Exploring basketball's best ideas, strategies, and coaches around the world

Happy Sunday! Welcome to all the newest subscribers from around the world!

ICYMI: Last week, we launched and introduced our newest feature to SG+, The Practice Lab! Learn more about it HERE.

This Week at a Glance:

🔒 SGTV: Early Offense - High Slot Pitch & Step Up​

🎧 Slappin' Glass Podcast: Dan Clements on "Lending Power", Mastery-Based Environments, and How Autonomy Ties to Motivation​

🔒 The Practice Lab: The "Ready Up": Priming the Mind, Perceptions, and Competitive Instincts​

🎥 Hudl Spotlight: Connecting film, analytics, playlists, and FastModel data to improve assist rate.

🥇 Best of the Week: Ram Entry & Angled Pops​

High Slot Pitch & Step Up

The best offensive advantage is often the earliest one.

This week we’re diving into a trigger that starts almost immediately after crossing half court, putting pressure on the defense before it can get fully organized. The action creates downhill attacks early in the possession, forcing help, creating reactions, and getting the dominoes to fall.

What You’ll Learn

• How Bilbao uses high slot spacing to turn a familiar pitch into step-up action into an early downhill attack.
• Why keeping the action in the middle third changes the defensive problem and makes it harder to get under, recover, or load the gaps.
• How the same structure creates counters against pressure, including backdoors, blind pig entries, give-and-go reads, rejects, and secondary screening layers {🔒}.
• Insights from The Practice Lab, where Drew Dunlop creates two drills to help train the decisions and pacing behind Bilbao’s action, from keep-or-pitch reads to playing downhill with pace and making quick rim decisions {🔒}.

Let's dive in...

When looking at immediate half-court triggers, one of our favorite spacings is both high slots filled flowing into the action. It is a structure we explored in our High Point Read Option Pick & Roll breakdown {🔒}...

...and now see Bilbao in Spain's ACB using a similar, equally effective concept with their High Slot Pitch & Step Up.

By starting high and wide in the slots, Bilbao flows from a guard-to-guard pitch into a step up screen, creating an early downhill attack. Off this action, the ballhandler is able to play with pace, while the spacing and screening angle create built-in counters as the defense adjusts.

Familiar Action, Unfamiliar Location

A pitch into a step up ballscreen, often referred to as “Miami Action” in American basketball, is something most defenses are used to seeing. But even when the defense knows it is coming, the combination of the pitch, the timing, and the screening angle can still be difficult to contain.

Typically, Miami actions happen in the outer third of the floor. The dribble handoff comes toward the sideline, and the screener arrives to turn the ball back toward the middle.

This high slot variation changes the geography.

Instead of playing the action on the sideline, Bilbao keeps everything in the middle third of the floor, immediately challenging the defense’s rules and spacing principles.

That is where the action becomes interesting. By starting high and wide in the slots, Bilbao gives the ballhandler room to shape the pitch, drive the exchange downhill, and force the defense to guard the handoff and the upcoming screen before it is fully organized.

The spacing also puts pressure on the defender guarding the receiver. If they trail too tightly, they can be pulled into the exchange and struggle to get back under the screen. If they try to jump the action, the middle of the floor can open quickly. And because the exchange happens above the level of the big, the screener is already in position to find the angle, turn the screen, and help create the downhill attack.

That is the larger lesson of the action: Bilbao is not reinventing the pitch into a ballscreen. They are changing the location, speeding up the timing, and forcing the defense to solve the problem earlier in the possession.

Why It Matters

The value of this trigger is not only in the first read. It is in the structure.

From the same high slot spacing, Bilbao can create:

• Early downhill attacks before the defense is set
• Tough decisions for defenders trying to chase, switch, or recover
• Pressure-release options if the defense denies the initial pitch
• Secondary actions layered on top of the same starting shape

That versatility is what makes the action worth studying. It gives the offense a clean entry point, but it does not become static after the first exchange. The same spacing can flow into counters, rejects, give-and-go reads, and secondary screening layers depending on how the defense reacts.

For coaches, the takeaway is less about copying the exact action and more about the principle behind it: start with a simple structure, create pace early, and make the defense guard multiple connected problems before it has solved the first one.

To complement this week’s breakdown, Drew Dunlop designed two Practice Lab drills around the same high slot spacing used in Bilbao’s action: "32 Earn It • High Slot 2-Man Game" and "4v3+1 Play It Down • High Slot Spacing" {🔒}.

The goal is to help guards get comfortable operating in the middle third of the floor, where decisions come quickly and the spacing can feel different than traditional sideline DHO or ballscreen actions. Within these drills, players are asked to read the exchange in real time:

• Keep it, pitch it, or screen
• Shape the angle of the pitch
• Play downhill with pace
• Make quick rim reads as the advantage forms

For coaches looking to bring aspects of the High Slot Pitch concept into their own environment, the Practice Lab focus this week is less about memorizing Bilbao’s exact action and more about training the spacing, timing, and decisions that make the action work.

🔐 SG+ Members can now watch the full High Slot Pitch & Step Up breakdown on SGTV, then head to The Practice Lab to see how these ideas can be built into live, decision-rich drill design.

The Ready Up

As we continue to roll out The Practice Lab {🔒}, we’ll highlight different pieces from the library and the filters coaches can use to explore them on SGTV.

The goal is to make the library easier to navigate, but also to show the thinking behind the design. The filters are not just labels. They are a way for coaches to search by the type of environment they want to create: the focus of the session, the group size, the amount of variability, and the density of decisions players are being asked to make.

This week, we’re looking at Ready Up {🔒}, found under the Focus filter.

What is it?

Ready Up is a reframe of the traditional warm-up, borrowed from Dr. Véronique Richard at the University of Queensland. The shift is small in language but big in intention: a warm-up just elevates heart rate, a Ready Up primes the mind, the perception, and the competitive instincts. It sits after a player's individual Feel Good baseline (mobility, handles, rhythm shooting or anything that centers them) and before the main block of practice. Once you cross into Ready Up territory, the work has to come alive — engagement, decisions, attunement.

Why do we use it?

A Ready Up connects players to their bodies, minds, and environment before the first "real" drill, so when the main session starts they're already perceiving, deciding, and competing. It also respects time: multiple groups working at once, built-in variability, and game-relevant problems.

How do we implement it day-to-day?

The Ready Up is built around three priming buckets — pick one or stack two depending on what the main block demands:

• Prime their decisions — small-sided advantage/disadvantage games.
• Prime their perception — late-information and constrained-vision work.
• Prime their bodies — contact and positional battles.

The practical design rules

1. Build in real (uncooperative) defense from the start (live, guided, or coach defenders)
2. Prioritize high time on task structures to keep groups engaged and flowing
3. Pick drills that mirror the options / solutions of whatever's coming in the main block. If the main session is going to focus on ballscreen reads, your Ready Up should already be asking players to make decisions and find solutions in similar setups. The Ready Up sets the tone; the rest of practice cashes the check.

🔐 SG+ Members can explore variations of Ready Up inside the Practice Lab now!

Together with the NABC

If you’re a basketball coach, you belong in the NABC community!

The NABC is the leading professional development and advocacy organization for coaches, serving over 5,000 members across all levels of basketball.

Why join? Members gain access to the NABC Convention and regional clinics, exclusive awards and mentoring opportunities, valuable discounts, and a voice in shaping the future of basketball.

If you're serious about growing as a coach and staying connected to the game’s biggest conversations, this is where you belong.

Become a member today and make your impact as a Guardian of the Game. Learn more HERE.

🎙Dan Clements on "Lending Power", Mastery-Based Environments, and How Autonomy Ties to Motivation

This week on Slappin’ Glass, we’re joined by coach developer and researcher Dan Clements for a conversation on building better learning environments inside high-performance sport.

The episode starts with the difference between mastery-based and performance-based environments, and how coaches can create practices where players are more invested, more motivated, and more connected to their own development.

Dan gets into the details of voice, choice, task design, differentiation, and feedback, including how one drill can serve different players in different ways. The task may be the same, but the coaching cannot be.

We also discuss the craft of intervention: when to stop a drill, when to coach on the fly, and when to simply observe. Dan makes the point that coaches are often poor historians of their own practices, which makes reflection a key tool for growth.

The conversation also touches on strength-based coaching, the difference between honest positivity and toxic positivity, and how coaches can be demanding without constantly coaching from a deficit.

In this week’s Start, Sub, or Sit, Dan ranks autonomy, competence, and relatedness as drivers of player motivation, leading to a strong discussion on belonging, confidence, and helping struggling players find traction again.

A few things worth listening for:

• Building mastery environments inside performance-driven programs
• Using player voice and choice without losing structure
• Differentiating within live practice
• Knowing when to intervene and when to let the task breathe
• Coaching from strengths without ignoring hard truths
• Helping struggling players regain confidence through task design and feedback

Listen to the full conversation with Dan Clements now on Slappin’ Glass.

Together with Hudl

Hudl helps basketball staffs turn film into better decisions.

By connecting Sportscode, Hudl Instat, and Fastmodel tools like FastDraw, FastScout, and FastRecruit, Hudl brings video, scouting, recruiting, and game planning into one seamless workflow. Less time managing tools. More clarity in preparation, teaching, and evaluation, built for how college and professional programs actually operate.

For a deeper look at how these tools can support a program’s workflow, we broke down how we used the Hudl suite to connect film, analytics, player playlists, and FastModel data around one season-long point of emphasis: improving assist rate. You can watch the full breakdown HERE.

​Learn more about Hudl and their variety of products or subscribers to Slappin' Glass can also directly email Winston Jones of Hudl at winston.jones@hudl.com.

Tactical

📺 Ram Entry - Corner Exit • Pin the Tag​

"Another great layered action by Bilbao, compromising the defense’s ability to guard both the screener’s roll and the pin down for the shooter."

✚ Pair With: Masking the Ram Screen by initiating with a pin down to curl into a stack ballscreen.

🔒 SG Plus Content: Our breakdown on the "Pin the Tag" concept to free a shooter weakside of the ballscreen or use their gravity to open up the roll of the big.

🔒 Angled Pop - Baseline Triple Stagger​

"Curling the screener off the angled pop and into a baseline triple stagger."

🔒 Pair With: Popping the 5-Man out of the angled screen into a empty-side stack ballscreen.

🔒 SG Plus Content: OKC Thunder's Angled Pop playbook.

Interesting Reads

📚 Why Steve Kerr stayed with the Warriors​

Kerr recommended a book to Nikola called "The Inner Game of Tennis," which is a metaphysical self-help guide that divides all competitors into two people, the one who does things, and the one who offers nonstop negative commentary on them.

"That book saved my career," Kerr said, as more sushi arrived. "I was so in my own head the whole time. I was so mean to myself. So harsh. I read it pretty much every season. I'd go back to it. I realized we are all two people. We are Self One and Self Two. There's our body and our mind. What we all try to do, in life and in sports, is combine the two. To find the rhythm of life."

📚 ‘Ultimately, Skill Is Technique Performed Under Pressure’​

There is also a psychological and emotional dynamic that goes beyond cognition and technical execution. All these elements can affect skill expression in a match situation.

“There’s no substitute for being in the saddle,” adds Teague. “Hot feedback in the moment can be so powerful because you’re living that moment with the player.” He will use the moment to talk them through a situation.

He will readily halt training sessions to allow kickers to practise too. “Get them to kick when their heartrate is up and their emotional state is variable rather than just doing 50 kicks at the end of the session – because that’s just technique.”

📚 This is Water by David Foster Wallace​

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

Quote of the Week

Thank you for reading and have a great week coaching,

Dan, Pat, Eric, and Drew

info@slappinglass.com