Game & Practice Management

Before any team can exploit the rules, it must know the rules. To that end, I recommend that coaches serve as referees during scrimmages, which should be the primary activity at practices. In this way coaches will become intimately and practically familiar with what referees do during games. This will enable them to converse or dispute, as the case may be, with the officials during games. They should have personal copies of the current official rules and learn exactly how they are worded and what they mean and imply, including the ambiguities and uncertainties they contain. 

It is one thing for a coach to run "ladder drills," also called "suicides," and other various drills, and thereby exhaust the players, and something else entirely to run fast-paced scrimmages. What is the difference? The difference is that scrimmaging is playing basketball, and playing basketball is fun. Drills are not fun. And a player's style and stamina develop and are esteemed differently in the context of fun than in the context of drudgery. When a coach orders a time-out in a game, why must he always the proceed to use that time to lecture his players and diagram plays? Why doesn't he, at least occasionally, attend to other business, such as conversing with officials or other coaches, and simply allow his five to rest and contemplate and catch their breath? By lecturing them, isn't he implying that he knows better than they do what needs to be done to securate advantage, which a) sometimes may not be the case, and b) even if he does know better, he is making puppets of his players, demoralizing them, by taking away from them their own initiative -- devaluing their own immediate ideas and impulses that come to mind in the midst of the unforeseeable action on the court. Instruct the players at practices before and after games, but let them play according to their own lights in the actual games. 

Passing

The basketball regime for the developing player is such that he is made to seem to be incompetent if his first inclination is to pass the ball. Unfortunately, effective team play and proper interaction of team members on offense require a pass-first mentality among all team members. If one player among the five does not share this mentality, but instead chooses to attempt to dribble and shoot primarily, he spoils the fun for the team. 

Reader, do not think that you can contradict these words by reference to numerous experiences of your own in pickup games or by reference to common practice in televised basketball. I know full well that you invariably find the supposedly "better" players doing most of the dribbling and shooting while the made-to-seem-"lesser" players are reduced to supporting roles. All teams playing by that type of "star" system are in my view playing basketball according to a defective and mediocre paradigm. Any player who is seeking to outshine his teammates is suppressing the ideal of interaction and cooperation and mutual support and reinforcement that alone can produce the greatest effectiveness at winning games. Players who seek to "do it all by themselves" are stifling and destroying efforts by other players to give and receive the glory that can be so much greater when no single player is demoralizing his teammates. Passing is the sign and the mode of teamwork on offense. 

Passing II

NBA teams have hired employees who apparently rebound shots and pass the ball to a player who is practicing his shooting. I have at least 3 objectives or criticisms of this. 

It indicates or implies that to develop one's shooting is more important than to develop passing skill. To have another player doing the rebounding and returning would allow that other player to practice all sorts of passing techniques from all the varied places where the ball is rebounded to. 

By practicing to develop an identical, repeatable shooting form you are a) boring your intellect, which considers it has learned how to shoot at earlier developmental levels and b) reinforcing the familiarity whit missing shots, which is likely to prevent the development of unerring shooting -- that is to say, never missing a shot in game contexts, or especially in "clutch" contexts, which is the ideal. While the shooter may be said to be practicing jump shots, the prevailing norm that I observe is that these are actually set shots, by which I mean that the player's body is not moving at all in any lateral direction when he shoots. 

I have learned that the fun and joy and pleasure of shooting practice -- though no doubt readers will not get me yet on this point -- is taking shots on the move and making the rough calculation of how much the aim must be adjusted to compensate for the drift of the motion imparted to the ball.