Matt Majkrzak on Scripting Offensive Play Calls, Fixing Bad Starts, and Tenants of the "Lock-Left" Defense {Northern Michigan}

Then what kind of came next was it's the bed McCullough and Jim Crutchfield crossover. I think bed McCullough and Jim Crutchfield coach more similar than anyone wants to acknowledge or admit. So McCullough plays and we're talking Northwest Missouri McCullough. Played five guys, basically. The only time they stub is maybe one position and then tiredness or some foul-trump. Crutchfield always played ten, but the ten subbed five for five. And so they really were in either unit A or unit B and then changed a little bit. And McCullough was never something. So they were only in unit A and it kind of hit me that both of them despite being very different are subbing where they're keeping five core guys together and the continuity of playing together matters. Hi, I'm Dan Crutchfield and I'm Patrick Carney. And welcome to slapping glass exploring basketball's best ideas, strategies and coaches come around the world. Today we're excited to welcome Division 2 Northern Michigan head coach Matt Macrizac. Coach Macrizac is here today to discuss scripting offensive play calls, layering sets and thinking deep about sub patterns and we talk the intricacies of lock left defense and what to do when your team starts flat during an interesting start, sub or sit. Here's the problem, there is a lot of smart basketball content, there's also a lot of basketball content. Slaping glass plus exists to separate those two things. It's a curated space for curious coaches with film breakdowns, deep dives and conversations with people who've already tested the ideas you're trying to understand. No searching, no sorting, no wondering if this is worth your time. We do the studying, you do the coaching. If you want to keep learning without turning it into a side job, slapping glass plus is for you. Join the thousands of coaches from around the world who've made the investment SG plus at slapping glass.com today. Now please enjoy our conversation with coach Matt Macrizac. Coach, really appreciate you coming on mid season. I know your middle conference play having a great year, congrats on that. Thank you for making the time. We're excited to talk to you today. I'm really excited to be here. I've joked around that my coaching philosophy is like the slapping glass all stars because we just do one thing we stole from that show and one thing we stole from that show. So to get to be on the other end of it's definitely pretty cool for me. Appreciate that coach. Thank you coach. Coach, we wanted to start by diving into the theme of calling and scripting games from the offensive side. And we've talked about it a little bit off air and before the show of just you and your staff's mindset and thoughts and philosophies on how you're scripting and calling games offensively and what that looks like. I guess from pregame to early in the game, mid game, all that kind of stuff. So I'll pause there to throw to you on calling and scripting games offensively. Yeah, it's probably the most unique thing that we do right now offensively. We're leading the country and offensive rating. It's almost been validating because I wasn't sure if what we're doing is right and we've leaned into it heavier last year. We had four new transfer guards from different NEI and division two schools. And then this year we're playing five freshmen in our top 10 and we started doing it really to just try to make it more simple for those guys and make sure our offense could function and flow in the way that it used to do when we had more senior heavy older guards. And obviously in today's day and age, I don't know how often you can stay old. So it almost started with all right, we're going to try this for the preseason and see how it works. And we've just continued on with it and really dove into it deeper and deeper and lean on it more and more. The starting point for the scripted offense was scripted lines. And that was something I think I was on. I coached fourth grade YMCA when I was in high school and every four minutes they had to stop and you sub in fourth grade. We had one kid that could dribble. So you started figuring out that with the one kid that could dribble, we need a minute at the end of games. We probably want to minute the start. And then when he's not in, we probably need to play a little different since we have one kid that can triple and maybe one kid that can shoot or so, you know, whatever. And then when I became college coach, I started at a junior college and I thought when we played the right guys together, we played better. It also took a little bit of the emotion out of subbing where you weren't just, you know, "Hey, that's a bad play, get out." And then what kind of came next was it's the bad McCullough and Jim Crutchfield crossover. And it's funny because I've told this to a few different people and at first everyone's like, "What do you mean?" But I think bad McCullough and Jim Crutchfield coach more similar than anyone wants to acknowledge or admit. So McCullough and plays, and we're talking Northwest Missouri McCullough. The only time they sub is maybe one position and then tiredness or some foul truck. Crutchfield always put 10, but the 10 subbed five for five. And so they really were in either unit A or unit B and they've changed a little bit. And McCullough was never subbing, so they were only in unit A. And it kind of hit me that both of them despite being very different are subbing where they're keeping five core guys together and the continuity of playing together matters. So this original question of scripted offense, it couldn't start without the scripted subbing to me because it kind of worked in that order where we're like, "We're going to play these lineups together." Once we settled on that, each lineup had different strengths and weaknesses and we'd always script maybe the first thing. It started the first three, four plays of the game and in D2 with the media timeouts, maybe the first play coming out of the media timeout. And that was the starting point. And since that it evolved to pretty much the whole game scripted, it's six plays for four minutes, the first at least 16 minutes of the game. The last four minutes and a half, we have some more suggestions on my sheet that I might use might not. And then the whole second half is probably more suggestions where we have to decide kind of what we've seen and how much we're sticking with it. If the game goes perfect, I'm just reading down the list and it's that simple. Very rarely does that happen, especially once you get into conference. Okay, coach. So we got to dive in, I think, right there and keep going a little bit deeper first. Where did that philosophy develop from? And we'll get more into what you do with it. It started with, I would statter offense differently than others do. I would put it in the four categories, which we came five, which was, how did we score on a set? How do we score on a set that went into our, let's call it flow for lack of a better term, just playing after the set? How do we score in transition? And then how do we score in transition when we played out of our transition? Later on, and I think this is really important and it's much transition offense, which is the opposite of what we're talking about. We took run outs and we removed them from transition. Because if you get a steal layout, that really has very little to do with your actual transition offense, but in most buckets, that gets put into transition. And once we got through it, we figured out we were the best in transition. And then once run outs got taken, it was close. And then our sets were not second. Our sets were third, but our sets in the flow was second. So we were best when we didn't score on our sets and played after the set. And this is six, seven years ago now. And we started going, well, why don't we do more of that? And then our most effective sets were layout plays. So when we called something, what we all want to call something to get us a layout that was cool. So then kind of by process of elimination, we tried to keep running the most effective things which tended to be those layout plays. And then it became more important if we're going to run more of those. Well, it can't end if we don't get the layout. So we started throwing on a layer at the end of every layout play to get into the flow naturally. And it was pre-UConn layered offense becoming kind of the thing. I didn't know it was called layered offense, but I was like, well, what if we run our best stuff, which our layout plays? And if we don't get the layout, we really spent our time teaching what to do afterwards. And that was kind of the early development of it. First with your six plays per four minutes. Is that then when you tie it into your substitution? Is every four minutes you're playing a new lineup? And does that lineup, you have six plays that you think suit them well? Yeah, absolutely. So if we can sub in my perfect world, we'd have lineup one who plays the first four. Line up two which plays the next four. Line up three which plays the next four. And then for us, we like if we could go back to lineup two maybe and then back to lineup one to finish it. So you're really only in three lineups the whole time. The Nova tuning stuff was two lineups. That would be ideal, but we don't all have 10 players that are that talented. So then in practice, they're never going to practice out of their normal lineups. So lineup one is the starters. They're going to practice together a bunch. Line up two is that first sub, which we usually all coaches keep that consistent. So they're going to practice together a bunch. And I think where we differ is after that, we start subbing maybe a little more intentional after that first eight minutes. And others do. And so each group has their, you know, maybe it's 12 plays. Maybe it's 18 plays for the starter. that they're practicing all week. It's not like every week we're throwing out the 18 things they ran and putting new 18 in. Some weeks we don't change anything and maybe we just change order or how we run them a little bit. Some weeks we add five or six plays, maybe we add per week and then we'll just jostle around the order we run them in. And I think it's easier to run the new stuff at the start of games while it's still fresh. And some of the stuff we've ran for four years, we're going to probably run deeper into the game because they know that like the back of their hand. It's adding and subtracting what you don't like. And then you can also add stuff per opponents, which we do quite a bit of or maybe re-bring out something we ran earlier in the year against a certain matchup or certain ball screen coverage. We've done it with five freshmen. We've done it with four transfer guards. We very rarely play bust and if they do play bust, that's usually what I stand and clap and cheer on whatever they try to do out of that play bust. Because I think that's the other key. We're not running anything to run it right. We're running everything to score. And hopefully if they can score on a way that isn't the set, that's what I know they're starting to figure out our offense. Just on your substitution, you're not playing in platoons correct? Are you at the four minute? Are you getting two to three guys in? And then like so maybe a couple guys will run eight minutes straight. Yes. And I think that's, you know, if we had straight 10 and could do it, we would think about it. I like the idea of the platooning. The reality is we have the best player in the region or the best players in the country. I need to employ 32 minutes, not 24 or it's very NBA subbing in a lot of ways. Like we'll leave our best guys in for eight minutes, get them along run, you know, especially the guards. I think function better when they get an eight minute stretch and they know they have an eight minute stretch so they're not looking to jack up the first shot they get because they know they're going to get to play longer. And they also know if they miss they're not coming out. So I think there's a lot of positives to that scripted subbing that naturally feed into the scripted place. I'd love to dive in a little deeper on the process of putting together the scripted plays the order what you decide to run for who I mean I know it's game dependent and player dependent. But is it just you and your staff? How do you come up with the order and why? That's the phone part to me is like especially this time here we have kind of the group of plays ready for the most part. So the fun part is what order are you running a man. What's the thought process going into a game so like our four man is an all American level player so we know we need to get him touches and part of why we've embraced this is he's a six six 190 pound. Four that plays point guard about the third of the time plays the wing about a third of the time host up about a third of the time so for us some of the fun with him is all right we're going to get a point guard early or Thursday night we play a team that pressures us a time and not giving anything away here will have three different guys dribble the ball up in the first four minutes. So in those six sets we're going to have our four man dribble it up twice we're going to have our three dribble it up twice and we're going to have the point guard dribble it up twice so they can't sit in and really pressure our point guard so we kind of know that as a start and then. Now if you're going to run something where we use him as a ball handler to pass will probably run two of those plays to use him as the ball handler to pass and I'll tell him. Hey one of the times you should probably turn the corner and look to score on this but not necessarily say hey we're running this play for you to turn the corner and score it's just giving him the option where he knows he's going to have maybe five ball screens in the first half and he knows on one of them at minimum you should turn the corner and go try to dunk. But he knows he has five coming he's practiced it all week he's kind of felt out which ones within their coverage give him the best chance because we've ran these same plays now against their coverage two three times for practice and we've watched him on film and now he kind of has a feel of hey I think this one is the one I'm going to turn the corner on in this game but he also can break any of them off of his hot and there's games where we don't get to that second layer of him throwing back. They want to switch ball screens and they're going to switch a little guard on him you might five straight times just triple flip into the post and we might never run any of the rest of the set because that's enough of an advantage that we're happy to play out of that yeah that's going to be my fall question what do you do as a staff if you know first four minutes you only get to four of the six sets do you save the other two for later in the game do just cross them off like what do you do when there's miscellaneous possessions that either or you get seven or eight possessions in the four minutes and you know. Where do you go for those extra plays yeah the nice parties with the rotations is that starting group has their first six but then they have you know second six and a third six the starters do so they have 18 so if we don't get to play five play five will definitely come up again whether that's in the second half for whether that's in the second chunk of the first half maybe we start with play five because we love it so much I do try to get a little simpler as they progress play five and six tend to be. Easier things than play one and two per group and then we can rerun stuff if we do get through all six will rerun stuff also all the time if play two works. We're probably going to run play two again especially if we didn't get to the second or the third layer and maybe in play two I love the third layer and that's why I have it in it's not because of even the first two so we run it we score one we're on it again score on two but I know on that one I really want to get to that third layer because. Maybe it's a guard big ghost that I know the other team will struggle with I'm more likely to kind of keep running that if the third layer something that we value and unrelated but related one of the fights is. They can't be running these plays to get through they have to try to score on each action or otherwise they really become bad if it's oh we're just running fake offense fake offense real offense it needs to be real offense the whole way through and we need to be really. We need to be really comfortable breaking off kind of whatever we're doing within it quick heads up for coaches the NBC convention is coming up April second through six the Indianapolis and a matter your title or level if you're a basketball coach you belong at the NBC convention develop as a coach and grow as a leader over five days of ex no clinics educational sessions networking awards ceremonies and more all alongside calls basketball championship stage in Indianapolis. This year is especially exciting for us as the NBC is also our newest partner here at slap a glass so we're thrilled to be part of the convention in a deeper way will be there hosting a classroom style film session breaking down some of the game's best trends from around the world what we're seeing show across all levels why it's working and how coaches are teaching it you can register now for the convention at NBC dot com slash convention we'll see you there. I love to sit now in layering offensive sets early in the season how do you fight that battle when installing layers or teaching layers as you've worked through this offense you know so every preseason like what are you aware of what you got to teach what's the important things to do right so that the layered offense is effective and it's weaponized. That's the hardest part price teaching it and I think the degree we're doing it right now that's the part when I talk to other coaches I wouldn't copy what we're doing because it's gone so down the rabbit hole but you can take chunks of what we're doing so the easiest way that and it's taking me a while to figure out how to explain this but the easiest way to explain layered offense in general is the cross screen down screen so that's been around forever well the cross screen down screen just any form of it the cross screen is to try to get the best of the game. Cross screen is to try to get a layup or your big guy that's the best shot you can probably get in basketball as a layup for a good big guy so whenever someone came up with cross screen down screen the first option that and you want the first option is it's the best one. The second option is your best shooter coming off a down screen and shooting a three and so we probably of our our many sets I bet we run 20 forms of cross screen down screen now they might be out of cyclone action or you know these kind of fancy things that we've all. Added to start it to make it a little different but at the base of it we were running cross screen down screen 30% of the possessions so the first thing will do the first day is teach cross screen down screen and tell them that you got to look in at the cross screen because we want to layup and if we don't get it you got to set that down screen and you have to throw it to the guard and shoot it or the big who's setting the down screen is going to slip in and that's a better look than this three point shot so now they have option one cross screen. Option two slip option three hit the down screen guy and I think if you're coaching you know youth basketball you would explain cross screen down screen that same way where I think we try to get better is after that if you hit the down screen guy and he doesn't have a three now what do you do and to me you can ball screen that's probably the most common and the easiest and so we'll teach day one ball screen and how to read that ball screen which is relatively simple but there's a big low so it's a little bit different than a trick. A little bit different than a traditional spread ball screen so you're going to set it you're going to roll what does that guy low do he's got a couple options so maybe day one we start with cross screen down screen followed by a ball screen and that big is going to read it and we're going to shake on the backside regardless of which way he goes and the other guy has to fill that corner and then maybe day two we add all right after that why don't you catch it and hit the big guy and now we're going to get into kind of traditional Princeton split. Princeton splitting. action. So if we can just run the most basic cross screen downstream with Princeton concepts and spread ball screen concepts with the big low, we just ran a lot of offense that's hard to guard. So if we have, let's say, 20 different cross screen downstream options throughout the year, and we end them with just those two actions, that's an awful lot. And then out of that, we'll teach hit the big now, we're going to fade screen for that shooter because generally your shooter set the cross screen. So instead of it being a pin down Princeton, it's fade screen Princeton. Well, now out of that fade screen, we have a bunch of different options. You can slip it, you can hit it, and then back screen the big guy after you hit the fade screen, you can go into a handoff. So it's just teaching the same boring things over and over and over again. But I think where the teaching really comes in is how you play after in this example, the cross screen downstream, the flow, the after the play action. How important is it? I know like that your guys are familiar, I guess, when you're doing all the layered sets that it kind of always ends in a similar spacing. So that like you said, then they know they can get to the spread ball or the Princeton learning rather than you have multiple sets, but then maybe sometimes they're ending on the 45 empty versus the middle with, I guess the importance of putting them always in a familiar spacing, maybe to end however you want to do your actions cross screen, downstream, et cetera. I think it's the most important part of our offense is how we end. So whenever I see like, let's just take a Twitter clip of a cool play, I start with, okay, how do we end this in a way that is it and that we need to add? So if everything ended with the same boring cross screen, downstream, we wouldn't be that hard to guard. But you know, sometimes we need more spread ball screens, we need more empty side ball screens. This year we end a ton of them with staggers. So it ends in a stagger action. And then we have about four or five different things we do out of that stagger. So if we can run a cool play and it can end with a stagger, I love that now. So if we can find a way to have an end in that, we try to incorporate that as much as we can, because that stagger end has been really good for us. We've tried to add more stuff where it ends in the middle. A lot of the teams in our league are pretty good at icing or hard hedging and keeping you on a side. So I'm trying to have more plays and in the middle third, so we can get in our ball screens more out of that middle third. But when I'm adding a play, and we probably add a normal amount or maybe even less plays than others do, we run so much we don't need to keep adding that much. So when we add something, it's usually pretty intentionally thought out that the start is something worth adding, the middle something worth adding, and it has to end in a way that's comfortable for our guys. We can't just add a random play, where they're in an uncomfortable end. When you're adding or layering things in is the ability to give a really good defense fits by having them to guard these base actions that are hard to guard. So let me explain. So ending in dribble drive motion concepts, first ending in sort of Princeton Esk or pick and roll concepts like there's all these kinds of base concepts that you can end in or play out of. And when you go to play an opponent that maybe guards cross screen downstream as well, or there's just not as much of an advantage having these abilities to then, well, we're going to end or we're going to have this last layer be more dribble drive base to my versus spread pick and roll base versus Princeton base. I guess getting to those big bases that in those third layers or second layers attack different types of good defenses. For sure. I think that's where the fun part of that's where we're coaching the same way everyone else coaches. First, you know, 10 12 seconds of the possession. We're probably a little different because we're running stuff a lot. But in practice, what we're really working on is, all right, they took that away, which most good teams do. And now we got to quickly flow into spread ball screen a little bit more dribble drive. Maybe we really want more possessions that end in post touches for our best player. And so it's a little bit of that part can be played as I'm, but a lot of that still just coaching old school basketball and, you know, well, one week will work on, all right, they're really aggressive and ball screens going over. So at the end, let's get no ball screen every time. But let's get into a razor action out of that ball screen. And that's why as much as I love sets, I can't stand sets that last 20 seconds. It's got to be like 12 seconds of, hey, let's get a bunch of movement. Let's get a look at a lap, maybe a look at a three. And then let's get into something where we can play. And, you know, we'll probably have 10 possessions a game ended in flex, like old school type flex, because they know that that sets last layer is type flex. You know, we'll change it within reason. But at the same time, we might break that flex off on the first downscreen for the point guard and just get into a ball screen. If that's kind of what the opponents weakness is. So there's still a lot of traditional coaching, it just starts with something different. When are you doing this in practice, right? Is it intro to practice? You're going to add a wrinkle or is it 510 every day to go through stuff? How are you continuing to add layers and add plays and script these things? Do you go through the script with the team in practice? So they know what's coming in the game? Like, how does that look in practice? That's probably the best question in the sense of I think that's the most important thing. And what I like about it the most, Monday's is try stuff. You know, we'll try more or clean up the previous weekend. So if one of our plays that we've ran for four years, today's Monday, we're not going to run it today. Our guys got it. We're fine. But we'll try some creative things. And then we'll also run the stuff that we ran last week. Maybe see if we can read different things out of it or I might have a suggestion how to end it. But the real core of this is from day one, we don't do hardly any five on oh, it's all five on five. And I am very passionately celebrating playbusts. And if they can playbust and do something good, that's when I get really, really excited. If they get a layup on the play, I'm bored. I want them to try to explore things that are not the play and to beat players within it. I don't think our guys play robotic at all. And I don't think scouting wise, I could hand the opposing coach what we're doing. And I don't know how much it would help. Because we're still reading all these motion actions within it. That staggers never a, all right, we're curling the first and fading the set like they're playing out of those actions. And then what we do is we'll present the script on Tuesday. And we have Tuesday, Wednesday practice where we'll run through a Tuesday, we'll run through a Wednesday. We film every practice. I watch every single film of our practice on both sides. If they run it right, we don't show it, but we'll show them the new stuff every time. We'll talk about where they could have read it better within it. And now I'm not talking to random players. I'm talking to one guy who knows he's going to run that play Thursday night. And he knows he's going to run at the third play from minute 12 till eight. And he knows what they're going to do against it. We talked about it. And we're telling him the exact right read on Tuesday. And then Wednesday is going to go get that exact right read done. And by shooting around on Thursday, whereas the only time we do 5 on 0, I have maybe three things because I've watched practice on Wednesday. And I'm like, Hey, you really should look to curl that first screen because I think it'll be there. And hopefully that's not the one play. Hopefully he's going to be in a stagger six times. And in those six times that our three man is in the corner curling, hopefully one time, you can take advantage of the fact they're switching off ball by setting it up and back cutting. But he's looking for it all six times. And then all of a sudden we get in a game and he makes that read. And you're like, awesome, where I think it really the end of the years, we've won two of the last three conference tournaments. I think the difference between us and a lot of the set teams is I think we're more of a motion team. Because by the end of the year, we're not talking about against switching back cutting that because we've talked about it all year. And now he's just reading defense because we've taught him how to read defense out of set structure. But it really just becomes motion and they're reading a stagger just like all the old school motion guys, you know, use the teach. It's just maybe a little bit more organized and a little less random. Two follow for you. One talking about the practice and you try to avoid five on no. If you're going heavy five on five, the install. I mean, I know it's going to be ugly at first, but is it really just kind of giving them not everything, but these are the couple actions. Here's where it's going to end up. Let's go and teaching through. I guess how do you think about installing it within five on five? Whenever we get new assistance, I think they look at me like I'm insane. So I'll put in like this really deep layered sound. I'll be like, okay, we're starting with this and then we're going to do this. Then we're going to do this. And then the follow up, I want you to read this. And I on purpose early in the year, especially, I'm going to say it that fast. And I'm going to try to almost have them confused. And then I'm going to say run it. And if they ask questions, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, run it, run, run, run, run, go fast. And I want them to realize that playbusting doesn't matter. And doing something wrong within the play doesn't matter. And I don't think I we ever yell at kids for doing a play wrong, even now in season, because I don't care. I just want them to keep going fast. And then maybe they do something wrong. And then that stagger becomes a pin down instead of a stagger, because that guy went to the right corner, instead of the left corner. So a lot of it is just letting it happen fast and seeing what it looks like. And then when we watch the film, that really when we'll teach it. So most of the install is draw it up, run it once or twice, fast, probably wrong, and then watch it. And half the time something wrongly did, it becomes the new play. And I'm like, oh no, you went to the right corner, instead of the left corner. So that stagger, I thought, it comes up in and he back cut it for a layup because the guy wasn't in help. All right, that's the new play now. And I want them to think of this in terms of I'm giving you something to try to get you a layup if it doesn't work. Just play basketball fast and free. And I used to try to teach it to right. And now I almost want to teach it wrong. And then within that, we'll clean up the areas that could lead to turnovers. Like one thing I'm really strict with is whatever the first pass is has to be right. I don't care at all about the fourth pass. But if we're going to run a zipper entry, the play name starts with zip. So it's going to be a zipper entry. That zipper better be perfect. That one, there's no negotiation. The point car better get it up fast. And we better get the zipper entry right. If after that, we do something wrong, it usually works out better than if we do something right. If we go back to game management, scripting games, with taking in these four minute chunks, what is early foul trouble for you? I guess it's like a guy gets two. Do you let him run out that four minutes? Maybe the second unit will be a different lineup. What is your risk tolerance with early foul trouble? I am not a take guys out with two files at all. We've had a kick pick up his fourth in the first half. Part of it is as much as we talk about scripting stuff, we like being the last eight minutes. We like playing our whoever's playing the best. And if a guy's going to have for the most part, most players, if they have four files, you probably don't want them in that last eight minutes anyways, because they're going to be playing tentative. Now your best players, that's different. Our stud picked up two in a game. We're up 20 the other day. And for maybe one of the first times in his career, I didn't play him the rest of the first half just because we're up 20. He's got two, he's kind of in a mood. I'm like, you know what? Let's just not put him in a spot to pick up his third when everything's going right and give them any momentum. But for the most part, I'm going to let our guys play their normal rotation. And I think that's been really helpful. They don't look over at me much. The last 10 games, I don't remember if I've taken a kid out of their normal rotation. So they're playing completely fearless. And they know that they're going to get their time regardless. And so they're allowed to play aggressive. They're allowed to keep screening hard, even if they have two files. Because they know I'm not going to take them out that third file. The only thing we will do is leave a kid in if they're flowing. And you know, for guys playing really well, then we'll skip a rotation sometimes of someone and we'll leave that kid out there for a little bit longer than maybe what the script called for fast model tools have been part of basketball for years. And now fast draw fast scout and faster crew 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. Coach, this has been awesome so far. We could just keep going down this rabbit hole. But we do want to shift now to a segment on the show we call start sub or sit. We're going to give you three options around a topic. Ask you to start one of them, sub one of them and sit one of them speaking of rotations and lineups. And then we'll discuss from there. So coach, if you're set, we'll dive into this first one. Perfect. Okay. First one has to do with flat starts. We're calling it. Your team comes out no energy. Game plan's not going right. Your team just doesn't have it that night. Whatever reason. Walk through his great practices were great. But then they come out and it's just flat. It's not good. And we're going to take out right now the call quick time out and sort of get him refocused. These are going to be three tactical adjustments you could try to make to sort of light the fire. So start sub or sit to fix a flat start. Option one is on the defensive end adding some defensive aggression. Maybe trap a ball screen press whatever it would be. So defensive aggression. Option two is speaking of what we're talking about in the first bucket. But is more joy sticking of the offense or we're going to give the ball to this player in the spot. We're going to go the free throw line. We're going to get this player touch to hopefully get our team going or option three is going back to changing or mixing up a sub pattern. Certain guys aren't playing well to start. We're going to mix up the sub patterns and see if we can light a spark that way. So start subset getting rid of the flat start defensive aggression, always sticking the offense or substitution pattern. Well, I would have to sit substitution patterns based on everything I just said. Yeah. I do think it backfired sometimes. And I'd say like we've always played this way. I've done it. But then you're like blaming it away. A certain group of guys and I don't like them thinking in those terms. I want the blame to be the team. And the worst thing that sometimes happens is you change your rotation pattern. The next group plays well. And now for the rest of the game, it's in your mind and everyone's mind. Wait, that group is good and this group's bad. And I've seen that backfire later in game. I will start defensive aggression. I think it's the easiest thing to change is to be more physical, fly around more. And we all get a little scared to do it because usually they've hit some threes or something's gone the other teams way. It causes them to get that lead. And the natural tendency is to get conservative. And maybe it's once you get better and if once more, you realize like no, that's when you got to crank it up and take even more chances and get them out of flow. Whatever that means zone press, just grabbing more, just being more physical, like kind of blindly physical. We've done that some. I think just changing the rhythm for the other team. And then also offense, I like doing that going to someone, but you get in that same problem where if I go to our best player at 16 in the first half, how are we going to survive the next 36 minutes? My dream scenario is we don't have to go to our best player at all. The real scenarios, hopefully we go to our best player the last eight minutes of the game after we've shared it and had energy and moved it. And what I do think you can do sometimes is change your offense to either be more ball movement, just to get the ball popping more. Because sometimes when things are going bad, you tend to stick too much or play a little hero ball, which makes logical sense, but isn't the right way. Or that's where we'll go faster. So we run some and that's when we'll turn the tempo up and go, all right, if we're going to lose, let's not go down kind of soft. Let's go down aggressive. And so I would sub it, but I think if you do the offense, those are the better ways to early in a game. You come up flat, change the rhythm, is either go faster or to just get ball movement with pace and just kind of yell about violent cuts and violent screens similar to the defense of the adjustment. Yeah, great answer. This question arises from Pat and I just both going through this ourselves as coaches. I think everybody at some point during the year goes through this a couple of times. And for you, what are things that you've learned that you think help pregame that takes it so it's you're not starting flat? Because you've got sort of a structured approach to the game, the substitution patterns, the play calls, how are you making sure they're revved up and ready to go so that start isn't flat from the walk through the bus, the pregame speech, all that stuff before you get on the court. I would have given you a completely different answer a year ago. It's the one thing that we program wise change the most this year. And I think it's been the best thing we've done is we talked a little bit off. Fairly like the culture football stuff. Every football coach who's good 100% of them only talk about process and they talk in about this voice. You know, they're not super high or low. And I think a lot of the new school basketball coaches are the same. I'll use the extremes again. Hurley is the same because he's psycho 100% of the time. The column's the same. He's come 100% of the time. You know, shirts is the same guy every time. So I think with that the phlawtomy of arts two highs and two lows wasn't games were low. It was the games were high. So if you start letting your team think that they drew it around where they're all yelling and like, let's go. And then you go on and you give the big pregame speech and they come up with their hair on fire and you start that game 20 to 4. Naturally you and every player on the team is going to think, well, that's what we have to do every game. And that's not replicable. You can't do it. So to us, it's been kind of that slow 80% burn 100% of the games is better than these kind of high low because if you want to be high every game, I think it fails more times than not. And if it's the best way to coach NFL football players at Georgia, Alabama or Indiana, it's probably the best way to coach D2 basketball players in Northern Michigan. And it's not my natural personality. I'm fiery. I'm high energy. I love the pregame. I love the this arrival. I hate them. Let's go. And I've had to fight that in me big time because again, if you just look at the best coaches, they're not that way. They're the same every game, whatever that means. We're talking about flat starts. But if we kind of look at going back your offense and these four minute windows, we talked about early fouls. You're going to write it out. What do opponents do or what takes you out of maybe he's kind of scripted. four minute segments, whether you think like, all right, we got to strip down plays. We got to maybe add a seventh player, take out a six, change the six. What is that will affect your scripted philosophy the most? Again, it's the right question because everybody has a plan now for taking us out of it. Everybody we play in our league and we're going the second time around it. I don't know what everyone's going to try, but no one guards us normal anymore. Everybody has something, whether that's really aggressive pressing or zone or hard-head coaching, which they haven't done before or switching five or we get switching off ball all the time now. Most of our sets are off ball related and the biggest thing we have to do is we have to be ready to attack anything that is they're not normal. If we get pressed, I don't want to run a play. I want to score a layup or shoot a three in the first eight seconds of the possession and just go as fast as we can right down their throats and shoot and then crash. If they're in zone, we don't run any sets. We just pass around and I say shoot a three every possession and crash. If they're trying to heart hedge, we try to kind of mock it all year and be like, "If you heart hedge us, we're going to go flat. We're going to set up all street and we're going to hit the slip and we're going to play four on three or screen and roll and play four on three. If anyone wants to play four on three, we will never run a set. We'll just run that every possession." We try to, whatever it is, that's kind of that adjustment, pre-plan and almost go the opposite of what we're normally doing. That's hard because you don't always know what's coming and that's where sometimes it takes. You get to that media and you're like, "Oh, thank God we got to the first media because I can calm everyone down and go. All they're doing is heart hedging us and rotating out. Guys, we're going to come out of this time out. We're not going to run our set that we have planned. We're going to run this and I'm getting rid of these two sets because I just added two simple ball screens to attack whatever they're doing. But these fours still work. Just know at the end of them, this is kind of what we're looking to pick on. If people do something that I would call extreme, we'll just play out of their extreme and not worry about the script or whatever else. It's almost like counter what we always do. You mentioned crashing offensive rebounding and in preparation, we know you guys like to send five and we can't resist a tagging up or sending all five conversation. So offensive rebounding philosophy, sending five, what's the discipline you demand with sending five and building your transition defense off of it? It's new this year. I've wanted to try it forever. We've tried it in the preseason and this year we stuck with it. We crashed five every shot. The last I checked, we're leading Synergy and transition defense points per possession. First in the whole country in D2 and we're also getting 38% of our offensive rebounds back, which last year I think it was in the 20s. So our transition defense got way better and our offensive rebounding got way better. I think those things go hand in hand now that I've seen it for a year. We're just going, there's some bad crashes. We're not trying to go under. We're not taking up to like, it's not like the Aaron Fern system tag up stuff, but it definitely is like that. It's crash, fill the wall, who pressure on them, will let our point guard pick up full court sum out of that, not every time, but we definitely do it. Like I know you had Sundance on earlier. I'm a green male alum, so I know him pretty well. Their numbers have done the same thing ours have. Their transition defense has gotten way better. Their offensive rebounding percentages have gotten way better. I really hope everyone doesn't do it. And if people do do it, we're going to have to make another adjustment and start running more. And whenever we play at the crash five teams, part of the script accounts for, we're going to run like since scripted running. Hey, we're putting this group in. We're going to crash five and we're going to have our best group in the run and we're going to run for four minutes. Because if they want to crash five, we got to make them pay on the other end. And so I went different ways with that, but it's been probably the best thing we've done. And it's been something that I think more and more coaches are doing. I do think you have to be good and you have to be deep. Obviously we have really good players. And we're playing 10 guys. It allows us to do that. I don't know if every team could just say, hey, we're going to start crashing five. If you have the athletes and the talent and the depth, it's been pretty good for us. How do you, the accountability piece of it to get guys to go every time? And then what do you think that four minute substitution pattern like, how does that benefit you think in your ability to continually or consistently re-crash five? You know, I think it obviously helps because you're playing more depth. I think it helps because no one's out there for longer than eight and the eight guys know that they're in there for eight, but they're also going to be held accountable to go hard for eight. And we talk about, like, you're going to play a minute to row 16 to eight. You better not let up from 10 to eight, or I won't trust you to play eight in a row anymore. You know, that's like a real conversation we have. The rebounding thing is really easy. We play a ton of live half court full court, but a lot of half court live. We don't do many drills. We very rarely drill anything. We just change the rules of five and five and a half court. And if you don't go, you get yelled at. We've been a top 10 defensive rebounding team, I think, for the last four or five years. And we've been really, really small. And we've still been top 10 in it because we've sent five to the defensive glass with relentless pursuit. So for us, it was just now letting them do it on offense as well. And in our practice, you don't get yelled at for a lot. You can play bust. You can do whatever you want. But if you turn it over or you don't crash in now on offense or defense, it is stop practice. Crash. And early in the preseason, some of our scrimmages, we did a lot of inner squad scrimmages to try to teach the crashing and to try to keep teach the pace in the sense. And it was not only I would stop the inner squad. I'd sub you out even though we don't do that anymore, but we did it early. I'd showed on film three times. And by the end, if you were the one guy who had three missed crashes, it became such a big deal that you had to change. And it was just one of those. We have a lot of negotiables on both sides of the ball. The crashing every time on both sides and the turning it over are not in that mix of negotiable things. When you say crash, defensive glass, box out, burst crash and go get it philosophy. Like, could you go a little deeper on that? I personally don't like boxing out. I think it started with we switched five for two years in a row every ball screen. And so we constantly ended up cross matched with our guards on biggs because everybody tried to pick on it. And that was the first year we were, I think we finished six in the country in defensive rebounding percentage because we were so worried about it. Everyone said if you switch, you're not going to defensive rebound. And we started teaching basically guards hold the big off and biggs run in there and grab it. Like, go take it. And there's some subtleties to it. You got to stop at 15 feet. You can't run in every time. But every time our five are going towards the rim, 100% of the time. If you challenge a shot, that's the hardest one to teach. They don't always get back in the play. But again, we'll show that every single time on film if you don't do it and we get good at that stuff. And just by having five in the fight, having tough kids, you know, preaching toughness over and over again, we just tend to win a lot of those balls. And I always feel like every half somebody go in and like, our defense rebounding sucks. And then I look at the statute of like, well, they got three, but all three hurt our soul. And it's definitely one of those things. I think it has to become part of your culture. And that was why this offensive rebounding thing, I think, transitioned so well for us. Because now it's, I mean, if the other team gets a ball, you would think the world is ended by looking at the faces of not me. Like, I might actually better, our staff. Those two guys are convinced every time we give up a rebound on either side, that we're the softest team in the country and have no effort. And I'm like, we guys, we out rebounded by 16 today. And they're like, yeah, but we could have had another 12th if we just would have grabbed in or we would have gone a little harder. Now the players are there, which is the key. And it's like every time another team gets a rebound, we think we got fouled. And it's the rest fall. They made a bad call on the out of bounds because certainly it's our ball or an active God happen to allow him to get a rebound. That's the mindset that I think is help more than anything else because we are not big by traditional standards and we're not bouncy by traditional standards, but we do a tech job at rebounding. All right, coach, our last start subset for you has to do with the lock left defense. And we're going to call this one our tough to teach. So tough to teach with the lock left defense. So option one is just the on the ball angles, the on ball defender, their angles within the lock left defense, the actual ball screen coverage within the lock left defense or your help side rotation within the lock left defense. Tough to teach. Tough to teach start the help side rotation. That's why we've done it every year as part of what we do. And then we change how extreme we're lock left. This is the least lock left principle we'd ever been. And a big part of it is that it's hard to get them to be in gaps perfectly on the right side of the floor so that you're running a traditional no baseline gapping defense on that side. And then if you're on the left side of the floor loading up to the ball and you know being ready for baseline drives, I think that's been really hard to teach because in a way, they're kind of opposite things. So I'll positioning really easy so I'll sit that because you're just staying on right hand. It's all guys always. play each other when they play pickup. It's pretty easy to be right to left. So staying on the right, I don't think that was a problem for us at all and never really is. The ball screen coverage sub, I think that's hard, but in a way, it's similar. So depending what you do, but for the most part of your pure lock left, you're jumping right at any ball screens, so you're high-seeing the left side, the right side, your in drop or hedging. I think you can go either way. And the middle you're weakening. So in a way, you're doing the same thing as the on-ball guard either way. And if you're in drop covers, you're doing the same thing as the bag either way. So if you do it that way, I think it's easy, maybe even easier. However, the problem is it limits you to almost having to do it that way, which is the other reason that we're not doing it because I didn't think we were a great ice team this year and I didn't want to ice the left side of the floor. And once you go to not iceing the left side of the floor, the whole thing kind of falls apart. I know there's ways to do it. I know other people that do it a little bit, but to me, if you're going to really do it, you got to kind of be all in on all the facets of it. And if you're not willing to do that, I think it's hard to to do parts of it in that way. Saying that, I'll never have a year where we won't teach it the first month because I think the first month of the season, you just learned so many good habits about how good players are right handed versus left handed, how bad the passing is with the left. All the principles that make it good, I think are worth knowing and teaching. I just don't know if you can do the full system if you're not fully committed. I'd like to follow up on the helpside rotations. It feels like it can be two different couperages off the ball. When I'm teaching whether it's forcing baseline now, that rotation versus now we're forcing left because the left hand's taking a middle. What have you learned about trying to work through that rotation with your team? I've learned that it's hard. It's traditionally balls on the right weighing. You're taking away baseline and you want that middle defender to be locked in at the elbow. And your whole defense is set up to drive middle, bluff, get back or you know what I'm saying? Everyone runs it a little different. But if you're on that left weighing, what I really wanted to do out of it, and this one I feel easy talking about because we're not doing it. What I really wanted to do is ball gets left weighing, put it over there and not let it out so that neither reversals and force those left baseline drives into double teams and see if players can make those passes with their left hand and just constantly shove everyone to that baseline. I coach junior college for one year. I went back, 100% we would work on it every day and even though it's hard, we get good at it. We'd probably have a call on that side, whatever, blue, whatever you want. And then once it's on that side, we would just go to the Niles, force it, go baseline and make those guys make decisions while driving based on the left hand side of the floor. In our league, the guards are too good going based on making plays, left or right. And that's the number one reason we went away from it. I think you can do the full thing, but it is going to take a bunch of work because you are in two different defenses at the same time. And I think it's difficult. I don't think it's something you can just do randomly. I do think there is a time and place to run the whole system and one of these years, I'm going to do it. One of these years will have the right personnel. I'll be in the right mindset. But if you did it, I think it would work really well. That force baseline on the left side and be more conservative on the right side. When on the right side and forcing left is the help really heavily dependent on bluffing and being able to basically square off the penetration. I guess when would you have the help actually come at the rim or would you think at all about like peel switching, trying to like level off the ball like, yeah, the Dave smart stuff Dave smart didn't in what all those championships in Canada, they would peel. So they would run at the ball. And then they would have the guy guarding the ball, go to the weak side and they would fall on rotate. I don't know if I'd ever have enough courage to do that. So for us, it was a lot of like bluff. Get back, try to get him to the left side and go vertical on wall ups. One thing I will say when we studied it and thought about doing it, if you log how well teams shoot the ball from the left side, outside of like uncontested layups, you will be horrified how bad teams are. Our team, other teams, I mean, it is like against pretty scary, like 28% on like four foot shots, I think was what I counted if you could get them outside the charge cycle. And then the right hand shots there, teams shoot really well. So there's something to be said for just get them left and then make them finish over a late wall up going to their left. Also, I did it with our guys, whatever we teach it. How many right hand players can dribble to their left and throw that hook pass back to the right corner? Our guys zero. They all threw it out about. So first time I had him do it. So you can take the right corner guy and run all the way over to challenge the shot at the rim. If they do drive left middle where if going right, our guys pretty good. They can throw that hook pass that corner pretty effortlessly. So that's the concept of it. I think it's the right concept. I think the, I've said this the best way to play defense to me is obvious. It's the force baseline old school Texas tech drive baseline, trap it, rotate out of it, Houston. I was like, that's the best way to play defense if you can do it, but it's the hardest. I think the lock left might be the second best way because you're getting it off of that without fully going down that pathway. We don't do any of it partly because I don't think we have good enough defenders to obviously pull it off. One of the reasons I want to ask you this question because talking before the show and prepping, you've done this and then you've gone away from doing it and just sort of like why. And you said something interesting earlier. It's that it's worth teaching and you'll teach a lot of these concepts early the first month to your team because it's good for them to know what then are you doing after the first month to say, okay, these are the concepts, but we're going to actually do this and we're going to keep these things like what are you communicating to your team that you're keeping versus not keeping? Yeah, we'll use the lock left example, but I think you could go everything this way. You could do that with crashing five. You could do it for a month and then be like, no, we're crashing three, but I want you three to crash that way or whatever. And that's why we love trying stuff, which is part of why we like to show so much because I like anything the weirder the better for me. And then we're going to try it. And then at the end of it, we're going to go and that didn't work or yes, we do it. So the lock left stuff, we're teaching it all and then all of a sudden we go, you know, the ball screens, we're not going to ice the left side anymore and we have to be no baseline on both sides. That was this year how we got out of it. You just said, hey, we're not going to ice. We're still weak in the middle. We're still in drop coverage on the right side, but on the left side, we're no longer icing. We're going to stay no baseline and we're going to drop on that side as well. And also no longer do you guys need to, you know, I forgot even what our call was earlier in the air. We're not calling that anymore so you don't need to load up to the ball. You guys can stay in your normal gaps and then we got to get to the elbows more. So, you know, about a month in, we made that change. I don't think you can change often in the middle of the season. You get one or two major shifts, I think. But you can't do a thousand of them, but for us, that was a pretty easy theory. And then we said, hey, but all the stuff we talked about with Rimmer and Cality and trying to stay down when they're, you know, driving to their left, you want to stay on the floor and get to a vertical wallup if they're driving right. You want to cut them off and force spin back. All that stuff's still real and we still believe in all that. We're just not going to do all of the ball screen coverages and all of the load up stuff. But I think we still got a lot out of it for sure. With weaking in the middle third, have you found or is it maybe just straight big man dependent? The level of aggression in terms of if they're going left, you know, you talked about percentages of passing or being able to make passes, it better like we're going to week, but we're going to be aggressive. It's hard for them like hedge it. It's hard for them to make that pass or we're going to lateral hedge or we're going to drop because the deeper they go, the harder the left hand pass becomes. I guess how have you found the level of your big within the weaking defense to have any impact on the left or was it more just if your bigs capable or not? Yes. And the biggest thing. So traditionally those middle third ball screens are set for the other teams best player. I mean, that's, you know, a lot of those flats. They're not setting flats as much for random guards. It's usually the other teams best guard. And in our league, maybe more so than other leagues, but I think this is true. The best players shoot into their left, the best right hand to players shoot pull ups going to their left a lot better. And they pass and get to the rim going left worse. So I think with that weaking in the middle third, we've definitely had to get higher on those whatever you're in drop or show or whatever you're calling it because it's kind of an ice, but it's not we've had to get higher on those maybe then have to get on the wing ball screens because I think in the middle, if that guy can get his left downhill and walk into a three, they shoot it pretty well. And even though it's a pull up shot, I don't know if we're as happy with them shooting that pull up shot as we are others. And we got crushed two years ago on pull up shots in general. We force all these off the dribble jumpers, but they'd make them all the time. And we've definitely gotten higher in our coverage, particularly in the middle third, because you almost want to be higher left because they're going to shoot it more and you could be the lower right because they're going to drive it more. And it's definitely been a change in something that I think we've actively noticed that I didn't anticipate at all, but something we've definitely learned. Coach, you're off the start, sub sit, hot seat. Thank you for going through those with us. That was a ton of fun. We've got to find a question to close the show before we do. Congrats again on the great start and all the success so far this season. I wish you guys best luck the rest of the way. But thank you very much for coming on today and being so open. This was awesome. Thank you. Yeah, no, it's so cool. I mean, like I said, it's so cool for me and when college basketball, we can all get a little negative about the day and day out. So you get tired, you get whatever. So whenever I get to do like things that are just cool and awesome and you know, picture me seven years ago, like it's, you're like, okay, this is pretty cool and try to enjoy those moments. So this has been a lot of fun. Thank you, coach. Coach, our final question to close the show is what's the best investment that you've made in your career as a coach? Yeah, fortunately by listening to this a lot, I thought about this probably more than I should have. It probably occupies a weird space in my head. And I think the answer is, you know, changed every now and then the real answer because there's a lot of, you know, you'd love to say people and thank people and that's probably the real answer. But I think the more relevant answer is COVID happened after my first years of head coach year, second years of head coach in the world shut down. And during that time, we couldn't recruit or do it ever. So all I did was listen to podcasts, watched a bunch of virtual coaching clinics, took notes and coming out of that, all these kind of wild ideas, you learn them all. Lock left, crash five, you know, all these different things, the Northwest Missouri play and slow the noble plan fast, subbing patterns, basically all the things you guys cover in your show. And out of all that, I decided to try more. And the first COVID year was like a modified year for us, we only played 16 games like it was for a lot of people. And we ran all continuity ball screen. We were full lock left. We just tried things. And I think the best investment, you know, I've made our program was learning that year and using that as like a pretend I know nothing. And out of that, we've tried probably everything. Everything that's kind of the one of those like trendy weird basketball things, we've at least tried it. We've maybe gotten rid of it. We've tried playing fast like no, even though we're doing the opposite. And I think having the courage and confidence to try things and also spend the time learning kind of all these different unique ways to look at basketball. I think that's where our programs taken off because we are hard to play against because we do do so many weird different things and we do a lot of the unique trendy things now. And looking back, I think if I don't have that, I don't know if we ever would have tried all the different things we've tried and gotten to the point where I love our comprehensive system. And it's now ours. But it's really just stealing from all these different coaches and learning for people at heck of a lot smarter than I am. Pat, hey, let's dive into this recap. That was highly enjoyable. My brain is thinking a lot right now. I'm sure a lot of coaches who just got done listening to it. Coach Mackersack is doing an unbelievable job. Obviously at Northern Michigan and just the way he explained stuff was really good podcast today. This philosophy is flow. He explained things really well. So really enjoyed it. Yeah. I think in our research, talking to coach, talking to his assistants, I mean, everything kept coming back. How they game plan, how they script their offenses. Really interesting. So I was excited to dive into it today. He did not disappoint. I love the perspective he has on it. And I know we'll get into it. But a really invigorating conversation. Yeah. Absolutely. So Dan, I will throw it to you to kick it off here with your first takeaway. Yeah. I'm going to try to stay narrow and scope here to start. I know we'll probably go back and forth on a ton of things in that first bucket. But I'm just going to give two things that really stood out to me. One is, I know we're going to get into the layering and the scripting. And that's sort of my first takeaway is just how interesting that is and how intricate it is. But I think the thing that I would like to just add some commentary on top of that here is probably the underlying thing that really helps on top of them scripting and knowing all that is what it gives his players. The fact that the confidence it could give that these guys know they're going to play a certain amount of time. They have these certain sets and reads are going to the game. And just the confidence it can give to, I mean, he's playing with a lot of freshman sophomores right now, giving them that ease of, I know I'm going to play this stretch. So I'm not coming out after a mistake unless like, you know, do something just totally crazy. Like you mentioned, he's not taking guys out from a stake. So like as a player, like you know, I'm, here's my minutes, here's my stretched. Here's the cadence of the sets we're trying to do. So like I kind of am comfortable going into the game. I think there's a lot of like underlying psychology, I think to that that I'm sure he's found super helpful that, you know, we didn't talk about it a ton, but I would just say from my perspective, that must be something that's an added bonus benefit to his group that builds throughout the years. These guys just have a confidence in a freedom and a flow to play because they know what their minutes are going to be. They know the sets. They know the reads. It's just easier to get in flow as a team. So that was my first takeaway. And number two, within the layering and the sets, I liked how he just came back to two things. One was getting layups. We're trying to like make it, there's rim pressure within all this stuff. The best sets that they found are like ones like you have to guard the rim. If you mess up a communication on the backside, it's going to be a layup like that being it like the root of a lot of stuff. And then most of his teaching and all that being the play after the play or having them have the freedom to what he said, you know, play bus. I think was a good. So it's like probably on the surface that can feel very like, well, here's a structured set and here's all these plays and here's the cadence of all that. But like within it, there's a ton of freedom that I think is the secret sauce from a mental side. One, and then two, just like I understand how to play side. I agree. And he mentioned multiple times that he's always going to celebrate the play bus. Because he talked about it. I know it was kind of in the back of our heads. I'm preparing for this conversation is like, how does it not become robotic when you're layering sets? It's like, yeah, we just went through one A to B to C. And now we're at D with no advantage. And we've just wasted 15, 20 seconds, you know, yeah. I thought he spoke really well on that. The part I did like within the layering and, you know, at least I came away with like is a key concept to this is however the play ends or when the flow begins, like it's always putting guys in familiar spaces. And I think that's been like the one big thing for me over the last year talking, you know, watching these teams in Europe. I go back to Francesco Tabillini, Thiago Splitter, like they're playing, you know, it's like two sides of the same coin. Maybe they're playing with, you know, hey, if we do a set, it's always going to be Iverson or they have like this one kind of base offense that they're comfortable with the familiarity and they get the reads out of it. And I like this approach where they have some really layered sets to test the defense. Get like you said, get a threat at the rim, get some shooters off the screen. But then it's always going to end up in like what he said this year. They're doing a lot of staggers and they're getting comfortable just playing out of it. And he said, you know, if they can add a play that puts them in a stagger ending, you know, for clarity and simplicity of our conversation, then they're probably not going to put it. But like that's the key thing is when it goes through their checklist and we couldn't, you know, we did at the right speed, the right intensity made the reads, but couldn't finish like, well, we're going to get to our staggers. We're going to end in a set spacing we're really comfortable with. And we'll continue to hunt solutions from there. Yeah. He was really good at talking about that, the play after the play, how things end. I think you even mentioned it. That's one of his biggest questions and biggest teaching point is like, how does everything end? And when he watches something on, you know, he finds a great set. He mentioned, you know, a theme throughout this whole thing was he's curious. He's going to try stuff. He's going to be creative, but always going back, well, how could this end for our team? I think the other added interesting benefit to what they do and how they do it is actually set it in the start subset, which was sometimes it forces opponents to play uniquely on the other side defensively in the added benefit. So like when they're trying stuff, they're doing all these things that are kind of on the fringe or, you know, what not that it's forcing teams to either press or trap or zone or do something maybe outside of what their base is. And I think, you know, you would say that's an advantage for them because you're getting a team to kind of get out of their normal stuff. And so I thought that was another added interesting point. Like I said, set it in the start subset, but could be kind of added into this first bucket for sure. Yeah. He talked about you to have them ready to attack non normal. Yeah. And when he sees teams do something outside of their base, encouraging his guys almost turn up the aggression. Yeah. You know, I got the impression like even then kind of going even simplifying maybe less layers and like we're just going to attack it because that's not what they normally do. So let's stress test it immediately. Correct. I'll just throw a quick miss of mine, not of coach MacriZax, of course, but I mean, we could have kept going on this first bucket for a long time. So there was a lot of other avenues we could have went down. One thing I had a question on is just the sort of cadence of the play calls who's calling it is he calling it is an assistant in charge of it because you know, if he's head coach in the game and he's dealing with a lot of stuff, you know, you lose or we don't play three versus play seven or you know, where are we at? So who's calling the plays? Do the guys have it half memorized the first, you know, like group, do they know like or do you need to keep calling it? I mean, I guess It's just more even insight on the actual progress. of the whole thing would be interesting. I agree. I think super interesting conversation. I believe we only like scratch the surface. I think you and me could have just kept going. I liked when he started getting it like teaching it, installing it and he talked about he almost at times rather teach it wrong, quote unquote wrong, let him do it wrong, discover, and then use the film. But I think too, as he was going through it and he mentioned several times like the pace, the speed, but also like when you're so layered, what level of execution do you need? And the one point I really like that the first pass has to be perfect or entry into the offense has to be perfect. He used the zipper example. And then from there, it's just kind of about pace trying to make the reads like everything in any offense you run. And you can read it better, you're going to be better. But yeah, I thought that was a really good point. Just like demanding that like that entry be perfect, kind of really stressing execution there. But then throughout it's like getting to pace kind of probably I'm sure that like next action mentality. Yeah, a ton in that first one, of course, but let's keep blowing here. So Pat, for takeaway number two, I will throw it back to you. The second takeaway, I'll go to my start subset when we discussed the lock left. I really enjoyed the conversation around what I think in our prep, we were the most curious about the help side rotations and kind of the conundrum of when you're forcing left to the base line, versus when you're forcing left to the middle. And here are his thoughts on that just trying to that the thought experiment of what's important. I mean, I think we all understand their ability to pass and finish out of the left. It is two defenses and one when you start to think about it. And I like here in his thoughts on the importance of course those stunts, the bluffs and here are his thoughts on the peel switch or if we're going to send help at the rim, it's really interesting. In general, just how you think about trying to solve these rotations or trying to teach it in simplistic terms. So your defense isn't overthinking and just playing with speed and intensity. And I always think there's like an interesting conversation of peels. I think you and me have talked about it. Maybe not necessarily about with lock left, but if it is getting middle, you know, are you trying to peel right away as soon as possible or peel at the rim. One question I wish I followed up with if these bluffs, like the technique or the position of the bluff so you're not giving up strong side kick out threes. I drive with my left, but if we're stuck too much or bluffing too low, stuck in the bluff, you know, one pass catching shoot three, I think is also like where my mind goes with the difficulty of this defense. So I just like here in his honest thoughts on like how he tried to work through it and teach these rotations and think about it and why he went away from it. And I'll leave it there. I'll throw it back to you, but I really like your follow up question on when he introduces it for the first month. And then, okay, well, where like the parts he keeps and the parts he scraps and how that then he builds his defense from there. Yeah. And I'll just pick up there because my favorite part of this conversation, it's honestly my favorite part of the show is I just really like hearing coaches talk about their trade offs and why they do or don't do something. And then like in this case, why a historically really good interesting style of defense, like why he went away from it, what he kept and like what the trade offs were that made him get to that decision. Because I think that's obviously where the goal is in coaching is understanding the nuances of the lock left defense and how you stun or how you play this ball screen is one thing. But then like, okay, but why did you stop doing it? Is super interesting, especially from some of my Cam who you know he thinks everything through to the end degree. And so I actually really enjoyed that part of the conversation as far as just some of the things that they couldn't solve or even just like, of course, who your players are and some of those things and what they ended up going to. I thought that was really good. I'm just really like hearing it. And then I did like also the very end of the conversation when we got a little bit into like weekend or forcing left in the middle third ball screen. And it's so true that really good right handed players going to their left are historically pretty good at pulling up for that mid-range jumper. And like you mentioned, they kept giving up that shot and games were making them. And so like just getting to the level of where you need to be in a middle third ball screening for weakening it and sort of the angles and he talked about differences of people finishing with their left hand versus the right hand. So just the last few minutes of I thought was really good too. He raised a point even when I was asking the question. I wasn't really thinking of. I mean, I've been seeing a lot lately. I mean, teams have been weaking middle thirds for a while. But the weak in the middle third with the bigs kind of lateral hedging and it just got me curious, you know, why the lateral hedge versus the deep drop versus just full on hedging. And I think that point I wasn't thinking about it. I think it's totally valid and completely true. You know, if you deep drop, maybe then you're going to give up comfortable stepping to threes with the rise of skill and off the dribble shooting by the guards. And you know, and then kind of thought experiment or thinking on it more and hearing them talk. You know, maybe like they don't want a lateral hedge because they think, okay, they can still, you're giving up that short roll, which is dangerous, but they're lateral hedging. Maybe they still think it's tough for a guard to hit that pocket pass off the dribble with their left hand. And so it's kind of the best of both worlds are being aggressive without really too fearful. Maybe of guards being able to hit that pocket pass, but also discouraging those pull up threes, the dribble into shots. For sure. All right, Dan. I'll throw it back to you now. Bring us home with the last takeaway. Yeah. So I do want to go to the last start subset, which was the flat starts. And you and I have been talking last week or so and just in varying degrees. We all go through it, but your team doesn't have it that night. I think we were talking earlier. And we had Josh left Laurent, the show for the second time you had mentioned one of the harder things in coaching is when your team just doesn't have it. And what do you do? And we wanted to take out the call the time out, get him fired up. Yeah. Get him going from that standpoint because I think, okay, that is a tool. But what was a more tactical way to help your team out when they're just starting flat? And so it made sense as we got to the first bucket that he was probably going to sit the sub pattern. So that made sense there. But I think he started with the start in the sub. I think we're two areas that you and I were thinking a lot about before the show, which is just forcing your team into some kind of trap or a different type of thing that just, you know, maybe you just get a tip ball or steal that leads to a run out layup or dunk and just kind of can turn them on. Man, I'm a little bit. And so I like hearing him kind of talk his way through that as well as the offensive side gave some more insight to of like if a team maybe they go simpler if a team's press or a trapping or they need something where they're not going to do their cadence. So overall, I like the defensive aggression. I think you and I both thought that was one of the ones we might think about to just to fire our team up. I think too, you know, as they talked about the offensive side and trying to okay, then usually the balls getting sticky, trying to put more ball movement into stuff, yeah, trying to play with more pace. I think in crafting this question too and thinking about, you know, unfortunately the occasions when our teams are flat, how offense has really become the catalyst for a lot of stuff, like better defense, more commitment to defense, better energy. And yeah, just trying to breathe life in your offense. I mean, of course, it all comes down knowing your teams, maybe for some teams, it is like, all right, we're just going to get it to our best player in their best spot, you know, because we just got to manufacture points. I think that's probably another thing we've hit on a lot, probably within the last six months of a year. Yeah, it's kind of flipped like the offense really is the fuel for a lot of your energy, your effort, your defense. Guys want to score, guys want to feel involved. There's credit like he said, you know, preaching more ball movement, getting guys more active and hoping that kind of lights the fire or is the spark to get things going on both sides of the ball. Yeah, I liked his point about sometimes coming down and running a longer, like getting a set or something where it's just makes them guard the ball moves a little bit. Maybe they're having to guard some of that, you know, screen the screen or back screen action, like just making it so the defense, if the other teams kind of on a roll or they've got the momentum and you come down and let's say you do just get to your best player, but you know, he or she rocks and shoots a tough one and then boom, they go out and transition again versus come down. No, we're going to move the ball. We're going to make them guard some tough screen action. Like we're going to try to get downhill into the paint. Hopefully can suck the energy out of the other team a little bit. So I like this point there. And then I don't know if it was in this one, but just going back to the offensive part, you mentioned he didn't like sets that were too long as well. Like you said, like 12 seconds was about where he liked him to be. So that way there's enough time at the end of it to really play. I don't know if it was in this part there, but I just kind of had it circled as far as the length of a set for him. Yeah, we didn't hit on it like directly on those, but pace and but he mentioned it several times with the 12 seconds getting through these actions. I think it's really interesting. You hear like layering sets scripting plays. They're going to be a slow walk it up team. I mean, he talked about McCollum being an influence, but also Crutchfield who plays super fast. So, you know, maybe conversation for a different day or maybe a miss as well on our end, but I think he plays with a very unique cadence to the game and like how he views pace and where he really values the pace within the offense. I thought was kind of sprinkled in throughout the whole conversation today and also I think what makes them unique and probably difficult to guard. Absolutely. Well, Pat, we've gone through a ton here, but are there any other areas we wish one deeper on? I would have loved to have asked. He mentioned when we were talking about five reboundier, five crashing the glass that he'll get the lineups work. This is a line that's going to push pace. They're going to play faster. They're going to crash. It's like their aggressive crashing lineup. And I'm sure he's thought about a, I mean, just the way he thinks about offense and his lineups, but where is the next progression for this or could this be for his team? And I'm thinking more now on the defensive end like, can you have different styles? Like this is a line or we're a really great hedging team, or we're not going to be a five, we're going to crash three, or this is a zone team like, I guess can you vary within your lineups? Not all the curse, you have your six sets, but also how you play defense, and maybe this is the aggressiveness, the more conservative. Everything's obviously a time tradeoff. You can't practice three hours a day for six straight months on all this stuff. But I guess I would have loved to have maybe followed up with where he thinks maybe defensively, he can start to stretch this if any in terms of yeah, stylistically, tactically, with kind of learning his team and the different lineups he's going to get to. Yeah, good point. I also felt like the interesting to keep talking to him about the crashing all five and all the nuances of that. He mentioned it. It wasn't this straight-up tagging up system. Yeah. And I just find that conversation to be maybe going into the next year. I know we've talked about tagging up every year, because it just keeps coming up. But like, I think what was starting to happen is you have sort of like the full tagging up system. But then I think you're starting to see coaches figure out variances of that system that work for their personnel or their philosophy where you're setting all five, but maybe it's not quite the strict tagging up system. I just think that's interesting because obviously it's work for him. They're rebound percentage. Anybody mentioned defensively in transition. They've been really good as well. It's interesting. I'm with you. Is the value and the consistency in being able to do it every time over the technique and properly doing it, probably getting the high side, properly trying to scrum it. But it's just like go with aggression every time. And if we can get that, we'll solve everything versus kind of getting bogged down. And like, did you go high side? Did you connect? I think it all matters. It's just where you put your emphasis. But I think too, we're here talking to coaches too. I just want them to go. And I want them to go aggressive. And we saw from there. Yeah. When he mentioned their rebounding philosophy is like they should get everyone defensive and offensive and talked about how it like fills them as a staff. Yeah. When they look and you know, that's what they show on film. And like, so I think just the mentality is the overall driver. Exactly. Well, once again, we really thank Coach MacriZack for coming on. That was a fantastic episode. We appreciate everybody for listening. We'll see you next time. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please make sure to visit slappingglass.com for more information on the free newsletter, Slaping Glass Plus, and much more. Have a great week coaching and we'll see you next time on Slaping Glass. Who do we have a name yet to this thing? I have like slapping back for Slaping Glass. Slaping Glass? That's kind of funny. I like that. That's real Slaping Glass. [BLANK_AUDIO]