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 featured two different approaches to pace and offensive organization. Matt Majkrzak on scripting rotations, pace, and play calls. Kyle Bossier on Cal Poly’s Beautiful Game built around pace, space, connection, and player freedom. Read the newsletter HERE.

This Week at a Glance:

🔒 SG Plus Content: Mike Magpayo and Tim Fanning SoCal Coaches Summit Clinic Release!

🎧 Slappin' Glass Podcast: Justin Downer | Point Loma

🔑 The Practice Lab: Explore, Stabilize, Calibrate

🥇 Best of the Week: Ballscreen Defense​

Smart Wins and Identity First

We’re wrapping up our three-week rollout of this year’s SoCal Summit clinic replays on SGTV with two final presentations.

Last week, we featured Northern Illinois Head Coach, Matt Majkrzak {🔒}, and Cal Poly SLO Associate Head Coach, Kyle Bossier {🔒}. This week, we turn to Fordham Head Coach Mike Magpayo on using analytics, feedback, and language to find edges, and BYU Associate Head Coach Tim Fanning on building a defensive identity during a gold-medal summer.

We’ll start with Magpayo’s Smart Wins framework, then turn to Fanning’s lessons from leading the Netherlands U18 National Team to the FIBA U18 EuroBasket B title.

Smart Wins: Analytics, Language, And Principles Of Play

Coach Magpayo uses analytics without letting the numbers become the whole thing.

A lot of Fordham’s system traces back to his time working under current Stanford Head Coach Kyle Smith at Columbia, and the purpose is pretty simple: identify what matters, track it, and keep putting it in front of the players.

That was one of the main ideas from the clinic:

Analytics are not the strategy. They are a feedback system for making priorities visible, aligning language, and turning desired behaviors into daily habits.

The numbers help the staff reinforce what they want the team to become.

Measure the Behavior, Not Just the Outcome

One of the more interesting parts of Fordham’s approach is that they don’t only track whether a possession ended successfully.

They also pay attention to the behaviors that helped create the outcome.

A made or missed shot tells you what happened. Looking deeper at the passing, screening, spacing, rebounding, or defensive execution can tell you more about how it happened.

The idea is simple:

If you want a behavior to become part of your identity, make it visible.

Tracking Is A Coaching Tool

For Magpayo, the value of tracking is not simply collecting more information.

It is how quickly that information can be turned back into coaching.

When players know what is being evaluated, the numbers can reinforce habits, create competition, and help the staff identify where more attention is needed.

The larger takeaway: measure what matters, return the feedback quickly, and let the information help shape the basketball.

​SG+ members can watch Mike Magpayo’s entire Smart Wins presentation now on SGTV, including a deeper look at Fordham’s tracking system, practice feedback, lineup decisions, and principles of play.

Defense First, Identity Fast: Lessons from a Gold Medal Summer

BYU Associate Head Coach Tim Fanning drew heavily from his most recent summer leading the Netherlands U18 National Team, where the group won the FIBA U18 EuroBasket B championship.

With only a few weeks to prepare, much of Fanning’s clinic centered on a useful coaching question:

How quickly can you establish what your team is going to be about?

Defense First

For Fanning, the answer started with defense.

His reasoning went beyond simply wanting to be a good defensive team.

Defense can influence both ends. Creating turnovers produces better offensive opportunities, while practicing every day against an aggressive, connected defense forces the offense to improve as well.

Rather than trying to build an answer for every possible situation, the priority was to establish a clear defensive foundation players could understand and eventually adjust within.

The goal wasn’t to have an answer for everything. It was to know your answers well enough to adapt.

Identity Starts Immediately

Another major theme was how quickly team habits begin to form.

Fanning’s belief:

By the second practice, patterns are already being established.

Identity cannot be something a staff waits to address after the basketball has been installed.

The standards have to show up from Day One.

For Fanning, that means being specific about the few things the team is going to stand for, repeating them consistently, and connecting them to actual basketball behaviors.

Build Clarity Before Complexity

One of the larger takeaways from the clinic was the value of clarity.

Clear defensive rules. Clear language. Clear standards.

Fanning’s 1v1 defense is a good example: in the middle third, the rule was simple—take away the strong hand and force the ballhandler weak.

Zooming In: Fanning’s 1v1 drill gives players repeated reps taking away the strong hand and forcing the ballhandler weak. The simplicity helps turn a defensive rule into a habit players can carry into live play.

The larger lesson from Fanning’s clinic was not simply to “play harder” or “defend more.”

It was to decide what matters, make it specific, and coach it early enough that players can eventually carry it themselves.

​SG+ members can watch Tim Fanning’s entire Defense First, Identity Fast presentation now on SGTV.

The Learning Loop

Thoughts from Drew Dunlop in building The Practice Lab

Brick

Working with NOAH has helped paint a clearer picture of the relationship between arc, depth, and direction. And one thing has become increasingly obvious:

If you want to become a great shooter, you have to be able to shoot it straight.

This week, I was working with a player who was struggling with too much left-to-right variation. We started with our Paint the Rim series which is a competitive shooting drill for the first to complete the following:

Make one back rim.
One swish.
One left rim.
One right rim.
One front rim.

The goal is to intentionally explore different outcomes and develop a better feel for controlling the ball. But controlling the side-to-side misses was difficult. Instead of continuing to chase the outcome, I changed the problem.

We started adding rotation into the task and asked the player to figure out how to get organized quickly enough to still shoot the ball straight.

A few examples:

• Sprint outside the three-point line with your back to the basket, catch, jump-turn 180°, land and immediately shoot.
• Start with one shoulder facing the rim, then rotate 90° into the catch with either a jump or pivot before shooting.
• Take one dribble, wrap it around the body, then shoot.

And we scored it using our BSR scoring - 1 point for a rim make, 2 points for a swish, and 3 points for a BRAD.

Different starts. Different amounts of rotation. Same problem:

Can you find the rim and organize the shot quickly enough to send the ball straight?

Takeaway

Looking back, I probably had the order backward. I started by asking the player to intentionally control very specific outcomes with Paint the Rim. What seemed to help more was creating a problem that demanded the player find their own way to organize the shot.

No technical correction for exactly how to square up. No predetermined footwork. No instruction for where the ball needed to move. Just enough rotation to disrupt the starting position and a very clear intention:

Shoot it straight.

The variability came from the task. The stability had to come from the player. That was a great reminder that sometimes our job isn't to provide the solution. It's to make the problem clear enough that the player can start discovering one.

And in hindsight, Paint the Rim probably belonged after this exploration, once the player had developed a better feel for controlling direction.

Tinker

This has me thinking more about the order of practice. We often start with something controlled and gradually add variability. But maybe there are situations where flipping that sequence makes more sense.

Create variability first. Let the player search. Then narrow the task and ask for greater precision.

Explore, stabilize, calibrate.

I'm interested in playing with that sequence more, especially in shooting. Instead of using variability as something we add after a player has found the movement, maybe variability can sometimes be the thing that helps them find it in the first place.

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 Justin Downer | Point Loma

Point Loma Head Coach Justin Downer joins us this week for a detailed conversation on building an offense around decisions rather than predetermined actions.

Downer takes us through the four phases that organize Point Loma’s offense, how they identify their three greatest leverage points, and why their primary ball handlers learn to read the defender, the coverage, and eventually the help behind it.

We also explore a demanding practice environment built around productive adversity, the difference between correcting and competing, and why Point Loma highlights roles instead of defining them.

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

📺 Sending Traps - Ballscreen Defense​

"Coach Todd Simon on dictating terms in the PnR by forcing weak and varying aggressive traps, at the screen, before it arrives, or after the screener releases."

🔒 Pair With: Another advantage of forcing weak hand in the ballscreen is putting the on-ball defender in better position to contest midrange shots and runners when the ballhandler has to return to their dominant hand to shoot.

🔒 SG Plus Content: Our breakdown on how and why defenses can neutralize middle ballscreens by "Weaking" the ballhandler into the "Next" help on certain actions.

🔒 SG Plus Content: Another aggressive “Next” strategy: a quick show by the big with an automatic hit from the loaded-side defender.

Interesting Reads

📚 What I Learned from Executive Coaches in 5 Years​

Mentors give you their answers. Coaches help you find yours.

I didn’t need someone to tell me what to do. I needed someone to help me think, a sparring partner who could ask the questions I wasn’t asking myself...

That’s when coaching works best: when you sense you already know the answer, but you can’t quite reach it. They don’t hand you the answer. They change the angle until you can find it yourself.

📚 All Cultures Are Local​

Culture is the stable, organization-wide set of values and norms that shape meaning and experience. Climate is the local weather system a team lives inside day to day, shaped almost entirely by its leader and colleagues.

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📚 Time Is Not Enough: Exploring the Processes That Shape Team Psychological Safety​

Behaviors that foster a climate of psychological safety include interpersonal risk-taking, such as admitting mistakes or asking for help (Perrigino et al., 2021). These behaviors are not only outcomes of psychological safety but can also catalyze its development (Edmondson, 2004). In many teams, psychological safety begins to take shape when one or more members model openness or vulnerability. Whether such behaviors expand into a broader climate of psychological safety depends on how others respond. Supportive responses signal that such behaviors are acceptable and encourage further risk-taking, whereas dismissive or critical reactions suppress risk-taking and hinder the development of psychological safety.

Several studies underscore the importance of early team dynamics in shaping team psychological safety. Edmondson (2003) found that hospital teams engaging in early preparation around open communication and experimentation were more likely to speak up later. Similarly, Johnson and Avolio (2019) showed that initial levels of team psychological safety moderated the effects of conflict trajectories on team satisfaction via team identification. Nienaber et al. (2015) further highlight that reducing uncertainty early through trust-building interactions supports the foundation of psychological safety. Together, these findings suggest that early team behaviors lay important groundwork for the emergence of team psychological safety.

Quote of the Week

Thank you for reading and have a great week coaching,

Dan, Pat, Eric, and Drew

info@slappinglass.com