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 revisited Martin Schiller’s approach to building PNR defense from the ball outward and Alex Pribble’s framework for aligning roles, pace, and defensive identity with the roster. Read our recap HERE.

This Week at a Glance:

🔒 SG Plus Content: Matt Majkrzak & Kyle Bossier Socal Coaches Summit Clinic Release!

🎧 Slappin' Glass Podcast: Jeff Van Gundy​

🔑 The Practice Lab: Constraint Expiration

🥇 Best of the Week: Creating Confusion​

SoCal Summit Replays

We’re continuing to roll out the clinic replays from this year’s SoCal Summit on SGTV, with another two presentations this week.

Last week, we featured Idaho Head Coach Alex Pribble on program building {🔒} and Utah Assistant Martin Schiller on building PNR defense {🔒}. This week, we turn to Cal Poly SLO Associate Head Coach Kyle Bossier and Northern Illinois Head Coach Matt Majkrzak, with two very different looks at pace, structure, and offensive organization.

We’ll start with Majkrzak and his unique approach to scripting rotations, pace, and play calls before turning to Bossier and Cal Poly’s Beautiful Game—a positionless offense built around pace, space, connection, and player freedom.

Matt Majkrzak: Aligning Rotations With Offensive Play Calling

Before taking the job at Northern Illinois, Coach Majkrzak was at D2 Northern Michigan, where his unique system of scripting rotations and pairing them with specific play calls became part of a tremendous multi-season run. Our podcast conversation with him back in February has also become one of our most popular of 2026.

At the SoCal Summit, Majkrzak broke down how he implements the system and addressed some of the concerns coaches often have when they hear the word scripting.

One idea sits at the foundation of the entire approach:

Script the substitutions before you script the plays.

For Majkrzak, keeping lineup groups together removes some of the emotion from substitution decisions, builds chemistry, and gives the staff a clearer picture of which actions best fit the five players on the floor. He kindly dove into some of his favorite sets from last year and teaching points within them...

Instead of thinking only about the best starting five, the challenge becomes building combinations that can win their specific stretches of the game.

From there, the scripting can extend beyond substitutions and play calls.

Pace can be scripted, too.

Different groups can be asked to play at different speeds depending on their personnel and strengths—an interesting reminder that playing with pace does not necessarily require every lineup to play the same way.

The full clinic goes much deeper into how Majkrzak builds those lineup groups, matches play calls to personnel, creates early rim pressure, and determines when to move away from the script.

​SG+ Members can watch Coach Majkrzak’s entire presentation now on SGTV.

Kyle Bossier: Playing The Beautiful Game With Pace, Space, And Connection

Cal Poly SLO and its supercharged offense has been one of our favorite teams to watch over the last two seasons, and we were thrilled to have Coach Bossier come to the SoCal Summit to explain the philosophy and building blocks behind what he calls “The Beautiful Game.”

Interestingly, Bossier doesn’t begin with efficiency, shot profile, or even what he wants the offense to look like.

He starts with a different question:

What do we want playing in this offense to feel like?

Cal Poly wanted to create a style players enjoyed playing—one where they could play freely, share the ball, make decisions, and feel connected to the other four players on the floor. Something Bossier also highlighted in our Film Room Session with him last year {🔒}.

“Everybody Eats”

That philosophy shows up in one of Cal Poly’s central ideas:

Everybody Eats.

Rather than concentrating advantage creation in the hands of one or two players, Cal Poly spreads that responsibility across all five.

Everyone drives. Everyone passes. Everyone cuts. Everyone has to read the defense.

For Bossier, there is also a developmental benefit. Asking every player to operate in different spots and make decisions gives everyone a larger role in creating and exploiting advantages.

Of course, that freedom doesn’t mean there is no structure.

One of the most interesting parts of the clinic was seeing the boundaries Cal Poly puts around its freedom—the spacing, cutting, pace, and shared rules that allow the offense to remain connected without prescribing every decision.

Freedom needs boundaries.

The full presentation dives into those boundaries, including Cal Poly’s spacing framework, Squeeze Cuts, Stampede principles, screening ideas, and how they teach players to operate within the Beautiful Game.

​SG+ Members can watch Coach Bossier’s entire presentation now on SGTV.

🏀 Stay tuned next week as we release the final two presentations from our SoCal Summit, featuring Fordham Head Coach Mike Magpayo and BYU Associate Head Coach Tim Fanning!

The Learning Loop

Thoughts from Drew Dunlop in building The Practice Lab

Brick

You design a drill around a specific intention, maybe attacking an edge, keeping the ball live, getting paint touches, or creating a particular shot. Early on, the constraint works. But after several possessions, you notice players anticipating the rule rather than reading the situation. The environment has become predictable. They’re getting better at the game you invented, but perhaps not better at the game they actually play.

Takeaway

A good constraint probably has an expiration date. Once players start gaming it, it's usefulness changes. Rather than adding another rule, you can remove the constraint, change the information, or alter the scoring and see whether the behavior survives. That becomes a useful test: Did they learn the rule, or did they become more attuned to the opportunity the rule was designed to amplify?

Tinker

Start intentionally building constraint removal into sessions. Use the constraint to exaggerate an opportunity for a short period, then take it away and play. Does the behavior continue to emerge without being rewarded or required?

You could even structure it as:

Amplify, remove, observe, re-introduce (if needed).

The bigger question I’d leave coaches with is: What if the success of a constraint isn’t measured by how well it produces the desired behavior while it’s present, but by what players perceive and do after it’s gone?

Together with Hudl

Faster from Film to Scout

The season is live. How long does it take your staff to put together a full scout? How many platforms are you bouncing between to do it?

The programs running Hudl - Sportscode, Instat, Fastmodel all connected - aren't asking those questions. They're getting to the clips that matter faster and spending that time actually coaching. Film, data, and scouting in one place. Fewer tabs, faster prep.

Learn more at hudl.com/slappinglass​

Subscribers to Slappin' Glass can also directly email Winston Jones of Hudl at winston.jones@hudl.com.

Slappin' Glass Podcast

🎙7 Lessons from Jeff Van Gundy | LA Clippers

In this high-level, candid, and engaging SG Classics replay, Los Angeles Clippers assistant coach Jeff Van Gundy joins Slappin' Glass for his third appearance. Van Gundy dives deep into what it takes to defend the NBA's best players—emphasizing the fundamentals of transition defense, rebounding, and avoiding reckless fouling. The conversation explores stunt vs. full help principles, creating physical defenses through communication, and the challenge of preparing against high-powered offenses.

Listen to the full conversation now on the Slappin’ Glass Podcast.

Together with the NABC

Stay Connected to the Coaching Profession

The season moves fast. NABC membership keeps you connected to the coaches, ideas, events and issues shaping the profession.

More than 5,000 coaches across every level are part of the NABC, with member access to the NABC Convention, regional clinics, mentoring, exclusive awards, discounts and professional development opportunities throughout the year.

Just as importantly, membership helps strengthen the collective voice of coaches on the issues affecting the game and the profession.

If coaching is your profession, the NABC should be part of it.

Renew your membership — or join for the first time — at NABC.com/membership.

Tactical

📺 Zipper Entry - Double Ghost Flare​

"Executing two consecutive ghost flares on the ball, with the first flare screener sprinting directly into the second ghost screen."

🔒 Pair With: Using the horns dribble entry to RIP screen the initial big in the horns alignment and flow into a stack ballscreen with the second big in the horns alignment.

🔒 Pair With: A well designed set using the curl of a shooter as the decoy off the ghost flare to elicit help and spring a shooting big free off the pin down.

🔒 SG Plus Content: Our breakdown on the Hook Ghost Screen and its effectiveness in attacking switches, combating defensive steers, and creating quick separation.

Interesting Reads

📚 7 Lessons I'll Always Carry From Coach George Raveling​

7. Plant flowers on your way up. You’ll need the branches on the way down.

...It was critical to him that when times were good, we continue to build and foster purposeful, truth-based relationships. When turbulence inevitably hits, our ability to navigate it will frequently be determined by the connections we've made along the way.

“The wise man changes before he has to,” Coach told me several times. “When it’s sunny, grab an umbrella.”

📚 The Value of Uncertainty​

Viewed from a certain perspective, Hawkins’s unease can seem strange, even paradoxical. Brains like ours are – according to a leading neuroscientific theory known as ‘predictive processing’ – designed to solve one basic puzzle: how to minimise their own long-term average surprise (prediction error) during our embodied exchanges with the world. The more volatile the environment, the less grip this core strategy gets, resulting in anxiety, stress and feelings of loss of control. Yet there was Hawkins, apparently adding huge doses of the unexpected into his life.

​
📚 Mistakes I Have Made​

Success breeds confidence, and confidence is what allows us to transcend. Yet successful leaders must always walk in fear of the gods, as the Greeks might say. Often, when leaders make strategic errors, it’s because the strategies that once made them successful no longer fit the situation. Strategy, as Mintzberg reminds us, is “a pattern in a stream of decisions.” If the pattern shifts and we fail to see it, our strength becomes our downfall.

Quote of the Week

Thank you for reading and have a great week coaching,

Dan, Pat, Eric, and Drew

info@slappinglass.com