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’s breakdown looked at using the wide reject as an ICE solution, holding the big in coverage while triggering layered weakside screening actions away from the ball. Read the newsletter HERE.

This Week at a Glance:

🔒 SG Plus Content: Zoom DHO - Early Pitch & Slip​

🎧 Slappin' Glass Podcast: Jeremy Shulman {UT Martin}

🔑 The Practice Lab: Brick, Takeaway, Tinker

🥇 Best of the Week: Corner Exits & Princeton Point​

But first...

SG+ Pricing Update Coming July 1st

For coaches considering SG+, a quick heads up: for the first time since launching Slappin’ Glass five years ago, SG+ membership pricing will be updated beginning July 1.

SG+ gives coaches access to our full teaching library, Practice Lab, Deep Dive articles, Coaches Corner community, and SG SoCal Summit live event + replays.

Current SG+ pricing is available through June 30.

Beginning July 1, membership pricing will increase to:

Half-Year Membership: $149 → $199
Full-Year Membership: $249 → $299

Get Out!

*A big thank you to Coach Ben Ostrow for his contributions to today's Deep Dive.

When the ballscreen revolution took over basketball, it felt hard to imagine another two-player action rivaling it in usage or importance to offense.

Then came the handoff.

Handoffs added a different layer to the two-player game, allowing the receiver to set up their defender before catching the ball on the move. For a long time, though, the handoff was often treated as a safe and predictable exchange: a big standing with the ball, gently presenting it like a waiter with a tray of drinks, waiting for the guard to come take it and do the heavy lifting.

That version is disappearing.

As defenses have gotten better at containing handoffs, offenses have started to evolve the action beyond a simple exchange. The trigger player is no longer just a stationary passer. They are reading coverages, changing the timing and location of the delivery, and adjusting their angles to create cleaner scoring or driving windows for the receiver.

We have already seen this evolution show up in a number of ways:

To prevent the under, we have seen bigs deliver the ball slightly earlier and adjust down {🔒}.

Against the growing trend of the the growing trend of the "DHO Deny & Under." {🔒} The big leads the receiver into space, then swivels their hips and occupies the area below the exchange, creating a bigger obstacle as the defender tries to recover.

For shooters facing hard chases, denials, or defenders trying to stay attached over the top, the Hook DHO {🔒} offers another adjustment. Instead of a standard delivery, the big dribbles under the shooter’s approach, hooks back to change the angle, and creates a cleaner shooting window.

The common thread is that these are not traditional handoffs where the receiver simply takes the ball directly out of the big’s hands. The ball is being delivered more dynamically, giving the big a chance to make a secondary movement that either creates or builds on an advantage.

This week’s SG+ breakdown looks at another layer inside Zoom action.

Zoom is already difficult to guard because the initial pin down can create separation before the handoff ever happens. But the best offenses are not just running the action to completion. They are reading the advantage as it develops and finding ways to attack before the defense has time to recover.

Inside the full breakdown, we look at how a small timing adjustment inside Zoom can turn the receiver’s separation into a much bigger problem for the defense.

Inside the full SG+ breakdown:

• How the initial pin down changes the timing of the handoff.
• Why the trigger player’s read is often more important than the handoff itself.
• How one adjustment can stress drop, at-level, and switching coverages in different ways.

At its core, this concept is about a larger offensive question: when the advantage is already forming, do we really need to wait for the action to finish?

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

The Learning Loop

Thoughts from Drew Dunlop in building The Practice Lab

One Brick. One Takeaway. One Tinker.

A mentor once told me, “The day you stop learning is the day it’s time to retire.”

That has stuck with me.

So each week, I’ll use this space to share three things:

One Brick: something I missed, messed up, or had to work through.
​One Takeaway: a lesson learned or belief reinforced.
​One Tinker: something I’m still trying to better understand, teach, or design.

The idea is simple: show more of the work behind the work.

Not just the clean clips or the finished thoughts, but the misses, adjustments, failed assumptions, and small things that helped move an idea forward.

So, each week: one brick, one takeaway, and one thing I’m tinkering with.

Brick

Recently, we were working with a professional player who was struggling to shoot pull-up 3s out of pick-and-rolls using a vertical drop/hop instead of their preferred 1-2 footwork.

We started on air.

Different dribbles.
Different entries.
Repetition after repetition.

The problem was that the player became consumed with the movement itself.

Drop. Load. Jump.
Drop. Load. Jump.

The more reps they got, the worse it seemed to get.

So we called an audible.

We added a screener, an on-ball defender, and a screen defender. Every rep started from a different location. The player had 8 seconds to create an advantage 3, while the defense mixed in drop, switch, and under coverages.

Almost immediately, the footwork started to appear.

Not because we coached it harder.

Because the environment demanded it.

Takeaway

One of my biggest coaching mistakes has been assuming that more reps of a movement will solve the problem.

Often, the opposite is true.

To borrow from Rob Gray’s work in skill acquisition and motor learning, it’s about conditions, not positions.

The moment we shifted the player’s attention away from the mechanics and toward solving a basketball problem, the movement began to self-organize.

The solution emerged because the environment invited it.

Less teaching.
Better conditions.

Tinker

Something I’m thinking about heading into the offseason:

How do we better teach players to create passing windows?

Most players understand spacing and relocation. Far fewer understand how to become available when a defender is denying, sitting in a gap, or occupying a strong position.

Creating a passing window feels like a hidden skill, similar to screening. Everyone benefits from it, but very few players intentionally develop it.

How do we design environments that help players adjust their positioning, change angles, manipulate their defender, and become an actual target for the ball?

I’m not sure I have a great answer yet, but it’s a problem I’m excited to keep exploring.

Together with the 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.

🎙Jeremy Shulman on Defensive Tradeoffs, Uniqueness as a Strength, and Attacking the Hedge {UT Martin}

This week on the podcast we were joined by UT Martin Head Coach Jeremy Shulman for a wide-ranging conversation on defensive tradeoffs, switching, building a system around what you believe, and attacking hedge coverage.

In our post interview wrap-up, we tried to pull out a few of the bigger coaching ideas from the conversation...

A few thoughts from our wrap-up with Jeremy Shulman...

• The biggest takeaway was not what UT Martin does defensively, but why they do it. Switching, containing, and putting two on the ball only work because they are tied to a clear belief system.
• Shulman’s best point may have been that rotations do not have to be something a defense avoids. If you train them every day, they can become the strength.
• The hedge conversation was a good reminder that every solution creates the next problem. Flip the screen, RAM the big, re-screen the hedge — all can work, but only if the offense understands what coverage they are trying to create next.
• In the modern roster-building era, trust might be the hardest thing to build quickly. Identity can be stated early. Cohesion can grow. But trust has to hold up when roles, money, agents, and pressure enter the room.

Listen to the full conversation with Jeremy Shulman now on Slappin’ Glass.

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

📺 Swing Entry - Flex • Corner Exit​

"Running a shooter off the flex screen to hold the defense at the rim, then using the corner exit screen to space around the ballscreen."

🔒 Pair With: A clever after FT set to roll a shooting forward off the drag screen into a corner exit screen.

🔒 SG Plus Content: Our recent breakdown on using the corner exit screen as spacing solution around the double drag ballscreen.

🔒 5 Out Delay - Swing Away • Point Series ​

"Blending 5 Out spacing with princeton point to create dynamic scoring and screening opportunties at the elbows."

🔒 Pair With: Rejecting the elbow split screen off the Point entry to clear a side for the inverted PNR at the elbow.

🔒 SG Plus Content: Our Film Room session with Coach TJ Saint on the Dribble Point offense.

Interesting Reads

📚 Why Watching Sports Makes People Happy​

What they found was that attending a live match significantly boosted some measures of well-being. “Attending a live sporting event was associated with a greater sense that your life is worthwhile,” Keyes says. Life satisfaction went up, and loneliness diminished. They found that attending a live event had an even greater impact on people’s sense that life was worth living than whether they had a job or not.

📚 What Can a Person Learn in 10 Minutes that will be Useful for Life?​

Spread your fingers out as far as possible and measure the distance from side of thumb to other side of pinky. Remember that measurement. You can use this to roughly measure things on the go if needed...

Before responding in an argument, scan your body and take a slow nasal breath to notice fight or flight before you speak. Then speak calmly.

📚 'This is Our Culture': Japan Fans Clean up World Cup Stadium​

Sociologist Ohsawa said such behaviour could be explained by what Japanese people refer to as "reading the air".

"In Japan, even if one person starts picking up litter, those around them feel they simply cannot help but join in," he said.

"That's because if they don't, the people they are with will think they are a bad person."

He said peer pressure was a powerful social force.

Quote of the Week

Thank you for reading and have a great week coaching,

Dan, Pat, Eric, and Drew

info@slappinglass.com