Ben McCollum on PNR Pace and Angles, Player Constraints, and Stats that Matter {Iowa}

Transcript

Ben McCollum 00:00

We try to teach them what they are great at. And so naturally, we want you to do that all the time.

If it gets to a point where they can’t figure out that this is what I’m great at and they think they’re good at everything, the best thing you can do for a player at that point is to constrain them, just so freeing for them. Because now it’s like, I can do this and I can stick with this one thing all of the time. You do kids a disservice by wanting them to be too versatile in things that they’re just average at. 

Dan 00:41

I’m Dan Krikorian and welcome to Slappin’ Glass, exploring basketball’s best ideas, strategies, and coaches from around the world. Today, in our December Rewind Series, we’re revisiting one of our favorite conversations with then-Northwest Missouri State head coach, and now Drake head coach, Ben McCollum. In this unique and insightful conversation, we explore Coach McCollum’s thoughts on playing at a methodical but efficient pace, and we talk five-on-five constraints and stats that matter during the always fun Start, Sub, or Sit.  And now, please enjoy our conversation with Coach Ben McCollum. 

Dan 02:14

Coach we were talking a little bit before, but we want to dive in with your views on pace, possessions, pace of play, and I’ll kind of preface it with you guys are the national champs last year, but your pace of play was one of the slowest in the country, and it’s an interesting stat in an era of, you know, playing fast and everybody pacing space and getting a lot of shots up for you guys to be as good as you have been and to play at a more methodical pace is an interesting thing just to ask you about and something we wanted to kind of kick the show off with is just your view and your thoughts on how fast or methodical you all play on a possession to possession basis. 

Ben McCollum 02:52

There were a few series, I guess, behind it for us. It originally started, we were a big defensive team and still feel like we are. And that would be where I like to personally hang my hat on. And we’re trying to figure out how can we be even better defensively.And we thought, okay, well, if we make ourselves better offensively, our defense will be better because we can set our defense. And if we’re more efficient with our offense, then we can set our defense even more. And then you have to be more efficient on the offensive end. And eventually it just adds up to where we’re able to gain that advantage defensively and offensively because we’re forcing efficiency. Part of being good offensively is being able to score on the best teams in the country. And so our objective was to always finish in first place. And we felt like if we faced a really good team, that you cannot score easy buckets in transition. So we naturally felt like what’s the point in sprinting the floor when we can’t get baskets in transition anyway against a really good team. And then it always goes to a half court game in the postseason regardless, because you always see late in the season, postseason, every game is always played low possessions. And we want to be able to win those games. So our thought was if we practice that way, all year long, then eventually we’ll be able to play that way. And that’s how it started. We ended up getting very, very efficient offensively. And so we wanted to make sure that we continue to protect our offense, not taking quick shots, not bailing the defense out. And so the pace naturally trended that direction. It was never intentional to play, I guess, that slow, but it was intentional to not play super fast and to try to waste time and practice sprinting the floor when we knew, again, against the best teams. We’re not going to be able to get those anyway. 

Dan 04:50

Coach, I wonder for you how much the talent of your point guard plays into the type of pace that you want to play overall. I mean, you’ve had back to back two great point guards in your program, Justin Pitts and Trevor Hudgens, as far as just wanting the ball in their hands versus pushing it, finding other people to play through as far as when it comes to that pace. 

Ben McCollum 05:12

I definitely think that makes a big difference. Those guys understand pace of play too. And they understand ball control. They understand, get the great shot, not just a good shot. They understand, make sure that you get paint before we take a shot, those things. And the other thing is, is I play what, six, seven guys. So you can’t play at that frenetic pace when you’re playing very few people. And I don’t think you can be quite as efficient playing multiple guys. Now, if I had a team that didn’t have that dominant type of point guard, would I play a little bit faster to see if I could get some cheap ones? Would I try to keep the defense on their heels, meaning play more at like a 70% clip basically, so that we’re going against a non-set defense then flow into our, what I call our flow anyway, move into our flow a little bit quicker so that we can have more time, maybe, but we haven’t had to do that at that point. 

Pat 06:09

Coach, on a missed shot, maybe early in the season, are you defining if it’s a long miss? Can we get an easy basket?Let’s go explore it. Or is it always missed shot, like find the point guard and let’s, like you say, continue just to play methodically, keep our pace where we want it, where you think it benefits you offensively and defensively. 

Ben McCollum 06:26

We will score in transition if you give us a chance, meaning I think our points per possession in transition, we’re number one in the country because we don’t do it very much. But no, you know, if it’s a long rebound, we’re getting into our point guard and we’re going to run what we run, which is our ocean ball screen offense. Or we’ll call some type of set depending upon what the defense is doing. But we don’t ever want to play at that high tempo, high speed pace just because, again, I think efficiency is more important when you want to beat the best teams. Now, can we get easy stuff against the bottom of our league if we decided we wanted to run? Yeah, absolutely. And would it make it easier to beat those teams? Yes. But you waste a lot of practice time on something that doesn’t help you beat the best. I think that once we get into the half court, things come at you very, very fast, though, whereas a lot of teams will just run fast and shoot fast. What we try to do is play fast in the half court. So everything comes at you really quickly. We try to get you in rotation very, very early and then try to keep you there. And so that would probably be a little bit of the differences between those. But now we don’t have any interest in trying to get you down the floor and trying to get easy layup. 

Pat 07:39

Another thing you said that was interesting coach is that you usually you have a six to seven man rotation again kind of a philosophical question of just why you prefer or maybe it’s just how it happened naturally kind of a smaller rotation?

Ben McCollum 07:51

So We accidentally did it. We used to go a little bit deeper seven, eight years ago and we had good teams. One year, I think we won the national title. Our first national title, we went, I wanna say eight, maybe even to nine deep. And then we lost a lot of that class and we ended up only having 11 on our roster. And so we went into the season and I wasn’t sure we were gonna be very good. We had two freshmen, Trevor Hudgens was one of them and then Diego Bernard was our other guard that we started as well. And we just did it because we didn’t have anybody else to play essentially.

And so those six or seven, but what I noticed because of the low numbers, I’m not only on the team but the guys that we played is I was a better coach for those six or seven. Because if one of those seven was not ready to go, there wasn’t the fear of the bench, the cheap motivational fear. Now I had to be a better coach. I had to be a better motivator to make sure that, hey, maybe Trevor’s not real, Trevor was always ready to go, but let’s just use Trevor as an example. Maybe Trevor’s not ready to go today. I have to be good enough as a coach to motivate him to want to go today because the fear of sitting on the bench isn’t there. And so I noticed that I was a little bit better coach. The second part of that is there was a lot more continuity within our offense because guys understood their roles. They never branched out of them. And they always knew who was coming in and what their role was. And so there wasn’t a lot of that where you see people not able to flow with each other. We were able to do that quite easily because of the lack of players that we played. 

Pat 09:34

Coach, you talk about it made you a better motivator. I’m curious, so maybe on the flip side of the coin, though, with your 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th man who aren’t going to get very many minutes, how are you motivating them, especially obviously you need them in practice? I mean, they’ll have moments during the season. 

Ben McCollum 09:51

That’s a good question. So we won’t always necessarily play seven. That’s what we’ve played the last, I guess, four seasons. But it’s whoever we think can play and that we trust will get to play. And so how do you motivate them? I guess they probably see the success of the guys that play and it motivates them to try to beat them out and will allow them to get beat out throughout the season. You’re just going to have to do it. And we get kids that naturally have that competitive spirit that want to fight for positions. So the motivation piece of it isn’t all that difficult. Our practices are pretty fun, probably helps because we play a lot of five on five. So you get a lot of opportunities to try to beat them out. And then we’ve been fortunate enough to win a lot. And so we get kids that would rather win than play a considerable amount of minutes. That would be the ways we motivate them in today’s culture.

It’s probably more difficult because everybody wants to play right away. They want the credit. They want those things. We try to identify kids in the recruiting process that want to compete and want to fight for their spot and understand that sometimes when they don’t get what they want, that might help them more than even playing. One example of that would be me when I played. So I played junior college for two seasons was an all conference kid. Felt like I was a pretty good junior college kid and then came to Northwest Missouri State. And my first four games of my career here as a junior college transfer, I didn’t play a second. And then after that, I earned my way through and ended up for my career, probably playing 10 to 15 minutes a game ish. And and we’re on a twenty nine and three team and another team that I think won the league or tied for winning the league. I learned more fighting for my spot and understanding the value of guys that play 10 to 15 minutes a game, their impact on the team than I would have had I come and played 35 minutes a game. So motivate those guys. They’re going to learn a lot about life through basketball. And that’s part of it. 

Dan 11:57

Coach, kind of on this same theme, I’ve heard you speak before on your player development process and how players come in from freshmen to ultimately getting into that top seven or eight. And really how they focus on their strengths and not trying to do things that they’re not capable of doing. Could you speak on that a little bit about your thoughts on basically player development at your level or in your program? 

Ben McCollum 12:19

Player development for us is teaching kids how to play. I think too often, we go in and we, you know, try to teach them multiple moves, you know, multiple different finishes, which is great, you know, all those different things, and they can’t apply it to a game. And so then they call that player development, you know, it’s a we got a development coach and look at these really cool drills that he does. Yeah, but can the head coach teach you how to play the game of basketball? And if you can teach somebody how to play and understand IQ and feel and what shots to take and what shots not to take and what passes to make and what reads to make. That’s development, in my mind, more so than the cool drills that college coaches sell in the recruiting process of we’re going to really develop you as a player.

Yeah, we really think you can move to a five to a two. Well, he can’t shoot, he can’t dribble, but he doesn’t pass great. So he can’t really move positions like that. Now, can he be the best five because he can finish well, and he understands cutting and those sort of things? Yeah, but he’s got to play towards those strengths. So for our development, that’s what we’ve always tried to do is if a kid can shoot, we want him to shoot all the time, and we teach him the spots that he can get a shot. He can cut, he can pass, we want him to pass. And then they understand the game of basketball, which naturally makes it seem like they develop. The other part that we try to develop is from a defense perspective, being able to move their feet, kind of that physicality defensively, which helps a ton. You saw that with like Ryan Hawkins, who ended up going to Creighton for us, you know, he shockingly developed throughout his career. And I think that was a little bit of physical development. If there’s one skill that we would teach outside of just getting a lot of shots, it would be the ability to stop when you drive. We’re big believers in how you stop, when you stop, and what to do when you stop. 

Dan 14:10

Coach, if you don’t mind, could you just go into that a little bit more on that philosophy and where and how you want to teach those guys to stop? 

Ben McCollum 14:18

There’s a variety of ways to do it. I think like Jay Wright has a bunch of videos on how they stop pretty similar to that where there’s stride stops, there’s jump stops. Again, our objective is to get paint once you get there, try to figure out what you can do with that. But what a lot of teams do is they drive and they drive so hard to score, which we’re going to score as well.

But the number one objective is to get two on the ball. If you get two on the ball, that’s the ball. And the only way you can pass the ball is if you stop is our theory. And so we want to make sure that you stop once you attract two to the ball and then get off the ball so that you’re driving under control. 

Dan 14:52

Staying on your offense since we’re here already, you mentioned when we were talking about your pace in transition and then that you quickly want to get to the half court and create an advantage or put a team into rotation by some kind of action. Can you talk a little bit about that then? If you’re not overly concerned about transitioning quickly, but you are concerned about quickly getting into some kind of advantage creating action in the half court, can you talk about that a little bit? 

Ben McCollum 15:19

So our offense, when we come down the floor, we either, depending upon the defense, we’re going to come down the floor and either just start with our motion ball screen right away, where we just set a ball screen. And initially, we may get a rotation right away. If we don’t, then we don’t want to just pass into another pick and roll. It needs to come at you fairly quickly.  So the flow should, again, go extremely, extremely fast and the next screen should come. If we’re going against more of a packed in defense, then we may need to run some type of set to essentially break your shell. We say as your shell defense, if we can break your shell quickly, we can get you to overreact once you overreact, then hopefully we’ll get off the ball quick enough, get off the ball quick enough, then we’ve got you in rotation. If we get you in rotation, we got a chance at a quality shot and a chance at a no board and a chance to set our defense. If you don’t do that quick enough, the defense does set a little bit too much, meaning when you do play a slower tempo, it doesn’t mean that you come down and you start your possession at 20 seconds and that we want limited possessions. We don’t want limited possessions. Our efficiency is off the charts. That’s not what we’re trying to go for. What we don’t want is early average shots. And we want to start our possessions very, very quickly so we can work that entire shot clock, make you defend, and see if we can get you in rotation. But sometimes it takes a little bit longer with better defenses. 

Dan 16:51

A quick scheduling note here on the podcast. Over the last couple of years, we’ve heard from coaches that sometimes it can be difficult to keep up with the show week to week as the season is in full swing. As coaches ourselves, we understand the frenetic pace of travel, practice, and games that takes place during the year, which is why we’ll be moving to our new seasonal scheduling in 2025. In this new scheduling, we’ll release two episodes a month during the basketball season, and then we’ll be back for a regular four month in the off season.

As always, thanks for being a listener and supporter of the show. And now back to our conversation. One thing when watching your teams play that sticks out is just the interesting angles and the amount of ball screens that you all set and how well your bigs end up switching angles, slipping out of screens, popping, making all those decisions. And I guess your thoughts on angles of screens and teaching guys how to switch and kind of mix up their angles.

Ben McCollum 17:53

Good question. So we’ve always thought, what I say is complicate the simple. So a screen is a very simple thing. But the trick to it is if you can complicate that one screen and set it 50 different ways, that makes you difficult to defend. What most teams do is that one screen doesn’t work. Let’s say it’s just a slot ball screen. They set it to the inside. Shoulder square to the sideline. That one doesn’t work. OK, now let’s change plays and let’s do something different. What we would rather do is change the angle of the screen, changes the whole play. And so we say complicate the simple. And so that simple screen can be set hundreds of different ways based on the depth, based on the angles, based on who’s setting it, based on who’s coming off it, based on who’s defending it. And one screen can be that dangerous if you’re creative enough to complicate it. 

Pat 18:48

 Depending on who’s coming off the screen, what are the factors that will influence and how you want that screen being set? If, you know, it’s a shooter, if it’s a driver, or if it’s a more of a passer, I guess, how does those factors determine then what screen you’re going to want to set. 

Ben McCollum 19:05

And then it depends on the defense too. So there’s a lot of factors in it. For screening teaching points, it would be forced the over. So if you can force the over and everybody hears it and everybody says it and everybody, and it’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. That’s it, force the over. And you force the over. So let’s just say it’s a driver. You said it’s a driver, right? Driver’s coming off, depends on the coverage. If it’s an aggressive coverage, there’s two on the ball. If there’s two on the ball, get off the ball. We don’t wanna obviously set and stay in the screen not too long because we need to get out of the ball. If it’s a drop coverage because it’s a driver, then you’ve gotta probably change where you actually set the screen to make sure that you can get a two on one downhill because we wanna get to the rim off of that. If it’s a shooter that sets it, then you can’t be in drop, then they gotta be up in a switch. So at that point, you try to confuse the switch and there’s a variety of ways you can do that as well. It’s so dependent and this is why I say complicate the simple and you can set it in a million different ways because I can’t just give you one scenario. Everybody else can give you one scenario and they can say, okay, it’s a driver, it’s this. This is what we could do. But I have to know everything in regards to the defense, who’s defending it offensively, setting it. What do they do? Who’s coming off of it? Where’s it set? What’s their base defense? Is it more compact? And then kind of going through all those progressions and then figuring out, okay, this is how we’re gonna set the one screen rather than changing play. 

Pat 20:33

And maybe coach, the better question I should ask is, you know, watching your team play, again, it goes back to kind of the pace is you guys are very methodical with how you set the screen. I mean, I guess the best way I can describe it is you’ll see like the screen will kind of hover until he figures out the angle or the right screen to set and then he sets it. So is that something during the flow of the game, you’ll tell the guys how you want the screen or have you worked with the guys so they know how to kind of figure it out in that possession. 

Ben McCollum 21:01

So we’ve talked them. So prior to a game, okay, so we’ll go into a game versus somebody in, and we’ll figure out exactly what coverage they may be in. So let’s just use our national type. We knew that they were going to be in drop coverage. And we knew that their guards were super athletic. I mean, they were mid to high major type athletes on Trevor in our ball screens. We also probably figured that the seven footer was probably not going to guard one of our pop threats. We assume that he put them on one of our guards, because two of our guards didn’t shoot threes. And so we knew that we’re going to have to set the ball screen with one of those guards. And we’re going to probably have to play hit backs or two on one because it’s going to be more of a drop to be able to get Trevor a little bit of freedom to be able to score.

So in order to screen that defender, we had to figure out, okay, this defender is going to force him more, this defender is going to try to bully and get through a little bit quicker. This one’s a little bit slower, etc, etc. And so we figured out how we’re going to be able to screen them that game, we wanted to actually screen them and make sure that we got clean. And then once we were able to screen them, we didn’t necessarily want to just get downhill every single time and play two on one, we did some, but some we might want to play some hit backs, some we might want to just get off the ball, get somebody else to come off the screen and come back to it. But yeah, going into that game, we were wanting to dictate exactly how we set that screen, because we need to make sure we got a screen. And if you just run out and screen, they’ll just go under quick. That’s not what we necessarily want. Because yeah, we’re gonna have a shot off of that. But I just don’t know that you can survive a whole game just shooting when somebody goes on the screen. I think you can hurt somebody. And that’s why we don’t go under screens defensively. But you know, for a whole game, I think that hurts

Pat 22:42

And in that game you said you didn’t want to just constantly attack right away that maybe you have them give it up Run an action to get back and set another screen I guess was the philosophy thinking you could just get like a good to great shot by passing up Maybe that first advantage and coming back to them, correct? 

Ben McCollum 22:59

Yeah a two on one downhill, because it’s a guard that’s setting the screen. So it’s Trevor and then a guard in that case. And so he was the dive. And when we had a, we had a six five athlete that does it and he’s fantastic at it. He was able to finish on him pretty consistently. And then we had another one that’s six three. He wasn’t quite as good at finishing on the seven footer. And so, you know, just difficult time because that’s kind of what they want you to do too.

Because if you go 50% on downhill, two V ones, efficiency wise, it’s not great. You know, you start to put in, no one else touches the ball. They’re out of rhythm. And now the floor seems like it goes from super wide to super shrunk. When it becomes shrunk, then you can’t get those two V ones anymore anyway. And so you need to make sure that you run some offense to keep the floor spread and spaced, other people touching it, other people shooting. And then, you know, obviously eventually coming back to that. But you have to have guys that understand who they are. You have to have unselfish people. You have to have guys that want for the success of, like for Trevor, for instance, we had to use his gravity more last year than we ever have. And so he went from shooting three and a half threes a game to like 10 threes a game in one season. And it takes a lot for those other guys who are really good basketball players as well to essentially allow him to do that. And so in that game, specifically with the ball screen angles, he was able to get off of it. He was able to get it back too. And so he’s not afraid to get off the ball. 

Dan 24:24

Coach, teaching your bigs the art of popping, short rolling, or long rolling and the decision to make, once they change your angle or set the screen, whatever it is, and how to get out to their skill set and just the propensity to pop or short roll more than long roll, is there anything teaching points there with those rollers? 

Ben McCollum 24:46

It depends on the defense, it really does. And that’s the cliche answer that I seem to always give.

But, you know, some of the teaching points, it kind of goes back to the original basic teaching points of setting a screen is force the over. So you force the over. And then what coverage is the defense in? If the coverage is, let’s just say it’s a blitz or a hedge or whatever you want to call it. And then let’s say that I’m still able to shoot. If we go low to high on a ball screen and they’re in a hedge, the hedge is probably not going to be up there. So it’ll probably be light. So in that case, we would probably pop that more than likely if he’s a pop threat. And then we’d be able to stretch the floor off of that. And then maybe if we pop and let’s say he’s able to recover, the hedges ever recover, then we throw back to the point guard and we come back into a screen, that will be more of like side to side or high to low, if you will, that one we might slip in short one and it kind of changes based on the coverage. 

Pat 25:42

Coach, coming back to something you said at the beginning versus maybe a switch, you’ll look to confuse the coverage. And I think one of the things we like are the ghost screens or when you scream at the guard and slipping out. I’d love to hear maybe your thoughts on then how you’re having the point guard maybe navigate that ghost screen and understand kind of what’s happening and if there’s a drive or if, you know, the ghost screen is open. 

Ben McCollum 26:03

I think ghost screens are considerably more effective when they come randomly. So, you know, for us, it comes random, again, based on what the defense tells you to do. So, if my man helps, then I leave, right? That’s the concept behind a ghost, behind a slide, behind a whatever you want to call it. And so, if I see my defender help or show, then you essentially leave, but there has to be pressure put on him. And it’s the same concept for any type of ball screen. If somebody’s driving at you, you naturally get the help. So, if you naturally help and then I leave, then there’s two on the ball. That’s that.

But you have to help because our point guard is such a threat. You absolutely have to help or you’re just going to get layups because there’s teams that try to just get through it, don’t do anything on it. It’s like Trevor goes for 40. And that’s just how it works, right? And so, with a ghost, same concept, we’d like to do everything random. It’s not a call. You’re going to ghost this one. You’re going to set this one. Again, really depends on how aggressive that coverage is and how deep they’re going to switch. Are they forcing you into the ball screen? How good a defender is guarding me? Those types of things dictate on when we ghost it and when we slip it or when we slide it or whatever you want to call it. 

Pat 27:15

And when teams are really physical with your screeners and trying to bump them off the screen or trying to mess up their angles, how are you helping then your screeners? What are you guys talking about to still fight that physicality and achieve the proper angles you’re looking for? 

Ben McCollum 27:30

Yeah, a lot of teams will do that because they want to push you up. The higher you get up, you know, it’s a foul, but they don’t call it. So whatever, you’re just going to fight for your positioning.

And so when you’re running out, maybe you stop once, maybe your pace isn’t very good on the way out, meaning you’re jogging at the same rate rather than, you know, fast to stop or slow to fast or whatever you want to call it. You know, we’re big on pace in every part of the game. So with the ball handler and with the screener, what does your pace look like? And if your pace stays the same, teams can get physical with you. If your pace changes, it’s hard to get physical with you. A couple of other things you can do is you can set screens into it so you can come down and set a screen so that that deviates some of that pressure. You know, you don’t have to score on the first one either. You can come up and set it. It doesn’t work. And then, you know, now I loosen that coverage a little bit. And now I set maybe one more. I set a double screen or a bracket or whatever you want to call it. And now it starts to loosen that coverage a little bit. And now what they had planned on doing doesn’t work so well. Or you just bring somebody else up that can’t effectively switch or can’t get physical with you and you just leave the good defender by himself and he can go guard the guy that’s standing in the corner. 

Dan 28:40

My last question on this topic, just has to do with how you arrived at teaching the game this way. Is it something where you always had an affinity for playing this style and teaching this sort of Pick and Roll or was there mentors or people you’ve studied to kind of arrive where you are now?

Ben McCollum 28:57

Yeah, I’ll give you the background. So I played here for a guy named Steve Tapmire, who’s a fantastic coach and probably the best culture coach I’ve ever been around, just like our culture and what actually wins you games, you know, just from a toughness, a discipline, an effort, camaraderie, those types of things actually are the things that win games like that. At the end of the day, everybody knows the answer, and a lot of people just don’t want to do it.

But my philosophy in regards to the ball screen then came, I went to coach for a guy named David Moe. And so basketball guys probably know his dad, Doug Moe, because for the Nuggets, the Spurs, and I think the Sixers a little bit as well. And he ran passing game. And so he was one of the few NBA coaches that ran just a true motion in the NBA. They would play super fast, just kind of pass cut and move essentially. And David would run the same thing, coach Moe would run the same thing. And he would just allow so much freedom as long as you pass cut and move, but he would coach the role definition. He would coach spacing, he would coach just conceptually at all times and gave them an elite amount of freedom. While I was with coach Moe, I actually watched a video, it was from a clinic in Florida. And it was Lawrence Frank that did a whole ball screen clinic. And it was unreal, just the detail that he taught with, and everything that he said about ball screens. And I just love, I’ve always kind of had the affinity for ball screens. So then I became the head coach here. And in my first couple of years, I tried to run just like true passing game. I’ve entered off to some sets, I think I even ran high low at one point. And then I was like, you know, I really like ball screens, but I love to give players freedom. I want them to make decisions. Not freedom necessarily, but I want to allow them the autonomy to make the decision for themselves. So based on what the defense tells them to do. So we combined ball screens or pick and rolls with passing game and just taught them reads and taught them how to pass cut and move. And it kind of grew from there. And then every year it changes based on what our greatest threat is. So like last year, for instance, Trevor was our gravity. So we almost had to treat him like he was Steph Curry and just create a lot of gravity towards him. And then once people would swarm towards him, then he was able to pass and make the game easy for everybody else, which helped our efficiency, obviously. So every year we have to adapt this year, we’re going to have to adapt to our personnel, but it’ll still be that motion, pick and roll type of offense. 

Dan 31:34

Coach, thanks for sharing all that. We want to move on now to a segment we call Start, Sub, or Sit. What we’ll do is we’ll give you three topics, ask you to start one, sub one, and sit one on your bench. It’s pretty short bench, haha.

Ben McCollum 31:49

Yeah, we don’t sub, we start them all.

Dan 31:54

So we’ll give you three topics and then we’ll discuss from there. So Coach, if you’re ready, we’ll dive into this first one.

Okay. Okay, so this first theme has to do with defensive simplicity and your answer here will be the most important choice to keep it simple. So I’ll give you the three and then we can kind of talk through it. So start, sub, or sit and keeping it simple in defense. Your pick and roll defense, your help rotations, or guarding the post or how you guard the post. 

Ben McCollum 32:22

I would start. Oh, geez. That’s interesting. Yeah, I would start. I mean, our post defense is super simple below and catch the ball. Okay. Then it’s the help and recover. Is that what she said? 

Dan 32:32

Yeah, basically like how you rotate or yep, and then ball screen Okay. 

Ben McCollum 32:37

So that would be the most complicated. 

Dan 32:39

So I’ve heard you talk before about the importance of defensive simplicity at times, so that guys can play fast and free on their feet. You mentioned guarding the post is super simple, so could you maybe talk about how simple it is for you guys when you’re guarding the post? 

Ben McCollum 32:53

Yeah, so our base post defense is, we just don’t want to touch the ball. It’s pretty simple. And like offense, you want to touch a lot to be able to seal defense, you don’t want to touch a lot. You want to pick the times that you’re physical most defensively. And then once he catches, then again, it’s very simple, making sure that you take away their angle and being able to wall up at the appropriate time. Very, very simple stuff. Now, if it’s scout based and a team passes inside, then it becomes a little bit more complicated. Now I have to talk about how I don’t want to let it in from a guard’s perspective as well, meaning how much pressure you apply to the ball, where your support is going to come from, that sort of thing. But from a base coverage perspective, so often people are three quarters, half, whatever it may be. But a lot of times when you over define post defense, it almost becomes a crutch for them to, oh, I was three quarters coach. Yeah, but you saw the ball, you got a layup. Yeah, but I’m still three quarters, I got you. So then we just were like, no, no, no, just we’re going to man up and touch the ball. 

Pat 33:57

OK, Coach, following up on walling up at the appropriate time, I guess what are the triggers, the cues to when you’re telling the guy like, hey, that’s where you’ve got a wall of there or too late. 

Ben McCollum 34:07

you know, most of that is going to be scouting report in regards to the timing of a wall up, depending upon their moves, like their primary moves. If you can drive guys out of their space by a foot, a lot of times they’re going to miss the shot. And a lot of times then, if they miss a couple of those, either they stop going to them, or it doesn’t put pressure on the rest of your defense to react to that post player. And so if you’re fortunate enough to be able to defend them appropriately and wall up at the appropriate time, then you don’t have to double, you don’t have to bring a bunch of help. If you’re not, then you have to bring help and you have to double, which we’ve had to do in the past. You know, then obviously you’re in rotation, then it makes everybody else a little bit better, which, you know, sometimes you just have to do that. But the appropriate time is based on what move they would have and making sure that they don’t hit their spots. 

Dan 34:57

You sat the pick and roll defense and that would be potentially the most complex and I just wonder how much the complexity of angles and stuff we just talked about for half an hour before how much that helps your Defense having to play against that every day and trying to you know mix up coverages from the defensive side?

Ben McCollum 35:15

It actually hurts it, like shockingly hurts it. We found that on accident, we were trying to come up with different ball screen coverages and we’re like, yeah, but if we do that coverage, they’ll do this. If they, yeah, they’ll do this because we do it in practice. We can expose a lot of different coverages very, very quickly. You figure out the coverage, you expose the coverage. It’s simple, offense always wins, right?  Better offense always beats better defense and it’s just how it works. Then we started to notice that we couldn’t guard a simple spread, pick and roll. We’d have to, because we’d overthink it, overdo it because like, what if they slip? What if he’s a pop? What if they have a shooter here? What if this? What if that? So we started to have to guard other teams’ ball screens and what normal teams have that’s less motioning and that helped us a lot. It helped our ball screen load. It helped us be able to have different coverages on different people with different screen setters. And that’s when we complicate things is just with the different screen coverage. There’s nothing really changes our ball screen coverage changes game to game, player to player screen. 

Pat 36:20

Coach, staying on this simplicity. How do you look to help around the ballscreen or in terms of tagging? Is it where is the two or three man side or where is the help side? 

Ben McCollum 36:32

We don’t have a specific rule, you know, if they have a non shooter, obviously you can tag off a non shooter, you know, if you have too many rules put in place, a lot of times you can adapt with your scout. And so tagging wise, you know, I think the preference is generally not to tag, I think that’s everybody’s preference is to try to guard it with two to try to go to two, but that doesn’t always happen in certain ball screen guys are better than others. And so at that point, you want to make sure that they don’t break your shell. So if you can kind of keep them outside on the perimeter, a lot of times guys, you can kind of beat them into perimeter past threes, you know, a lot of things just take it. 

Pat 37:09

All right, coach, our next start, sub, sit for you, you know, you’ve alluded to it  that you scrimmage a lot and you play five on five a lot in your practices. So we’re going to approach this question though, with inefficiencies or Dan, how would you describe? 

Dan 37:22

When five on five gets derailed. 

Pat 37:24

 yeah. 

Ben McCollum 37:24

Yeah

Pat 37:25

Okay, yep, start, sub, or sit. You put too many constraints on the five-on-five, you do too much stopping during the five-on-five, or it’s too competitive, and you lose the learning aspect of the five-on-five. 

Ben McCollum 37:40

I would say it could make it the worst. The start would be stopping too much in between. That would make 5 on 5 poor.

The second one would be, that would be the sub, which would be the competitiveness piece of that. Making sure that they understand that you still have to do things right because there’s a process to it as well. The sit would be the constraint. 

Pat 38:07

Coach, with the competitive aspect is that when maybe you you’ll stop it or remind them I guess how are you dealing with when you see like it’s great we’re competing but we’re also losing sight of what we need to accomplish? 

Ben McCollum 38:20

You know we don’t keep score a lot of times. So I’m naturally so process focused. Like I think a cheap way to get guys to go is to make everything competitive in practice. I think to get guys to want to be better and not use competition as the motivator, that’s kind of the trick. And so can I get you to compete when there isn’t a score on the clock is a little bit of the trick to focusing on the process of things. And so we don’t keep a lot of score up there.

So naturally it is competitive because guys are naturally trying to win that possession, but their primary thought isn’t win, if that makes any sense. They understand that if they do what they’re supposed to do and they compete that their result, which is winning will hopefully happen. And we sell that all the time. Cause it’s fool’s gold sometimes when you win in practice and maybe the other team just didn’t show up that day. Maybe they didn’t get back in transition. Maybe you’ve got buckets against somebody that isn’t good enough that you won’t see in a real game. And so then you think that that result is now you and you forget that the process is actually and so it’s really the balance between that and having enough things that are competitive, but then understanding the process is more important than winning. 

Dan 39:52

It’s just interesting to hear you talk about that. We just recently had an episode with Israel Gonzalez, Albert Berlin’s head coach, and he kind of spoke a little bit similarly on 5 on 5 not keeping score because he wanted just the process of 5 on 5 to be what they focus on. So interesting to hear you talk about that a little bit too.  Good coach. Very good coach, yes. I’ve watched so many good stuff. Is that hard though for you as a coach to get guys, I mean, because obviously you’ve gotten the guys that can do that, but is that a change for players used to in high school always having a score or playing or whatnot to just really get them to that competitive level? 

Ben McCollum 40:30

You have to get the right kids one and especially in today’s generation because of the quick fix mentality that we’ve created for kids trying to get them to understand process and going hard and competing has to be enough and getting the credit and winning is a byproduct that you don’t control how do you sell that to them how do you get them to be able to do that on a consistent basis and being self-assured enough kind of redefining success we try to redefine success what does success look like it’s going hard it’s competing it’s being a great human being a great teammate it’s being unselfish it’s fighting to win it’s not winning winning is a byproduct that’s not success the process of doing winning is the success and so trying to get them to understand that depth is part of our job as a coach. 

Pat 41:30

Coach, my last follow-up has to do with now your constraints and I’m more interested in your process especially we talked so much about your motion pick and roll and basically teaching your players the reads and the screening angles. What are the constraints that help with your reads that you find yourself using quite often in 5-on-5? 

Ben McCollum 41:50

Yeah, I think coverage constraints, meaning what coverage are they in? I’d like to see, you know, we’re gonna face a hedge next game. I’d like to hedge all ball screens. You know, we’re gonna face ice, we’re gonna face switch, whatever it may be, changing that up quite a bit. Limiting dribbles is one of my all-time favorites. It’s very simple, just living ball screen offense down to three dribbles, you’ll see who can actually make reads and get downhill, and that’s hard to do. And, you know, maybe it’s an assist day. You can’t score unless it’s an assist or it doesn’t count. Some more constraints would be, for us, we’d have one screen setter the whole time. That helps kind of speed up the process of teaching. Or maybe we have guards set them, you know, just different things that mess with their ability to adapt to things, but also constrain them so that you’re not saying, all right, all four guys can screen. You take as many dribbles as you want, you can do whatever coverage you want. And, you know, they kind of do a lot of nothing at that point. 

Pat 42:48

Maybe it’s within this constraints, but it’s something you mentioned earlier, but coaching role definition within the five on five. 

Ben McCollum 42:54

And so this is where we would probably constrain them less to start. What we try to do, I guess it’s a different way to constrain them. We try to tell them and teach them what they are great at. And so naturally we want you to do that all the time. Just always do that. If it gets to a point where they can’t figure out that this is what I’m great at and they think they’re good at everything, the best thing you can do for a player at that point is to constrain it. It’s just so freeing for them because now it’s like, I can do this and I can stick with this one thing all of the time. And then the other stuff will just kind of come with it. You do kids a disservice by wanting them to be too versatile in things that they’re just average at. Make them great at one or two things.

And those average things, you know, let’s say a kid’s not a great shooter and we, you know, hey, you need to cut more, you need to do these things, you’re a great driver, you’re a great finisher. What accidentally happens is they’ll get like a kick out three that’s in rhythm and flow and all of a sudden they’ll shoot it and they’ll make it. But they’re not thinking about that three all the time. They’re thinking about cutting and their great strengths. And then they get what we call surprise three. Surprise, you’re open. And it just feels right. But if you’re so focused on can’t really shoot, I need to figure out if I can shoot, if I can figure out, then you don’t cut and you can’t shoot on top of it. And now you’re not very good.

When I constrained you, now you’re great at cutting, you’re making your offense better. And on top of it, every once in a while, you get what we call a surprise three. And it’s like, oh, there it is. It’s just like disciplining a child, like kids love discipline. They love it. They love constraints, they flourish in them and it allows them to figure out exactly what they’re supposed to do. 

Dan 44:46

All right. So our last start subset for you, coach, the theme on this one is stats that matter to you. These three options, this would be margins. So you’re worried about the margin here, which one you’d want to win that stat margin. So start, sub or sit, winning the rebound margin, winning the turnover margin, or the third option is winning the free throw margin. They’re all pretty important. 

Ben McCollum 45:11

Yeah, I would say start the turnover. I would say sub the free throw and I would say set the rebound. 

Dan 45:20

And obviously these are all ones you’d like to win, start them all in a different game, but would love to just ask about your sub, which was the free throw margin. I think just interesting putting that in there, you guys having an offense that tries to get to the rim or shoot threes. I mean, how much are you talking with your team about the free throw margin or trying to get to the line within all the stuff we’ve talked about today? 

Ben McCollum 45:43

It would be more the opposite side of it. We don’t talk about getting to the line because that’s dictated by officials that we don’t control. However, we feel like we can. And a lot of times the teams that are out of control get to the free line a little bit more. It’s kind of our theory.

We talk more about defending angles and being able to guard without fouling. That would be what we would do. And so if we defend without fouling, a lot of times we don’t give up a ton of free throws. And we don’t play as many guys or haven’t in the past. And so naturally we need to make sure that we avoid foul trouble. And if you watch games, most fouls aren’t because you’re guarding the basketball. Most are just you’re being inefficient defensively and you’re out of position or you’re just on discipline. That’s most fouls anyway. If you’re disciplined, build your shell and take away angles defensively. A lot of times you won’t foul. And then from an offensive perspective, if you attack the rim enough naturally, you’ll just pick up some free throws. But we don’t talk about that ever. If we get free throws, we do. 

Pat 46:47

 You mentioned it also during when we’re talking about post defense, but just defending angles Could you elaborate on what you’re talking your guys what angles you’re trying to take away? 

Ben McCollum 46:57

Their angle to the hoop, you know, you just want to be between them and the hoop. If they’re cutting, you want to be between them and the basket. You know, if they have the ball, you want to be out in front of, we say, ball, but basket. It’s not body, but basket. It’s the ball. We want to be out front of the ball. So if they’re going left, we’d probably be out in front of their lead foot, which would be their left foot and almost splitting that lead foot so that we’re not on the side of the offensive player, which you see a lot right now in our game. They call it riding the dribbler, riding the ball. We don’t do that. We try to beat them to the spot and get in front of them rather than just writing them to spots. That’s just not really what we do. And so naturally we’re able to not foul as much. 

Dan 47:40

We gave you three stats here, rebounds, turnovers, free throws. Is there anything though, within your program that you do value maybe outside of these three things that I mentioned that’s important to you guys on a night in, night out basis in regards to stats?

Yeah. 

Ben McCollum 47:55

Not really, I’m not a stat guy and just have never used so much feel that I just like if somebody comes in and they say You can shoot because he shot 45% and I watch his shot and I don’t think it looks very good But I’m gonna say you can’t shoot and so and that’s just kind of how we do things a staff that might be impactful for some is either defensive three-point field goal percentage or the amount of threes that the other team gets that might be something that is Important, you know when I get the stats at halftime, I probably look turnover margin I probably check rebounds and then I check defensive field goal percentage. I can see it So that’s what I try to do is really rely on my own. 

Dan 48:39

Coach, you’re off the start, sub, or sit hot seat. Thanks for playing that game with us. We got one more question to close the show. Before we do, we really appreciate your time and your thoughts today. This was really fun for us. 

Ben McCollum 48:51

Yeah, no, thanks a lot for having me on. I appreciate it. It’s been fun. Absolutely. Thank you, Coach. 

Dan 48:57

Our last question that we ask all the guests is, what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career as a coach? 

Ben McCollum 49:04

For me, I can remember when I was my first season in coaching, I went to school and was a finance major, ended up going to work for Wells Fargo for a couple of months and then decided that I wanted to be a college basketball coach. And I came back and I asked my head coach at the time if I could be a GA for him, which is, you know, you get a stipend, you get a school paid for. And he said, well, we already have our GA spot filled, but you can come work for free. You know, having another job can be pretty difficult, pretty taxing, but I wasn’t afraid to do the little things.

I then was a graduate assistant my second year, but then got paid and then went to work at Oregon State for David Moe. I drove the bus, did all the scouts and did most of the recruiting, did some of the coaching, did a lot of things for that program and took a lot of pride. I was the strength coach as well, took a lot of pride in doing anything and everything that I could possibly do. I was not too proud to do anything. And I think too often, coaches coming into this profession are too above certain jobs or too proud to do certain jobs. I think a lot of times those jobs teach you work ethic. They teach you the importance of those jobs and the pride that you need to take in those. And so I always tell my managers when they come in, said, if I ask you to go get me coffee at the local Casey’s, you know, you get some managers, some assistants, they’ll kind of roll their eyes and be mad because they ask me, oh, I’m above that. And then you get ones that will just go get you the coffee and give you the coffee. And then you get ones that follow up with, yeah, coach, I’ll go do that. Do you want dounts with that too? And they take so much pride in what they do. And I felt like that was the thing that I guess I did coming through in this profession.