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

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

ICYMI: Last week, we dove into how Coach Oded Kattash is layering double drags with a baseline exit to create space for multiple bigs. Read the newsletter HERE.

This Week at a Glance:

🔒 SG Plus Content: Opening the Rebound - Transition Offense​

🎧 Slappin' Glass Podcast: Rusty Earnshaw {Performance Coach}

📨 YouTube Mailbag: Storytelling & Attacking a Switch​

🥇 Best of the Week: Horns Guard Out & Cutting​

👀 Podcast Guest Recommendations: Someone in your network a great potential guest? Let us know HERE!​

Rebound to Run

In the effort to play fast, coaches often turn to mindset, spacing, and actions to generate pace. Today, we’re looking at something a little different, a subtle detail that can immediately kickstart your transition attack.

Instead of traditional fast break concepts, this is an individual rebounding skill that can flip defense to offense in a moment and get the ball moving up the floor in record time.

We call it “Opening Up” the rebound, a technique we picked up from Besiktas in Turkey. It’s a micro skill that can turn a small transition opportunity into a dangerous one, or create pace seemingly out of nowhere.

It’s also easy to miss. Blink and it’s gone. But once you see it, you’ll want your forwards doing it on every rebound.

Midair Movements

At its core, “Opening Up” the rebound occurs when the defender elevates to secure the miss and adjusts in the air to land with their shoulders parallel to the sideline. That simple shift allows the rebounder to see the floor immediately and move the ball without needing to pivot.

It may seem minor, but in the conversion battle, a split second is everything. The difference between hitting an open outlet and slowing down to run a set often comes down to that moment.

Court Vision

Great decisions start with great vision. Catching a rebound facing the baseline limits what the rebounder can see and delays the next action. By opening up, that delay disappears.

The rebounder can immediately locate the floor, the defense, and most importantly, the outlet. With guards consistently filling the sideline, this creates a direct and immediate passing window.

Team Clarity

Opening up does more than help the rebounder, it organizes everyone else. Outlets no longer have to wait and react to a pivot. They can instantly recognize which sideline is being opened and get into position.

That shared understanding tightens the window between rebound and outlet and helps turn stops into early offense.

Why It Matters

With pace continuing to increase and the battle to win conversion moments becoming more important, small details carry more weight. “Opening Up” the rebound is one of those details.

It turns a routine play into an advantage by creating vision, clarity, and immediacy.

Inside the full breakdown:

• How it protects against swipe downs and pressure from underneath
• Why it creates cleaner outlet angles and faster decisions
• How it can even generate transition opportunities without an outlet pass

🔐 For more on this rebounding technique, become an SG+ member to unlock the rest of this newsletter, the full breakdown, and access to our entire film library.

Additional SG+ Screening Adjustments & Opening Techniques

• ​Creating Tougher Ballscreen Overs {🔒}
• ​Preventing DHO Unders {🔒}
• ​"Opening" Off Ball Screens {🔒}

Together with 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.

🎙Rusty Earnshaw on Leadership Mindsets, "The Invisibles", and Mastering Tough Conversations

In this episode of the Slappin’ Glass Podcast, we sit down with performance coach and leadership expert Rusty Earnshaw to explore the evolving role of the modern coach, from tactician to culture architect. The conversation dives into the concept of multiple mindsets, and how great coaches constantly shift between teaching, challenging, and competing environments, while also navigating emotional, tactical, and relational demands.

Rusty unpacks how elite coaches create shared language and mental models within teams, aligning both staff and players around clear expectations while still allowing for individual growth. He also introduces practical frameworks for leadership, including how to balance player ownership with authority, and how to build environments that produce better learners, not just better players.

The episode goes deep into one of the most critical and often overlooked coaching skills: having tough conversations. From assuming positive intent and creating safe spaces, to knowing when to act or when to pause, Rusty provides actionable strategies to handle the thousands of micro-interactions that ultimately define team culture.

Throughout the conversation, a central theme emerges: the best coaches don’t separate culture and tactics, they connect them. By simplifying communication, storytelling, and decision-making, they create clarity under pressure and unlock performance where it matters most.

🧠 What You’ll Learn

• How to apply multiple coaching mindsets (learn, challenge, win) within a single practice or season
• Why shared language and mental models are essential for alignment across players and staff
• A practical framework for deciding when to keep coaching a player vs. when to let go (Energy, Resources, Accountability)
• How to design team culture through four key questions: Who are we? Why are we here? How will we play? How will we win?
• Why the best coaches focus on creating great learners, not just executing systems
• How to recognize and respond to the “invisibles” (trust, confidence, connection) within a team
• A step-by-step approach to restorative conversations and building trust through communication
• Why assuming positive intent is the foundation of all successful tough conversations
• How to improve as a coach through feedback loops, reflection, and seeing through the player’s lens
• Why blending storytelling, simplicity, and tactics leads to better decision-making under pressure

Listen to the entire episode below...

Together with Hudl

Hudl Powers Every Possession

If you’re already using tools like Instat or Sportscode, you know how powerful they can be. Hudl Academy is designed to help coaches get more out of the technology they already have, and confidently add what they don’t.

The Hudl Analyst Academy walks coaches through Instat, Sportscode, and the broader Hudl ecosystem, with clear, practical instruction on film workflow, tagging, breakdowns, and analysis that actually translate to winning. Free to enroll!

​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.

✉️ Storytelling in Coaching: Building Trust, Communication, and Culture​​

"Pulling insights from recent conversations with Philipp Humm and Claire Murphy, we explore how elite communicators use stories to connect, teach, and build teams that communicate under pressure."

✚ Additional Study Material:

• 🎧 Dr. Preston Cline - "Managing Uncertainty, Assessing Risk, and the Benefits of Humor"
• 🎧 Phillip Humm​ - "Storytelling Frameworks, Player Resistance, and Behavior Change"
• 🎧 Clare Murphy - "Shared Narrative, Connection, and Building Real Team Cohesion"

✉️ Attacking Switching Defenses: European Concepts from the NABC Final Four​

"Key takeaways from our presentation at the NABC Final Four in Indianapolis, where we explored how European teams are evolving their approach to attacking switches. Instead of relying on isolations, today’s best offenses are using spacing, timing, and seamless actions to create advantages within the flow."

✚ Additional Study Material:

• 🗞 NABC Session: Attacking a Switch​
• 🗞 Clyde Clears​
• 🗞 Right Corner Ghost Screens​

📩 Submit your Mailbag questions HERE, and keep an eye out for the next Mailbag episode dropping on YouTube.

Tactical

📺 Horns Guard Out - Clyde Clear​

"Using the Clyde Cuts to clear out an an empty side for a direct attack."

✚ Pair With: A Horns Guard Out into a Blind Pig, elbow touch to backdoor for an easy score.

🔒 SG Plus Content: Our multiple breakdowns on the Clyde {Slide) Cut on middle penetration and against a ballscreen switch.

🔒 Andrea Trinchieri - Cutting Non-Shooters​

"Andrea Trinchieri sharing his cutting philosophy on the perimeter, the better shooter stays, the weaker shooter cuts."

🔒 Pair With: An effective cut to punish a defender "Cracking Back" on the dunker off the corner.

🎧 Pair With: Our most recent podcast conversation with Coach Trinchieri on developing levels of aggression, your coaching eye and more!

🔒 SG Plus Content: Our breakdown on OKC Thunder's effectiveness in sending multiple cutters on penetration.

Interesting Reads

📚 On Boredom​

I use trains as an analogy for the training process for a number of reasons.

1. Trains are remarkably consistent
2. Trains are relatively slow moving but always reach their destination
3. Even with variance between cars, most trains are the exact same basic structures for long distances
4. Train-ing as a term seems to help orient athletes to the process-orientation we all want for them

📚 Top Performers are Pathologically Ambitious​

• Protect your attention: carve out deliberate space to work on projects. This might be a physical room (i.e. going into an office without your phone or distractions), it might be an inflexible 4 hour chunk of time each Saturday, etc.
• Like Jensen, Paul Graham has argued that determination requires some pain. You do have to be at least somewhat hard on yourself to offset the costs of cultivating discipline. But this compounds over time, so consistency is more important than severity.
• Build strong network effects: the city you live in and your social groups will shape your ambitions. Ambitious people should try to meet others like them in person. Could you move? Go to a new event?

📚 Favorite Naval Thoughts​

12. Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.

13. If you're not 100 percent into it, somebody else who is 100 percent into it will outperform you. And they won't just outperform you by a little bit—they'll outperform you by a lot because now we’re operating in the domain of ideas, compound interest really applies and leverage really applies.

15. Escape competition through authenticity.

22. The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level.

Quote of the Week

Thank you for reading and have a great week coaching,

Dan, Pat, and Eric

info@slappinglass.com