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 looked at Hood College’s Offset Horns Flare and how they organize the action randomly throughout a possession. Read the newsletter HERE.

This Week at a Glance:

🔒 The Practice Lab: The Micro Closeout​

🎧 Slappin' Glass Podcast: Vitor Galvani | Mexico City Capitanes

📣 NABC: Renew Your Membership

🥇 Best of the Week: Deceptive Flares​

Attacking The Micro Closeout

Most offensive actions are designed to create an advantage. Once the defense begins rotating, the possession becomes a series of closeouts and decisions about how to attack them.

For many offenses, the goal is to create long closeouts that put defenders in compromised positions and open up drives and paint touches. Defenses, in turn, spend a lot of time trying to avoid those long closeouts through rotations, X-outs, and other ways of shortening the recovery.

We talk a ton about long closeouts.

But what about the other end of the spectrum?

We’ve started using the term “micro closeout” for the smaller recoveries that happen constantly throughout a possession but rarely get discussed in the same way.

For this week’s study, we turned to our own Coach Drew Dunlop, architect of The Practice Lab {🔒}, who has been designing environments that challenge players to recognize, attack, and extend the advantages created by micro closeouts.

What Is a Micro Closeout?

Our first use of the term came in a breakdown of attacking Hedge and Plug {🔒}. When the on-ball defender drops off for a stride or two to plug the short roll, the recovery back to the ball becomes a micro closeout: one or two steps moving back toward their matchup.

Compare that with the closeouts we usually picture: the low man tagging a roll before flying out to a skip, or a high tag recovering to a slot-to-slot pass. Those larger closeouts create obvious opportunities to stampede and attack.

Micro closeouts are less obvious.

They show up when:

• A defender supports a cut off a Chin action before recovering to the high post.
• A perimeter defender sits in the gap before closing on a swing.
• A defender digs or deters a post entry before reconnecting to their matchup.
• The ball gets kicked back out after an offensive rebound.

None of these situations looks like a major breakdown. The defense may still be in a relatively neutral position.

But the defender is moving.

Their momentum may have already carried them away from the offensive player, and for a brief moment the offense has something to work with. Against a good, well-coached defense, that may be all the offense gets on many possessions.

In soccer, there is the idea of wrong-footing a defender: catching them moving one direction and attacking against that momentum. Micro closeouts create many of the same opportunities in basketball.

The question is whether the offensive player can recognize that moment before the defender reconnects.

Designing for Micro Closeouts

That changes how we should think about training them.

Closeouts are often taught through the defensive lens, with players repeatedly placed into familiar closeout situations. The unintended consequence is that the offense can get used to solving a predictable problem from a predictable starting point.

If we want players to become better at recognizing and attacking micro closeouts, the environment should contain more uncertainty.

They may not know exactly where the catch is coming from, how much space they will have, what angle the defender is recovering from, or what help sits behind the play.

When Coach Dunlop builds these situations into practice, four questions help shape the environment:

1. How does it start?​
On the catch? Off a live dribble? After a stop or pivot?

2. What problem is the player solving?​
Drive? Create space? Shoot? Create, maintain, or extend an advantage?

3. Where is the defender?​
What angle are they recovering from? What direction is their momentum taking them?

4. What does the rest of the floor look like?​
Where is the help? Where are teammates spaced? What happens if the initial advantage gets contained?

The goal isn’t to give players a predetermined solution to the closeout.

It’s to repeatedly put them in situations where they have to recognize a small advantage and decide what to do with it before it disappears.

From there, the question becomes:

I have an advantage. How do I use it, maintain it, or extend it?

That question sits at the center of the latest Practice Lab release on SGTV, where Coach Dunlop shares seven new drills that vary the starting point, defensive angle, trigger, and help behind the play—all designed to challenge offensive players to recognize and capitalize on the small advantages that emerge throughout a possession.

​SG+ members can watch all seven drills and begin building micro closeouts into their own practice environments here.

Stay tuned, as next week we will be releasing the first of our two SoCal Coaches Summit clinic drops, featuring three of this year’s six presentations!

Together with Hudl

Preparation Wins Before Tip-Off

The staffs that hit the ground running in preseason are usually the ones that prepared their systems before players arrived.

With Sportscode and FastModel already dialed in, film, playbooks, and scouting workflows are ready from day one—not still being built in week two.

What you set up in August determines how efficiently you can teach, adjust, and prepare once the season begins.

Hudl helps make sure the work is ready before the real work starts.

Learn more at hudl.com/slappinglass​

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

🎙7 Lessons from Vitor Galvani | Mexico City Capitanes

This week’s podcast with 2026 G- League Coach of the Year, Vitor Galvani, covered several areas we’ve been studying closely ourselves—from the details behind Hedge & Plug and the rotations supporting it, to guard-to-guard screening, second-side offense, and the relationship between shot selection and pace.

What stood out was how often the conversation moved past the coverage or action itself and into the decisions underneath it: where the screen is set, who is involved, what the offense is trying to take away, and when a team should adjust without abandoning its core principles.

7 High-Level Lessons:

1. The pickup point should change the plug. When the screen is higher, the on-ball defender can get underneath and bump the roller. Closer to the three-point line, the defender chases over and plugs down with the roll.
2. Give the hedge clear exit triggers. Galvani’s big released when the ballhandler changed direction or picked up the dribble. Those triggers kept the hedge aggressive without leaving the big stranded outside the play.
3. Design the Protection Plan to avoid unnecessary rotations. Rather than automatically X-out behind Hedge & Plug, Galvani used the Fence (player at the Nail) to jump on the pickup while the MIG recovered home, trying to discourage the direct corner skip before creating another closeout advantage.
4. Gap positioning can be aggressive rather than passive. “See Numbers Go” gave backside defenders permission to attack exposed dribbles and spins. The gap wasn’t simply there to contain the drive—it became a place to generate turnovers. This is similar to our conversation with UT Martin HC, Jeremy Shulman.
5. Build changeups inside the base coverage. Black was the call for Hedge & Plug, White was Drop, and Gray was a short show with the guard chasing over. The advantage was being able to change the problem without abandoning the defensive system.
6. Separation comes before guard-to-guard screening technique. A defense that steers or jams the screener can kill the action before the screen matters. Galvani’s answers were to randomize the screen inside the offense, layer action on top of action, or create separation before sprinting into it.
7. Shot quality organizes more than the offensive possession. Galvani adjusted pace because better offensive involvement supported the effort required by his defensive system. More predictable, higher-quality shots also made Tagging Up and offensive rebounding easier to organize.

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

📺 4 Out - RIP • Shuffle • Flare the Passer​

"A multiple action set designed to clear a side of the floor for the passer receiving a flare screen."

🔒 Pair With: Another well-designed set out of a 4 Out entry, using a Zoom DHO exchange to set up a flare for the shooting 4.

🔒 Pair With:A few other quick hitting top flares designed to punish nail and gap help.

🔒 SG Plus Content: Our breakdowns on punishing transition nail help with the Top Flare and retriggering the offense with the Ghost Flare.

Interesting Reads

📚 12 Ways To Turn A Group Of Individuals Into A High Performing Team​

...A high performing team knows what energises and de-energises each other and allocates roles and responsibilities accordingly. This requires you as the leader to be honest with your team members about your strengths and weaknesses. This will encourage your team members to do the same.

...Ideally you want to have between six and ten operating guidelines. Focus on behaviours you do want, not behaviours you don’t want i.e. honour the team commitments and build the reputation rather than don’t miss deadlines!

...In many good teams there is a focus on high-standards but in great teams there is also a closeness. The team members understand each other at a deeper level.

📚 68 Things I Learned About Leadership In 2025​

• The challenge isn’t meeting every expectation; it’s knowing who you are, knowing your values, and acting in line with them, even when it’s loud outside - Roberto Ferraro.
• The risk of being authentic is that some people won’t like you, but the cost of inauthenticity is your own soul - Roberto Ferraro.
• As a leader, remember: your audience needs time to absorb what took you weeks to craft. Don’t expect instant understanding - The Underestimated Value of Message Repetition in Leadership.
• When a leader can hold uncertainty, something shifts in the room; others feel permission to think rather than perform, and previously suppressed questions rise to the surface - How CEOs can play the long game in a shortsighted world.

​
📚 Make Something Heavy​

At any given time, you’re either pre–heavy thing or post–heavy thing. You’ve either made something weighty already or you haven’t. Pre–heavy thing people are still searching, experimenting, iterating, and feel lost. Post–heavy thing people have crossed that threshold. They’ve made something of substance that feels like it, gets respect, inspires, and becomes a solid base to build on. And it shows. They move with confidence and calm (but this feeling doesn’t always last forever.) Your gut will tell you what state you’re in. And quite often the cycle repeats.

Quote of the Week

Thank you for reading and have a great week coaching,

Dan, Pat, Eric, and Drew

info@slappinglass.com