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 highlighted our previous work with Coach Dunlop and others on practice design and drill structure. Read the newsletter HERE.

This Week at a Glance:

🔒 SGTV's Newest Feature: The Practice Lab​

🎧 Slappin' Glass Podcast: Dave Collins on Anticipation, Shared Mental Models, and Blending Coaching Methods​

🎥 Hudl Spotlight: Connecting film, analytics, playlists, and FastModel data to improve assist rate.

🥇 Best of the Week: BLOB RIP Screens & Spain Exits​

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

Introducing The Practice Lab

A new SG+ space led by Drew Dunlop, built to help coaches connect concepts to the court.

That is the idea behind The Practice Lab, a new SG+ workshop led by Drew Dunlop and now available for members on SGTV.

The Practice Lab is a place for coaches to think, tinker, and take something back to their next session. The goal is not to hand coaches a script. It is to give them practical ideas they can shape around their own players, system, and practice needs.

At the highest levels of the game, staffs are not short on information. They have more film, scouting, coverages, actions, and development ideas than ever before.

The harder part is what comes next:

How do those ideas actually get taught, practiced, and carried into the game?

A concept can look clean on film.
A coverage can make sense in a meeting.
A skill can look sharp in a workout.

But the real test is whether players can read the moment and solve the possession when the defense changes, the spacing shifts, and the game stops following the script.

That is the space we’re excited to explore with The Practice Lab.

What Coaches Will Find

The starting point is simple:

What kind of problem do we want our players solving?

Each piece will look beyond the setup of a drill and ask:

What is this actually teaching?
What decisions does it create?
What cues are players learning to read?
How does it connect to the way we want to play?
How can it be progressed, regressed, or reshaped for different players, systems, or levels?

Many Practice Lab videos will include voiceover breakdowns from Drew, helping coaches see not just the activity itself, but the design behind it — what the drill is teaching, what decisions it creates, and what to watch for as players solve the problem.

For example, one of the first Practice Lab pieces, "Variable Shooting – Downhill Drive vs Pressure • Respace Shooting," looks at how a shooting activity can be shaped around more than the final shot. Drew unpacks the drive, the pressure, the relocation, the shot preparation, and the cues players are reading along the way, giving coaches a clearer view of the design underneath the activity.

To make the library easier to use, Practice Lab pieces will be organized through filters such as:

• Focus — the main area of development or concept being trained
• Group Size — from individual work to small-sided games and larger group environments
• Variability — how much randomness, change, and adaptability are built into the task
• Decision Density — how many reads, choices, and problem-solving moments players face inside the drill

The goal is not just to help coaches find a drill.

It is to help them find the right learning environment for the problem they are trying to solve, then reshape it in their own gym, with their own roster, on their own terms.

Why We’re Building It

Inside SG+, we spend a lot of time studying what the best teams are doing: how they create advantages, guard actions, develop players, and solve the changing problems of the modern game.

The Practice Lab gives us a place to ask the next question:

How do we bring those ideas to the floor?

If the film shows us the concept, The Practice Lab helps us think through the practice environment: what players need to see, what decisions they need to make, and how a coach can shape the task so the idea has a better chance to transfer.

That is the bridge we’re excited to keep exploring: from film study to the floor.

Why Drew Dunlop

Drew has consistently pushed how we think about practice design, player development, decision-making, and game transfer.

Every time we’ve worked with Drew, he has moved the question away from simply, “Is this a good drill?” and toward, “What is this environment actually teaching?”

That is what makes him such a strong fit to lead The Practice Lab. Drew sees the design underneath the drill: the information players are reading, the decisions being created, what the task invites or removes, and how it connects back to the game.

His perspective will help shape The Practice Lab into a space where coaches can study not only what to teach, but how to design environments where learning has a better chance to transfer.

The Practice Lab is not built to hand coaches scripts. It is built to give them raw material they can reshape in their own gym.

Explore The Practice Lab on SGTV

The first Practice Lab pieces are now live on SGTV for SG+ members, with more design breakdowns and teaching ideas being added in the weeks ahead.

Our hope is that it becomes a place staffs return to as they think through player development, team concepts, scout prep, small-sided games, and the daily work of helping players carry ideas into competition.

The work for coaches is not just finding better ideas. It is building the environments where players can learn them, adapt them, and own them when the game asks the question back.

🔐 Become an SG+ member to gain complete access to The Practice Lab today!

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.

🎙Dave Collins on Anticipation, Shared Mental Models, and Blending Coaching Methods

In this week’s episode, we’re joined by Dr. Dave Collins for a wide-ranging conversation on coaching, skill acquisition, practice design, and the importance of knowing when different methods fit.

As ecological dynamics, the constraints-led approach, cognitive science, and predictive processing continue to shape modern coaching conversations, Dave brings a balanced and practical lens to the discussion. Rather than treating any one approach as the answer, he pushes coaches toward a more useful question: what are we trying to achieve, with this group, in this moment, and why?

The conversation explores how coaches can blend different approaches across the season, from early skill development and player understanding, to building shared mental models, anticipation, team coordination, and decision-making under pressure. Dave also discusses the role of film, small-sided games, representative practice design, and the value of moving between “thinking slow” and “playing fast.”

We also dive into resilience, failure, and the “informed art” of coaching, including how coaches can design challenges, debrief effectively, and help players learn from both good and bad days without turning every setback into a vague motivational slogan.

For coaches interested in ecological dynamics, constraints-led coaching, cognitive science, predictive processing, player development, anticipation, practice design, and team learning, this episode offers a grounded look at how theory can become more useful inside real coaching environments.

What You’ll Learn

• How ecological dynamics, cognitive science, and predictive processing can all fit inside a coach’s toolkit
• Why the best coaching answer is often not “which method is best?” but “what does it depend on?”
• How coaches can build shared mental models within a team
• Why film still matters, even inside representative and constraints-led practice environments
• How to use small-sided games, whole-part-whole teaching, and purposeful practice design
• Why anticipation is shaped by experience, scouting, understanding, and focused attention
• How coaches can move players from “thinking slow” to “playing fast”
• Why resilience is often overused, misunderstood, and better treated as an outcome than a fixed trait
• How to design challenge, failure, and pressure without overwhelming players
• Why adaptive expertise may be one of the most important qualities for modern coaches

Listen to the entire episode below...

Together with Hudl

Hudl helps basketball staffs turn film into better decisions.

By connecting Sportscode, Hudl Instat, and Fastmodel tools like FastDraw, FastScout, and FastRecruit, Hudl brings video, scouting, recruiting, and game planning into one seamless workflow. Less time managing tools. More clarity in preparation, teaching, and evaluation, built for how college and professional programs actually operate.

For a deeper look at how these tools can support a program’s workflow, we broke down how we used the Hudl suite to connect film, analytics, player playlists, and FastModel data around one season-long point of emphasis: improving assist rate. You can watch the full breakdown HERE.

​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.

Tactical

📺 Late Clock BLOB • RIP Exits & Twirls​

"Playing off the early exit of the RIP Screener to set up another RIP screen lob or twirl screen opportunity."

✚ Pair With: Continuing to demonstrate the value of a hard rim cut off the RIP screen and the advantages and actions the offense can derive as a result.

🔒 SG Plus Content: Our Film Room breakdown with Arkansas State HC Ryan Pannone how he triggers his 5-Out Offense through the RIP Screen entry.

🔒 Spain Ballscreen - Corner Exit • Weakside Hammer​

"Exiting the stack screener over the corner screen to get to the weakside hammer screen."

🔒 Pair With: Deceptive use of the stack screen, clearing the side with a corner exit screen and fading the stack screener out before the roll or pop of the screener.

🔒 SG Plus Content: A multiple big transition offense concept with a rim-running 4-man turning a rim seal into a Spain ballscreen.

Interesting Reads

📚 Is the Modern NBA Breaking Its Stars?​

But the trends in this dataset are loud enough to cut through the noise and reveal a signal that is unmistakable and important: The NBA is in the midst of a leg plague, and a growing number of players are missing a growing number of games with lower-body soft-tissue injuries.

📚 Why Hobbies Are An Advantage, Not a Distraction​

One interesting study from a few years ago found that hobbies boosted self-efficacy (basically your belief in your own ability to succeed) specifically when the hobby was unrelated to what one already did at work. There are myriad other intriguing studies on the benefits of hobbies...

📚 Mapping the Structural Divide​

U.S. four-year colleges and universities face compounding pressures — demographic decline, fiscal stress, and artificial intelligence — that will reshape the sector over the next decade. This project maps where 1,556 institutions are structurally positioned across two dimensions, using federal data anyone can verify.

Quote of the Week

Thank you for reading and have a great week coaching,

Dan, Pat, Eric, and Drew

info@slappinglass.com