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

Happy Sunday and welcome all the new subscribers! We hope you're all enjoying a fun and entertaining opening weekend of March Madness.

March Madness Success: There are a ton of great coaches out there who've enjoyed success so far in March of this year. A big congratulations to Fairleigh Dickinson Head Coach, Tobin Anderson, for the historic upset of Purdue in being among the great stories so far. As many of you know Coach Anderson is a tremendous coach and sharer of the game and we were lucky to have him join us for a couple of events in the past. His thoughts on turning around programs, career growth as a coach, pressing, post game staff meetings, and much more were truly on point in our podcast episode with him HERE. 🎙

Congrats again to Coach Anderson and his staff, as well as all the other coaches who've led their teams to the post season 🔥

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ICYMI: Last weekend we explored how Joventut Badalona collapses of their opponent's 4-Man in order to be aggressive in ball screens with their 5-Men, plugging the short roll and keeping size at the rim. View the full breakdown HERE.

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Today at a Glance:

📺 SGTV: The Argentina Break 🔒 {SG Plus}

🎤 Slappin' Glass Podcast: Cheryl Reeve {Minnesota Lynx/Team USA}

🥇Best of the Week: ​​Corner Flare Initiating & Masking Pin Downs​

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Let's dive in...

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The Argentina Break

Whether a team runs Flex, Shuffle, "T Game", or any other form of screen-the-screener action, it's been proven over time to be a tried and true formula for helping a team generate high quality offensive advantages. As we discussed recently on the podcast with Coach Mark Alabakov, and subsequently with our look into his Modern Shuffle Offense, the value of initiating possessions with a rim threat followed by a screen to bring the shooter out to the ball has, and will continue to, flummox the most prepared defenses. Now factor pace into the equation and you have the Argentina Break...

Whether you want to call it a "transition", or "secondary" offense, being able to organize two scoring threats within eight seconds or less of a possession is almost always going to result in something good for the offense. It's well understood the benefits of a small screening a big to the rim, but what we particularly enjoy about the "Argentina Break" is its ability to capitalize on early defensive confusion as opponents attempt to locate their matchups and orient to the ball. Oftentimes, as shown above, this scramble leaves the Defensive Big exposed and vulnerable to getting caught in the screen.

Secondly, with any early possession small-big screen, defenses usually try to avoid the early switch, because it leaves good offenses plenty of time on the shot clock to attack the mismatch. So defenses who are reluctant to switch any of the "Argentina Break" screening action leave the shooter's defender with a tough choice to either 1) stay attached and hope the Big can get through or 2) try and bump the cutter and then recover back to the shooter coming off a pin down...

Zooming In: Focusing on spacing for a second, with this action it is important for the corner behind the screening action to be left empty, preventing any guard-to-guard "X" out rotations on the cross screen-down screen.

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Playing off the Pop - Corner Pin

What was fun to watch when putting this breakdown together was all the different screening variations that emerge out of the initial transition spacing and alignment, including how teams take advantage of that empty corner...

Zooming In: As shown above, a nice variation that Fenerbahce has in their repertoire is popping the trailer after the middle ballscreen and attacking through the 5-man screening the shooter out to that open corner.

These are just a few of our favorite wrinkles within the "Argentina Break," to see and learn much more about the execution of this transition offense including:

• Transition Alignment
• Cross Screen Reject Options
• Screening a Shooting Rim Runner
• Scores & Made FT Clapbacks
• Girona's Rescreen
• Stagger Screen Exits
• Huertas - Shermadini Reject

This week's newest Deep-Dive is now available for SG Plus members on SGTV...

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We're excited to partner with the terrific new analytics site, Hoopsalytics! Hoopsalytics is an affordable, easy-to-use, advanced basketball video and analytics system for coaches of all levels that allows you to create your own custom events and sets. Hoopsalytics then analyzes those custom events for you through video-linked stats, interactive shot charts, and other tools. There’s no programming required and is a fraction of the price of other systems out there today.

Slappin' Glass subscribers can try Hoopsalytics for free with your own team’s games, and save 25% on any purchase by using the discount code on the page https://hoopsalytics.com/glass/​

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Slappin' Glass Podcast

Four time WNBA Champion with the Minnesota Lynx and newly hired Head Coach of the USA WBB Team, Cheryl Reeve, joined us this week on the podcast to dive into some of the more fundamental elements of winning and coaching. In this enjoyable and wide-ranging conversation we explore the areas of:

• Building Toughness: In the first 20 minutes of the show we discuss Coach Reeve's thoughts on what truly makes tough teams and people. We explore her journey with teaching toughness throughout her career as well as the daily habits, drills, etc. that go into building the foundations that lead to physically and mentally strong teams. A great conversation from one of the best to ever do it.
• When and Where to Cut?: During "Start, Sub, or Sit?!" we return to an always thought provoking question..."how do you teach cutting?" Coach Reeve's Minnesota Lynx squads have historically been some of the best cutting teams in the WNBA, and we dove into read-based vs. system-based cutting, knowing your role, and much more.
• Teaching What You Know: Also during "SSS", we talk about the difficult times when a team just isn't executing or understanding a certain scheme or style of play, and what to do about it as a coach. In this segment Coach Reeve gives her thoughts on "teaching what you know" and a ton more. Great insights in this segment.

Listen to the entire conversation with Coach Cheryl Reeve here...

Listen Now!

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Tactical

📺 Yale - Corner Flare Slip Ghost​

"Yale confounds the defense with a blind flare screen out of the corner followed directly by a ghost screen 🤯"

✚ Pair With: Our Deep Dive on Manresa initiating their 5 Out offense with the corner flare.

✚ SG Plus Content 🔒: Our Deep Dives on Joventut Badalona initiating their 5 Out Delay with the corner flare and Sergio Scariolo's playbook with the Spanish NT.

📺 Tenerife - 3 Man Decoy • Pin Down​

"Tenerife doing Tenerife things. Entertaining the defense with a grand display of screening prowess to chase them off the scent of the real action, a simple pin down screen."

✚ Pair With: Tenerife's use of the flare screen after hand offs to free shooters.

✚ SG Plus Content 🔒: Our Deep Dive into how defenses are using the Next Help to defend off ball screens.

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Interesting Reads

📚 Psychological Paths of Least Resistance​

"Most people could not get out of bed in the morning if they were honest about how much of their future is unknown, hangs by a thread, or can be pushed in another direction by the slightest breeze. The solution is to eliminate doubt and uncertainty the moment they enter your head."

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📚 The Neuroscience of Trust​

"The neuroscience shows that recognition has the largest effect on trust when it occurs immediately after a goal has been met, when it comes from peers, and when it’s tangible, unexpected, personal, and public. Public recognition not only uses the power of the crowd to celebrate successes, but also inspires others to aim for excellence. And it gives top performers a forum for sharing best practices, so others can learn from them."

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📚 Bill Belichick Gives Rare, Valuable Insight Into Patriots' Process For Grading Draft Prospects​

"Not trying to be evasive about the grading and all that, but I would just say that we don't grade players like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That's just not, it's just not the way we do it. We use a combination of numbers, letters, colors and those things all have different meanings, depending upon what they would indicate about the player's circumstances or situation or whatever it is that involved the players... so it's just really the way we identify the player and tag the player that helps us classify. It's just too hard to generalize and give a player an 85 grade or whatever and then, like what does that mean? But if you can tag that grade, that number grade, whatever it is, with something that would indicate other things regarding injuries or how many schools he's been to or whether he was a transfer or if he came out early or if he switched positions or so forth and so on, played at a lower level of competition, I mean, there's dozens of things here that we could talk about. It becomes a pretty complex scale."

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Quote of the Week

Thank you for reading and have a great week coaching,

Dan and Pat

info@slappinglass.com

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