Slappin’ Glass sits down with the Head Coach of Telekom Baskets Bonn in Germany’s BBL, Tuomas Iisalo. The trio discuss playbook design, how to build and maintain advantages, and talk handling pressure and unconventional leaders during the always fun “Start, Sub, or Sit?!”
Inside the Episode
“Most of it is dictated by understanding what type of advantage we’re dealing with. This is something that came from soccer and positional play, that you can have a numerical advantage, you can have a qualitative advantage, or you can have a positional advantage. We’ve translated them into… you can have numbers, the second one is, ‘do you have a matchup that works for you?’, and then the last one is the action.”
This week we were joined on the podcast by on of our favorite coaches in Europe, the Head Coach of Telekom Baskets Bonn, Tuomas Iisalo. Coach Iisalo’s teams brings a unique, detailed, and disciplined style of play to the floor and we were happy to explore a variety of interesting topics with him including…
- Building a Playbook: From preseason study and planning, to first week practices, implementation, midseason adjustments, and more, we dove into the interesting topic of structuring and building out a playbook. Coach Iisalo discussed how he starts a season, when he installs plays, and building out actions from similar alignments.
- Understanding Advantages: Coach Iisalo talked about his theory of building and maintaining advantages and how he helps his players understand when and how to use them. He also dives into the different types of advantages a team can create and how they work on recognizing them.
- Functional Units: No two PNR’s or 2-Man Games are the same, and Coach Iisalo discussed how he thinks about pairing certain members of his team together in those situations, as well as how they work with them in a practice setting. So, for example… pairing a Post who can Pop with a Guard who can really attack the rim to put pressure on the defense in both directions at the same time.
- How Bonn Practices: Coach Iisalo was kind enough to go into detail explaining what a typical practice may look like from beginning to end, including stretching, breakdowns, drills, and practice philosophy.
- Teaching “Closeout” Decisions: We spoke about the different ways that Coach Iisalo teaches “Closeout Decisions” and the types of actions they look to play from once a closeout is created. A terrific segment from Coach Iisalo on how to reverse engineer an offense.
“Start, Sub, or Sit?!”
We had a lot of fun and some great conversations during the “Start, Sub, or Sit?!” segment with Coach Iisalo, where (off the cuff) we gave him three choices on a topic and ask him to Start one, Sub one, and Sit one. Here were the Topics and Choices, you can listen to the episode to hear Coach Iisalo’s choices and explanations…
- Topic #1 – “Tough to Teach” – Most Difficult Concept to Teach Players When it Comes to Handling Pressure
- Choices:
- Inbounding the Ball Against Pressure
- Making Late-Game Free Throws
- Handling a Trap
- Choices:
- Topic #2 – “Using Non-Shooters on the Perimeter”
- Choices
- As a Screener
- As a Cutter
- As a Facilitator of a 2nd Action ( Tangent: Why Coach Iisalo prefers to stay away from DHOs)
- Choices
- Topic #3 – “Actions for the Inbounder on a SLOB”
- Choices
- An immediate rim/45 cut for the inbounder
- Setting a Flare for the inbounder
- Sending the inbounder of an immediate DHO
- Choices
- Topic #4 – “Unconventional Leaders”
- Choices
- A Rookie Starter
- The 7th or 8th Man
- A Veteran Bench Player
- Choices