frustrating things when you think about the tagging up system, I love it. I think it's been amazing. One of the frustrating things is when you flip it offensively, if they tag up well, you should never get the practice transition. If you don't do a drill to create advantages, there's just not very many opportunities for that. It's been super effective for us. I think saying, "Let's get to the touch. Let's get to the top. Let's make sure that we don't have any reckless crashes and we don't allow advances." Is a pretty short, clear way to give them four rules to make sure we know exactly what it is we're trying to do? If you are a good tagging up team at in practice, you want to the work on your offensive transitioning, want to work and maybe playing in advantages. How do you think about drill design or creating an advantage that doesn't just fly in the face of tagging up or we're just not going to tag up here now? Constantly reinforce the tagging habit while also trying to help your offense attack in advantages and numbers and play fast. Great question. We will never alter the rules in 505 play. We're not going to say, "Okay, we're playing 505. We're no longer tagging up so we can try to get some transition breaks." We'll never do that. We're going to honor the tagging system and try to train you to consistently do that. It's super important to us. We're going to go back and do people call it progression drills and things like that where you're playing 201 to 302 to 403 to 504. I also think that a lot of the advantages that you're trying to play in, those 201 to 302's and 403's and 504's, those are in transition. They're playing fast, but they're the exact same in a lot of ways when you think about playing in the half court. You close out bad on me and I drive past you.
you, well, we're essentially in 504 transition. It's just that we didn't run from all the way down there to do it. It's still 504. You're still going to have somebody help. You're going to have two on the ball and you're going to have to make your decisions. So I think that the advantage is when you're working on them, don't just have to come out of transition, but you're applying the same rules and the same concepts and how we're going to cut and how we're going to try to find an open space and what we're going to do in those situations, whether you're working on it in the full or you're working on half. Pat, you took exactly what I was going to ask on that because we had that problem. Yeah, that's the way. Yeah. My question is going back to point number three with the no reckless crashes. And sometimes I've heard the argument from coaches who are tagging up, but they want some flexibility in the tagging up system. And they say, "Hey, I've got a three or a four man that's just a monster on the glass and I want to let him or her be more free and maybe go low side and maybe not have to do all the rules." What is your thought on that, whether there is some flexibility with really great natural offensive rebounders or has it got to be in the system still? From a holistic standpoint, you're going to talk about you staying within the structure of what we're doing because then you, I think it just trickles to all other areas of play. Well, I really like to do this or I really think I'm good at this. So I'd rather abort our concepts here and go to this. So it's really about what's best for us holistically, number one, but I think, you know, there's times that I might grab a day and you're really good at this crashing. I think if great instincts for the ball, I'm going to trust you. Like you cannot do that the majority of the time. That's not going to be acceptable. But man, you're in there and you're just playing in stanchial. You're like, man, I can go get this. Just go get it. Just go get it. And it will deal with it as we need to. But as you start making those decisions, you're going to prove to me whether you actually have wisdom in making those decisions or not. You keep saying, Hey, I thought I could get it. So I went and you not only don't get it, but we're trading off on the back end negatives. Okay. Well, like you're just proving that you're not doing that as well as you may think you are or you want to do that. And so we're going to have to pull that back a little bit. Hey, they're going to go in there sometimes and get some and stick back. It's like, man, those are huge plays. Those are huge plays. And so we may say and film, hey, you didn't do this one very well. But that's why the goal is like we're trying to get to 80%. That's our goal. Can we get every person I'll go back after the games and I chart every single possession for every single guy on the floor. You had 17 chances and you got, you know, whatever it was 17. That's 100% amazing, right? You had 10 chances. You got to that's 20%. That's not going to work. And it doesn't matter if that's because you went reckless eight times or because you just stood there at the three point line, you know, it's crazy to me how many times I think point guards have been trained that I were going to send three or four to the glass. The point guard's going to just get back on defense and it's critical, man, for your point guard to get up there and really slow the breakdown. Why? Because if that's who you're matched on, that's who they're going to try to throw the ball in. If you don't get up there, they just take it and jet it right up. Now those cross matchups really get exposed or their transition opportunities become available where you just get up there eliminates that. And so I think it is a fight. I think there's always flex where you're trying to do that. And some things, you know, you're willing to flex more other areas. You're a little bit more stringent. And so I think you manage those as you go. The charting. Is it a number system? Did you do all four of them? As you were asked. So if the ball was shot from the three and you didn't get to the touch, you didn't do it effectively. Did you move toward it? Yes. Did you maybe you did the old little jog? You know, there's an aggression level behind that. You got to go, man, you really went after it. You got to the touch, but you tried to go to the bottom side and get it. You did not do what we asked you to do. You did not follow the program. So to speak. And so you're getting your tally mark. You failed in that area. Hey, you really went hard. You got to the touch. You went to the top, but you kept trucking past them reckless. Didn't do that right. You got to do those things well. And so probably the one that maybe gets a little bit of gray area. If you do all three of those things well and, you know, maybe you're not up there to make the guy move back to the baseline to catch the ball, but he just stands there as long as you don't catch it on the run. And it's like, okay, there's some gray area I can live with that one a little bit more. But if the guy catches the ball on the outlet on the run, it doesn't matter that you did the other three things well and you forgot to start to run it back. You didn't do what we asked you to do. So we got to be able to put all those things together. Are all shots tagged the same? So three point shot above the break versus a 15 foot jump shot, which I know you don't want to take a lot of those versus a guy's going to a post up jump hook. Are they all tagged the same? Are we all going on the rise of the hook shot or the jump shot? Or is it more of just a three point tagging system? We try to think about it more from the farther the shot is so to speak. So you're thinking about three is those and we have to do it. Like we've got to get that done. Hopefully to heavens, we're not shooting a bunch of, you know, dribble pull-ups. We have to worry about that or we're going to we won't have to think about that much because we're just going to take that guy out and let him sit for a while till he can figure out the shots we want to shoot. What you don't want to do is create like we've got to go tag up so much that, you know, maybe I drive the ball, you're standing wide open in the corner and you start anticipating I'm going to shoot the lap, you run in and we miss a three opportunity that's great, right? So I think on layups and things that nature, the thought process is once the balls released, if I shoot a layup, you're not getting from the three all the way into the paint to get to the touch with a guy that was in help, you know, you're in the opposite corner. And so you're not covering 20 feet and a half of a second on that. So to me, it's more about are you moving in the direction? Does it look like that or are you standing there and the ball gets rebound and you're like, oh shoot, I got to go. Those are bad. But to me, if you're just moving in the direction or maybe even if you're in the corner and your guy was the fire guy or help guy or the mig, whatever you choose to call them and he goes, you're not going to get to the touch and you might not want to run a direct line to him. But maybe you're moving toward the elbow and then you can move back to him once you've gotten ahead of the play. It's almost like in football, the running backs running, you don't run right where is that you got to think about where you can come to a meeting point. You run where he is when you get there, he'll be up the field. And so it's the same concept there a little bit on those layups and close shots like that. Coach, you're off to start sub sit hot seat. Way too easy for you today. I felt like it was pretty hot seat. Thanks for going through those with us. That was fantastic. Hey, we got to find a question to close the show before we do. Again, thanks so much for your time today for all your thoughts. Learned a ton of pages of notes. So thank you for everything today. Yeah, thank you so much again for all you guys are doing and for allowing me to be home with you today. Absolutely. Coach, are I final question that we ask all the guests is what's the best investment that you've made in your career as a coach? I think there's two things that come to my mind on that. The first one is the investment in my family. I think when things weren't good at home, when I didn't do a great job as a husband or a dad, I think I look back at those times and become consumed with or allow things that aren't as important as my family to get in the way of those priorities. And I think your family is so critical for the obvious reasons. Nobody's going to write that down like, oh my goodness, that's a great thought I've never thought of. But when you think about when things are tough, when things aren't going well, you know, there's people that like if you're winning, you're their favorite person in the world and when you're not, let's just get rid of the guy or I don't know about this. There's so many questions and variables that come in that the people that are going to be with you there to the end to not only celebrate the good, but support in the bad encourage you is going to be your wife. It's going to be your kid. It's going to be your family that you're close to. And I think about how blessed I am, you know, my wife Amy is amazing. It would be 25 years married in a little less than a year. And I just think about I just would be totally lost without her and what she's done. Not only for me and helping me be a better coach, but helping me learn how to love and care about other people well, she's unbelievable serving. I think about we moved from Charleston to Youngstown with my daughter for her senior year high school. Like who wants to move their daughter in their senior year high school? It's tough for anybody. It's really tough for girls. And so I think about going through that process and talking to her about, you know what, like I've been off of this position, trying to figure this out and my wife and our believers that we don't let our kids make the decision, but we do want to hear what you have to say about it. What your thoughts are and how you're feeling. And so I told her, hey, we're going to talk about this in a week or so and need to be chewing on it, praying about it, whatever and doing these things, make your pros and cons list, whatever it is. And then we're going to talk about it next Sunday. We're going to come home from church and eat lunch while I have the discussion. And I'll never forget the impact that had on me when I came home from church and we're sitting down for lunch. It's like, okay, Pee, what do you got? You know, what are you thinking? How you feeling? And she said, let's go. And, you know, it's so easy to think about how she could have responded in that situation. And so I think about her and Gavin, my son, who, you know, is a helping out with the basketball program at Cedarville, the division two in Ohio with Rob Jones, who was at Liberty and Richmond as a great guy. You know, I just think about the impact they've had on me and on our teams and the family environment we try to create. And then the other big thing I think is curiosity. That's probably where I've tried to invest a ton outside of my family to think about how can I learn? How can I grow? How can I progress? I've tried to do this thing. I call it my professional development tour in the summers. And I don't get to it every summer. But more times than not this past summer, just a couple months ago, I spent basically five or six days out. And I went to Liberty. I went to Firm and I went to UT Chattanooga and I went to the University of Tennessee. And I spent a day at each spot and I watched practices or workouts, whatever it was they were doing. You know, the coaches at those places were so gracious to let me not only sit in on that. Maybe they were doing a culture class or something in the locker room before that they would allow me to sit on and you just go and you watch other people do things and you learn and you get ideas and you try to figure out what's the nugget I can take from this place. I want to go change my whole system. But what fits what we're doing? And I think whether it's being a reader, listening to podcasts like yours, how can I get better and grow? And I think that's a big part of what makes me
people successful, but also helps you to have a great life. I think when you think about when do people's health start to fill the most is when you retire and now you don't have as much purpose or passion, maybe for something. And so I hope to be a curious mind, a lifelong learner. (upbeat music) - All right Pat, Kayla top into this. That was awesome. Which Osborne, we had terrific conversations beforehand after the show and during the show. It was just a really fun morning and late afternoon for you over there. - Yeah, it has been kind of in preparing for him fun to see his rise from D2, now the Associated Coach at Young Sound State, but all that he did with Charleston, as you and me were prepping, going through kind of the stats, talking to him and knowing the ideas, had some tremendous scoring and defending teams in the past. So it was fun to get him on the pod and pick his brain on just what he's found has been effective and efficient over the years. - Absolutely. Well, let's hop right into it. And our three takeaways, I will throw it to you for number one. - I'll start right where we kicked it off, talking about just efficient offense and feel a go-per-centage. I think no surprise, a big chunk of that was shot selection. And whenever we have a shot selection conversations, how do you deliver the message to your players, valuing the shots, but also, I think your follow-up, kind of still not taking away their soul, their individual freedom, let's say. And it's always interesting here, how coach has tried to frame it. We've heard before too, and the pausing a shot in the air, with anything it's an open discussion, but just the methods, the green yellow red, to tremendous conversations, KC Alexander on what, defining a good shot. I think, all of that, say, as I ramble here, is just like the importance of stressing the clarity. And I think that came across today with coach Osborne and clarity of shot collection, clarity of what came to tagging up, like, it's a big component of just how you're going to talk about shot selection. I think everyone knows it. Even the players are probably smart enough to know it too, you hope, but clarifying how important this is the program and success goes a long way from there. And he said, like, not avoiding the conversation, of course, you got to figure out how you deliver it, but valuing directness. It's just such a huge part of great team's fabric. And how you get to that, there's so many different philosophies on it. Like you mentioned, KC Alexander, when he talked about players coming in, like, with the green light and saying, I trust you, you have the green light. Here's the shots that we're going to shoot. And then that thing slowly gets whittled down to, all right. If after the first two weeks, you're shooting this shot and it's not going in at a rate that we need to have a go in, you can kind of take it away or have those discussions, whether you use film, use analytics, you use constraints during drills to weight shots differently than others. You stop practice and make it known that that's not a great shot. We got to do it probably all of it, but whatever way it gets done, it is a huge determinant of efficiency. Going back to what KC Osborne talked about today. If you want to be an efficient team, and the best teams are, they take the best shots and getting to it is ultimately most important. I like just adding on his thoughts on, you know, just efficiency in life and coaching and not wasting time. And it kind of just all was in line with what he was talking about. I will give you a quick miss. Now by coach Osborne of course, but yeah, it would have been interesting to go down the rabbit hole a little bit on efficiency and coaching in general and life and outside of offense and defense and tagging up, but just his thoughts on what he's looking at being efficient in as a coach, when it comes to time and energy and things like that. And I know over the years he's had a ton of success and I know there's probably a ton of learnings there. So just a quick miss off the top from my standpoint and get to follow up on that because the conversation just weaved other places and then before I throw back to you. I also liked when we got to some of the drills in this early bucket about runs, the string of six drill, the Villanova, the playing off of two, the four line layups because we got into how efficient they were at scoring in the paint and how you get to that. And so I really enjoyed that part of the conversation as well. - To add on to the point you made earlier about you don't see great teams take bad shots. Coach Osborne talked about not all layups are the same and that great teams finish layups. Just one of those things that makes total sense but maybe you just don't think about it. I know at least for myself just like, oh yeah, that's probably absolutely true. And that's where we got on like you said, talking about the Villanova package is playing off the two. But being again, really clear and like, what is a good shot at the rim? Not just because we got to the rim, doing necessarily take it, but yeah, you can't get the money. Their packages that they think will lead to high percentage you'll play off the two hunting a better shot. Good great stuff like that. - Their bag at the rim has Coach Van Gundy would love to talk about getting into his bag, teaching the bags. Again, so the point you made bad teams don't take bad shots and they know what are good shots. Not all threes are equal, not all layups are equal. - Yeah, I would add one caveat, Pat, that all the great teams have a fundamental understanding of great shots, but then they also do usually have one tough shot maker to close out possessions or games where it's like they all understand 90% of the time the shots that need to be taken, but they also have a player or two that can make the tough mid range or can make that tough shot down the stretch because good defense is aren't going to give you those high quality shots down the stretch. So I think that's an interesting nuance. The great ones also have somebody like that too. - Absolutely. I'll just close just 'cause I also enjoyed this part of the conversation when you talk about first touch decisions and how to think about this point five mentality. And again, just putting the guys in the concepts, the clarity of maybe expecting what they should be looking for and being familiar with an environment that they're constantly in through your offense to help them with these first touch decisions. Remind me of going back to often quoted podcasts here this summer for us, but Mike DeGeorge for Cal Poly talked about there and they call it SSS decisions or the shot, stampede, swing decisions in some fashion. And I know a lot of coaches have that of like a metric or a score for he talked about the first touch, the FTD similar stuff of when we create some kind of advantage and then the ball touches your hands, are you helping us keep the advantage by one of these things? - Yeah. - Dan, as we roll along here and our recap, I'll throw it to you for a second take away. - I'm gonna go to your start subset, the tagging conversation which I thought was just terrific by coach Osborne and more and more coaches, I know across the world are tagging up and using this system. What's fun about that is you're getting more and more evidence and stats and video from Europe, Division one, high school, coaches are just definitely implementing this and so this was a great conversation as you and I both were able to dive into. I'll start with, I really liked his four things when we got into that. I was the detail that was great. For those that are listening that are want more on the tagging up system, we've done some videos on it, Aaron Firm was on the show, Francisco Tabillini, we had a great start subset as he did it over last year in Nimburg. So get to the touch, the top side, the no reckless crashers and then move back to the baseline. I think was number four or? - Yeah, no advance passes, yeah, you want to try to get them to land their heels. - Yeah, so like what I liked about this conversation is we talked a little bit about both the actual art of how you have to go tagged and go high side, be physical, but then the start subset was about what happens next. And I think for those of us that have dipped our toes into coaching, tagging up, it's one thing to just put it in and try to have your players go top side. But then there's all these other things after it that have to go well for you to do it correctly and you have to really pay attention to those things or it will be a potential layup line for the other team as we're fearful of. So I really liked him getting to the question and the start about solving mismatches appropriately. And if you go in tag, it's your two that happened to tag to their four and then their four takes off on the wing. Well, you can't have your two trying to switch with your four whoever in the back court and then all of a sudden there's holes in your shell. So I liked that discussion and when to do that and how to do that because it's such a major part of teams that tag up well and he mentioned it. It's not an offensive rebounding system first for him. It's a transition of defense. So starting from that lens, I thought was great. - Yeah, his four rules, it's obviously like, there is the order of operation but that fourth rule is like super sneaky important. And I think he was also good to make a distinction that just because you're tagging doesn't necessarily mean you're pressing, it doesn't have to be a press, it's not necessarily designed to be a press and the importance that like we talked about and kind of coming up with this starts to upset that you have to a good ball pressure, like a decent amount of ball pressure like said. So maybe they're playing on their heels or backing up or at least their head goes down first because as you work with it, hopefully first is like get that habit getting them all to go which is a challenge. But then you'll see like you have to find that gap based on your player's ability, but to occupy the ball where they can't just eye down mismatches or eye down or maybe one of your teammates didn't quite get the tag right and got over ran or got caught with his momentum going the wrong way. And if there's no pressure on the ball then it's like the second pass this can just also be killers in this tag, you know, thinking you tag well, but then it's an outlet pass throw ahead and now you're still playing in transition. And I think that number four is like a sneaky important detail that I think as you build the habit, this is then what becomes important moving forward and really being effective in how you tag. - Yeah, you mentioned it and so did coach Osborne. You can cover up the sins of some of the other things in tagging if they're not.
The person who is on the ball does a good job of making that first dribble east west or turning a shoulder or not allowing someone to make a forward out that's passed. Like if they got a pass it back, if that person does a great job, then yeah, maybe someone went not correctly or maybe there was a some, but you can cover up that sin. If you don't, you could be in trouble based off what happens next or who does or doesn't rebound it. To close kind of my final thought too on this, another discussion we enjoy having, too, is when you have a talented offensive rebounder and how you kind of fit him in to that system or maybe fit him in or pigeonhole him. And I really enjoyed Coach Osborne's thought of like, well, you can't empower him and he can show you again if he has the wisdom to know what rebounds he can really get and go after or if he continues to remain reckless. So again, kind of putting the onus on him, but I like that kind of, he'll show you the wisdom in his tag decisions. And Coach Osborne mentioned and you and I have talked about, you're gonna go off your route, you better get the ball. You don't then you're putting your teammates in a tough spot or an underrated thing is if you don't get it, teaching your players how to tip it or slap it out of bounds. I think that's another part of this whole tagging thing. Like you go top side, you're trying to get it. If you can't come down with it yourself, the good teams are trying to like tap it or tip it. So like if you're all tagging correctly, you tap it back and then you should be able to corral it or if you just can't get it, like actually tipping it out of bounds, so you can set your defense up. - We had a really good conversation with Coach Francesco Tabalini kind of on how you teach the tags and practice. And I think he mentioned rewarding either the offense with a point if they tip it or taking a point away from the defense if the offense is able to tip it because yeah, that's another valuable, like just keeping the ball alive. And so maybe yeah, you have a chance or you tip it, it goes out of bounds, you get to set your defense. There is no transition. So again, you've accomplished the mission, but yeah, really valuing the tips, I think is important and putting in emphasis on that in practice. And with the guys, maybe you try to empower or give a little bit more leeway, I think what bears out is good offensive rebounder guys are usually high motor guys. And what you find is even if they don't get it, they usually are sprinting back too. They're just built differently with energy. It's not your slow lazy players who tend to be your great offensive rebounders. It's true. Again, the guys that have kind of a knack, a high motor that will just like read lentless and pursuing the ball. And it's not only in trying to get the offensive rebound, but I think there is no absolute. It bears out that then they usually have the guys that turn and high tail it back. And then they're also on some occasions too, like maybe get some traps or tip the ball from behind too. Like it's the relentless energy that I think covers a lot of their sins by allowing them to go high side to pursue or maybe get quote unquote a little reckless. Good point. Well, Pat, we could keep going on the tagging up stuff, but let's move to our last takeaway and I'll throw that back to you. For the last takeaway, I'll go to your starts of sit where we looked at ATO considerations. This was a fun one to put together, especially framing it through the lens of like kind of looking at what your opponent is doing or the situation therein. And I think it's always interesting conversation, which was his start on like kind of using sound defensive principles against them, but the considerations of attacking the coverage versus killing it. Like you said, your great example of kind of, well, are you going to accept the head or try to ram screen it? I think is always interesting. And also on like ATOs baseline out of bounds, I think we've been having this conversation lately again, framing it through the lens of efficiency. And I think what's burying out is working out a very one, I mean, I think as Coach Osborne said, they only like one baseline out of bounds or their ATOs very rarely see drawing up a new one. It's just kind of getting to concepts. And we've had conversations with Coach Roy Rana on just simple, not simple, but one line meant maybe two, but getting, breeding familiarity and efficiency within that alignment rather than trying to do a playbook of ATOs about a bounds. That I think is really burying out to drive efficiency and scoring in these situations. And so I think that's what Coach Osborne kind of, the heart of was like, if they didn't practice it and that they're just kind of stick to their concepts, I did like the point, maybe they'll run like one kind of, the first action will be the scoring, but then it's usually ending in a catch area that they're familiar with that they can then get to a concept that they usually play out of from that elbow short corner area. - The overall thing I took out of that was his belief, and we've heard this from many great coaches, is that you've got to practice the things that happen the most in the game. And yes, it'd be great to have 10 different, unbelievable, silent out of bounds that get layups and open threes. And you do need those things in your arsenal for when the time comes, but like he mentioned, hey, that deep corner inbound, like hey, do we have something for that? Do we practice 15 minutes to get it in? And he went back and said, well, how many times does that actually happen? Versus double triple down on the things that happen all the time, the tagging, the rebounding, the offensive flow, all those things, and then find ways to work these special situations, or not even, I mean, basically not a bounds, not a bounds, aren't necessarily special situations, but work these in to where, like we he mentioned, they just are also connected to what they do normally in the half court. So it's not a completely brand new thing all the time. It starts like this, but it ends in something that's familiar to them so they can be efficient at. There's always a time in a place where you got to drop a new play or you got to draw something on the board that they have to take to the court. But I think what bears out with those, why are they usually messing it up? I mean, one, maybe because someone forgot the play, but usually it's timing. You know, not that it can't be done, but I think that's what then becomes really important when you draw up that play is stressing the timing because it's a play they're not familiar with. They haven't run, you know, it's not a normal concept or normal out of their flow. Or like you said, it's a play call that you've run 20, 30 times previously at this point of the season. Again, not to say why would anyone ever drop a play. I think within those plays, it's really an emphasis has to be made on just the timing and the order of operations 'cause so much can be a great play. You think we're gonna be smart. And then all three actions are happening at the same time. It's like, well, there's no way. We're gonna get to any of them now or that, you know, how can we read this back door if we're already onto this handoff over here, stuff stuff. And I think obviously this is the advantage of just playing in your concepts, but then just the consideration of when you do draw something up, the value that timing has to be emphasized. He also, I think through in the point about, you can tweak the ending of stuff, which allows you to maybe be more variable. So you can have your base alignment that you do on all your slyly down the bounds, but then in a game, if you need to tweak the ending of it, so you at least get everybody to this familiar point. And then hey, instead of doing this, we're doing that. Or, you know, something you've practiced before, you can be a little bit more variable rather than like, here's a whole new alignment, whole new thing in game time. Pat, I gave one earlier kind of miss. Is there anything else you had that we could have gone deeper on? Yeah, I wish I had kind of followed up on pace one week or in our first bucket, talking about efficiency, shot selection, pace, always plays kind of a big role in the efficiency. And I think within pace, it's not, oh, you just play fast. We've had so many conversations from teams that are highly efficient. I think of Coach Ben McCollum's offenses at Northwest Missouri State, that were probably at the lowest end of pace, but highly efficient. And then the other side of the spectrum teams at high pace and high efficiency. So wish I had kind of followed up on there. In this instance, we were on the subject matter of efficiency and just to get Coach Osborne's thoughts on pace, what he considers, you know, maybe what a team make up, lineups, the kind of factor into how fast or slow they want to play. We had Dan Errolan recently from Chatnouga and he had a great point about pace being so team dependent and it sounds great to play fast, but maybe that doesn't fit your lineup, doesn't fit your team. So like, you're going to try to do something that doesn't work. You know, I think he even mentioned some of his teams were slower than maybe you would want, but they were more efficient at that slower pace. So like, what are you going to just make them play fast just because it sounds good? Like you got to find what fits. So I think that's interesting, yeah, as always. I'll just quickly add at the end, I just thought his best investment answer was great about the family one and like kind of going in depth on those things and really a great story about making the move and talking to his daughter about it. And what a great kind of real life thing that we all go through with making these big decisions in life and it's ultimately most important. I just really enjoyed hearing him talk on those things and of course the curiosity stuff was awesome too, but I thought his best investment was terrific. Well, once again, we thank Coach Osborne for coming on and joining us, wish him and Youngstown State all the best of luck this season. Thank you for listening and we will see you next time. (upbeat music) Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please make sure to visit slappingglas.com for more information on the free newsletter, slapping glass plus and much more. Have a great week coaching and we'll see you next time on slapping glass. (upbeat music) But do we have a name yet for this thing? I have like slapping backboard. Slap and glass. Slap and glass. That's kind of funny. I like that. That's good. Slap and glass.
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