Slappin’ Glass sits down this week with the Head Coach of the G-League’s Osceola Magic, Dylan Murphy! The trio dive into Coach Murphy’s thoughts on coaching meetings, including “Rumbles”, moving big rocks, embracing the gray, and explore winning the PNR battle, and Plato and Aristotle during a highly entertaining “Start, Sub, or Sit?!”
Transcript
Dylan Murphy 00:00
It really clarifies your belief system in basketball because you actually have to make the choice and when it’s your team and you’re the leader of the group you learn really what you actually would do in certain situations. Quickly the instinct to win and develop guys and grow your group takes priority over any selfish I want to be right.
There’s such a responsibility so if you are wrong that instinct of wanting to get it right far outweighs the instinct of wanting to be right because your stubbornness can really cost your whole group.
Dan 02:00
And now please enjoy our conversation with coach Dylan Murphy. Coach, thank you very much for making the time for us today we can’t wait to talk to you about a bunch of stuff.
Dylan Murphy 02:20
Really appreciate you guys. Love the pod, love all the work you do. So glad to be here.
Dan 02:24
you. We appreciate that. Coach, we wanted to dive in with this kind of a time of year right now where a lot of staffs are either figuring out their new positions for the next year or they’re talking about years in review. And one of the things that was interesting we were talking about before the show was how you did team meetings this year and the good, the bad, the ugly of trying to do them a certain way and how you laid them out so that things were hopefully efficient. Everybody got out of them what you wanted to and kind of that whole process. And so to start, like to dive in on just your thoughts of what you did this year with your team meetings.
Dylan Murphy 03:02
So particularly with our staff, I think something we all feel as coaches sometimes is the schedule can be a little chaotic during the season. Things are kind of happening on an ad hoc basis. You find yourself kind of playing whack-a-mole all the time, like this problem popped up, we won’t address it now, and now this problem. So we kind of rescheduled all of our meetings as a staff before the season, making sure they all had a specific purpose too. So specificity was really key.
Part of that too was just to avoid any bias that creeps in or any emotional reaction to what’s happening in the season. So they were kind of spaced out appropriately. So we didn’t really do meetings before practice or pregame or any of that. It was more specific topic based. So we had one we called Rumbles. I actually stole that from Brené Brown, but basically the idea was coach comes to a meeting and he brings an idea and that idea can be as off the wall as he wants. And the rest of us and the coaches make fun of me because I would wear boxing gloves during the meeting and put on the Let’s Get Ready Rumble music. We were just trying to bring something new to the table and then everybody’s job was to beat up that idea as much as possible, criticize it, find everything that was wrong with it. But then hopefully we come out of that with something positive. So we did the Rumbles probably once every seven or eight games, keep it fresh.
And I think one of the cool things about it that developed over time is it gave the coaches an outlet for when they have bigger ideas. So they have them in scheduled spaces. I know previously when I was an assistant, sometimes you don’t know when to knock on the coach’s door or give them an idea and you don’t want to bother them. Obviously head coaches can be really busy. So gave us that space to do that. And then the emotions related to having an idea that doesn’t get taken up by the coach. So we kind of encourage everyone to be frustrated. If I tell you, I think your idea is not good. I don’t need you to pretend to be happy and all come by. Obviously, when we go down and talk to the team and practice in games, we don’t show any of that as a staff, but kind of encouraging all the coaches to be frustrated, criticize each other and get that all out in a safer space, if you will.
Dan 05:10
Going a little deep rung, these rumbles, really interesting idea and how you structured it so it didn’t get to where, I don’t know, people’s feelings were hurt. You mentioned being frustrated, but being able to have it be constructive as well, beating up on the idea, but not having it where people are afraid to maybe bring something up later as well.
Dylan Murphy 05:28
Yeah, no, that’s obviously a big deal. I think just trying to give a lot of opportunities for ideas in structured settings. So it’s not really operating on an ad hoc basis. So whether it was the rumbles or we had self-scouting process, we did that every seven or eight games. Two of our coaches would put on the hat of the opposing head coach and their goal was to pick us and pick me apart and everything that you would do to beat the Osceola Magic. And so that kind of directed what we were thinking. But I think to answer your question, just trying to provide a lot of structured opportunities for those ideas. So some are going to get through, some aren’t, and you don’t feel like to make a break with the one big idea I have.
Pat 06:12
On a week to week basis, you said you didn’t have staff meetings before practice or after and you scheduled them all before season. So how often were you guys meeting and were they all kind of with these bigger, broader themes of, like you said, self-scouting, rumbles, and not so much into the day-to-day minutia, the grind of a season?
Dylan Murphy 06:31
The idea was, by thinking bigger picture, we always talked about moving big rocks. By trying to always move the big rocks, that dictated what we were going to do on the day-to-day basis. So if we had a game where we were really poor in transition, and then we had three really good games in transition defense, and we had another poor one, but if you look at it over the course of nine games, we were a good seven out of nine. That’s something that we need to be really addressing as a team.
And so that was the purpose of the self-scaling process, to help us identify what are those big rocks that we need to be addressing, and again, not to play whack-a-ball with what went wrong the night before. And so I think some of that is maybe we weren’t in some sense trying to win 100% of the games. We were trying to win 80% of games, understanding that we’re going to lose some, but if we’re always thinking bigger picture, we’re going to win more than we’re going to lose. So I think sometimes just trying to solve every little problem, takes away your focus from things that matter more. So we were trying to stay lasered in on the things that affected the most parts of our team.
Pat 07:38
Under this framework. How often were you guys meeting?
Dylan Murphy 07:41
Now we had a couple other things we did, we did player development meetings, some of those, we did check-ins throughout the year with the guys, but as a staff, we also met to talk development, both progress on where guys are on their player development plans, and then progress on, you know, hey, where’s this guy emotionally right now? Did he just break up his girlfriend to going through something? Is he in a really good place? And so we kind of did those check-ins too.
So we have that, those kind of three were the main drivers. And so you’re meeting once a week, every two weeks or so. And then there are a lot of other touch points. You know, I did one-on-one meetings with every staff member every week, you know, 15 minutes, go for a walk, lunch, come to my office, whatever. So you had that touch point with me. So again, just trying to create a lot of different touch points with me, with the staff, different purposes of meetings to make our time super efficient, but also different avenues for different stuff to come up versus, hey, let’s just all meet as a staff and sit around for two hours and not accomplish anything.
Pat 08:39
With the touch points with the staff, your individual meetings, was that more just checking on them personally, their career development, or was it all sort of just their thoughts on the team? What were you hoping to accomplish with the individual staff meetings?
Dylan Murphy 08:53
They are super open-ended, a check-in on how they’re doing and family, wife, whatever. But sometimes there’d just be stuff to come up. And I guess it’s just, we’re all a product of where we’ve been as coaches. And one thing that Coach Mosley with Orlando does a really good job of is just making our time really purposeful as a staff. And so whatever came up in those meetings, the coaches knew they had a specific place to put thoughts that make sense. Like what meeting this fit into versus just bringing things randomly and throwing them at the wall just to make their time and my time efficient. And that’s not to say that obviously they weren’t impromptu, get togethers for whatever. Nothing like specifically organized. If it was your scout, you met with me and you didn’t meet the whole staff and just trying to make everyone’s time efficient.
Dan 09:36
Overall, zooming out between the rumbles, the self scouting, the individual one-on-ones and all the other things as a head coach, you’re just constantly getting information thrown at you in different ways. And I guess what you’ve learned about how to take all the information that’s coming from these meetings, what to keep, what to take action on, what to put aside for later. I mean, you mentioned moving big rocks and things like that, but I guess anything that you’ve learned about how you kind of narrow things down to what’s most important today, what can wait and what can really wait till later.
Dylan Murphy 10:07
I don’t know if I totally have the answer to that. No, that’s a good question. I think ultimately it’s just about what is going to make it to the players. Of all that information, what needs to be disseminated to the players was the most important thing. Obviously, what you’re doing in practice, shootarounds, all that. One way we kind of tried to implement ideas from Rumbles, Self Scout, I’ll use an example. So the first rumble we did was on the problem that no one has solved, which is how to deal with guard guard ghost screens. We had our way of doing it, and then our center got injured in the first game of the season. And all of a sudden, we were switching one through five pretty much. And so being able to switch those appropriately, stay home when there were slips, that was problematic for us. And so we had a rumble about it. We had a lot of disagreements about it. And then one thing that came out of those, we did what we called concept film sessions, which was not like review of the previous game or Scout, but it was, hey, here’s 12 sketchy in between guard guard slips that are not clean and clear teaching tape. Let’s talk about them as a team. Usually would come from a rumble or a self-scout process. So we had kind of already beaten it up so badly as coaches that there wouldn’t necessarily be a question from a player that we hadn’t considered. Obviously, that’s always going to happen. But it was kind of a way for us to address the gray that sometimes comes up when you’re teaching coverages or whatever it is.
Pat 11:32
Coach, can I just follow up on what came out of that guard to guard rumble meeting?
Dylan Murphy 11:36
Yeah, so our first goal was to switch. So physically, we call it reroute and force the switch. Push the screener into the on-ball defender so there’s contact, so it’s easy to switch. What we kind of settled on was if there’s separation before the screen, so you’re guarding the screener and he gets away from you and you can’t reroute him, just start yelling square. And even if there is contact, stay square on the ball. Because most of the time, if it’s a guard guard and he’s running away from you, he’s not going to stop and screen. He’s just going to stop and slip. And we found that was right for 95% of the time and 5% of the time we give a bucket. And I said, all right, that’s the 5% that’s going to hurt us. And that was our solution. But again, I think that’s a tough thing to guard. So we did the best we could.
Dan 12:21
Wanted to go back, actually zoom back out with the meetings for a quick second. Cause you mentioned the beginning about the reason you set things up a certain way was to guard against your own bias or coaches bias and emotions. And I’d love to ask you a little deeper on that, how you think the way you set some of these up helped guard against the bias and emotions that we may be all have individually.
Dylan Murphy 12:45
We had a game we played at Motor City, Detroit’s G-League team. They beat us by 20, you know, we were in the middle of a sudden game road trip, it started off poorly. And I just had like this nagging feeling just watching the film and didn’t really put my finger on it, but I felt like we played really well and we lost by 20. I couldn’t really square that, but kind of through the various self scouting processes we had, you know, we had one of our best defensive games in the year from like a game plan discipline standpoint. So that kind of allowed us to tell the team with confidence, we played well, if we played this way, we’re going to win 80% of the time. Sometimes they’re going to, you know, shoot the hell out of the ball and there’s nothing we’re going to be able to do. So I think that, you know, thinking in larger chunks, thinking in seven, eight game chunks versus in what happened last night was really the goal. And to avoid just reacting to the previous night. And then you look up 11 games have gone by, you’ve talked about 15 different things. And, you know, we wanted it to be where everyone knew if we did A, B and C well on the offensive and defensive end of the four, we were going to play well, whether or not we won, you know, who knows, but we knew we’d come out ahead most of the time. So that was kind of the purpose of the spreading those out and then trying not to react and not have the meanings. So we don’t accidentally get pulled in a direction that we don’t want to get pulled in.
Dan 14:03
Maybe a slight pivot on all of this, but related is your thoughts on practice methodology, setting up situations in practice where whatever it is that you all talked about in these meetings and deciding what the team needs. I guess an overall thought on how you wanted to structure your practices, because I get the sense that you thought very deeply about those things as well with these meetings.
Dylan Murphy 14:27
you know, I think just trying to build off of what we discussed and trying to address the gray as much as possible. Obviously, you’ve had a lot of people on to talk about skill acquisition and motor learning and all that. And we’re big believers in that and how we structure everything. So the design of practice from that sense was important, but also just what we were addressing, you know, we didn’t want it to be, hey, this is Shell, ball goes here, swing it, he’s going to drive, you’re going to pull over.
Like this is kind of the clean sense of that. Obviously, you know, when you’re installing, that’s kind of what you’re doing. But we wanted to get to the point where we had felt enough of those in between situations that our instincts were tuned well for how to handle them. And obviously, you can’t address every situation, but you know, it’s easy to say like, okay, you know, baseline drive, low man pulls over here. Well, what if it’s unclear who’s the low man because of where the offense is positioned? What if it’s, you know, technically, the one is the low man, but your five is right there, who’s going, you know, so all of those situations, we try to engineer organically in practice and do the best we could to figure it out. And then when those plays happened, again, if there were enough of them that we felt like it was a big rock we had to discuss, then we discussed it. But, you know, if there was a random game, we got hurt on this one thing, and we just kind of ignore it and pretend it didn’t happen until it became a pattern. And then we address it.
Dan 15:51
Going deeper on some of these things in practice, because you mentioned some of the motor learning stuff and some of the things that you all believe in. And I guess when you’re developing a concept or trying to move one of these big rocks, your thoughts on five on five, smaller sided games, constraints, anything that you all did or that you preferred to go to in order to help teach these things.
Dylan Murphy 16:11
Yeah, we did all that. Everything tried to be game-based as much as possible. One of the tricky things about the G League, and it’s even more of a problem than the NBA, but the amount of practice time you’re legitimately getting is very limited during the season. So without that level of intensity, how you do that, playing area, I’m thinking deeply about the soft season, how to do that better. So that was always the balance, the fatigue, the physical demand on our guys’ bodies versus trying to put them in those gray area situations.
And I think you guys know just from your experience, guys either want to go 100% or they want to walk. So you’re trying to tell them to go 60%. They’re like, what is 60%? I don’t know what that means. We got to short practice, high intensity, and that was the way we solved it. But even if it was something as simple as just having someone talk, they’re on the side and they’ve got to talk through five guys on the floor, tell them where all to be as the ball’s moving randomly. So we did it best we could, but again, just trying to do those situations versus the road blocked practice as much as we could. Obviously, you’re going to get some of that and need some of that at times, but that’s how we handle it.
Pat 18:26
When working through the gray areas or trying to put as much gray areas as possible in practice, when your team was handling the gray areas versus when they weren’t, what did you notice? Now you mentioned trying to attune their instincts in terms of instincts or skilled traits or what was a team doing well in the moments when they were handling the gray and what was missing or were they not doing irrespective of the actual action, I guess.
Dylan Murphy 18:49
Every time we tried to prescribe a solution to something, it never worked. And every time the players kind of organically found something off of our principles, then that seemed to be a better solution, both their belief in it.
And then also just their feel on the floor, doing things at full speed. Obviously, as coaches, we watch the film and we have ideas of how things are going to work. And we had a situation at the G-League showcase. We were saying we were going under a guy, first play of the game. We go under, drains at three. And the under was not a great under. It was 100 feet under, basically a practice shot. So that kind of led to a discussion during the game on the bench. When do we go under? How do we teach it? All this. And that ended up leading to a rumble and a concept film. And then we kind of hashed it out and then figured that out as a group. So I think just more organic solutions involving your guys seem to have more staying power than prescribing and trying to drive a square peg into a round hole.
Pat 19:48
You gave the example of you’re going to go under and you mentioned when you played motor city that you thought you had good game plan discipline. And so kind of the same question, what did you learn about game plan discipline in terms of how you guys presented the game plan, talked about the game plan when your team executed the game plan or had good discipline versus when it didn’t. What did you learn about maybe what you guys from a staff coaching perspective kind of stuck at more staying power.
Dylan Murphy 20:14
It had more to do with, and I think this goes for anything, we were more targeted with what we talked about and what we cared about. And again, this kind of goes back to what we were discussing before, but I think as soon as we kind of were trying to pick at all the details of a game plan, we lost focus on the things that really mattered.
And so I think when we were hitting home, hey, if we do these three things well, we’re going to have a good chance to win. The game we played Motor City, they had two really good shooters and they shot the ball really well. We had contested them really well. We’ve all seen that, hey, this shot, it’s a great shot for us. And then on offense, then on defense, you put a hand up and you’re like, got to get closer. Like, well, it’s the same shot. What perspective are we on offense or a defense? That’s either a good shot or a bad shot on both ends. And so when we looked at it objectively, it was like Stanley Amuda took a 35 footer with a hand right in his face. If he takes that shot a hundred times a game, we’re going to win most of the time. And it just happened to be that was one of those nights where we didn’t win because he made nine of them or however many. I think just the specificity of, hey, we do this, this, and this, we’re going to be in a really good spot. We did a lot of tracking relative to that game plan to split and we kind of figured out throughout the season what mattered. So we try to stay true to those things over the course of time. And the hard part is when you lose a game because you play a random team that does one thing really well and it’s not something we talk about often, there’s only one team in the league that does that. So we’re kind of just going to pretend that game didn’t happen and move on because we don’t play them again. Trying to correct all that stuff from the previous game.
Pat 21:44
Going back, you mentioned the concept development, and again, just how you approach it in terms of how you kept it efficient and how you encourage dialogue or manage the dialogue when doing a film room on concept development with your guys.
Dylan Murphy 21:58
That’s obviously the risk. You’re introducing unclean clips and a lot of opinions. I think that was something our coaches did really well. Our assistants led all the concept films and they would kind of rein in the conversation and have a pretty good idea of how we were going to address those gray areas. We weren’t just going to… A player was going to raise his hand and say something and we’re just going to change automatically, but we kind of wove that into the discussion as best they could. But I think there’s a risk at any time.
I think that’s one of the hard things I learned about being a head coach is letting go of some of that decision-making power and giving it to other people. So there is some risk in that. You feel like you’re losing control of what you want to do, but the goal is to win. The goal is to get it right and not be right. So if it was working, who am I to pretend that I have all the answers when obviously other people in our group have better answers. But sure, that was definitely… There were times that same in our rumbles too where you feel the conversations kind of devolving in a way that is not productive. And so that was our responsibility as a staff to control with the players and then our responsibility as a staff with each other to make sure. I think one of the cool things that came out of all this though is our last meeting type was a front office meeting. So like twice during the season, we met with our GM and assistant GM as a staff and we kind of presented everything we were doing from an X’s and O’s standpoint, just so they could have intimate familiarity. Obviously they were there at every practice and we had great GM, Kevin Tiller, Trent Pennington, assistant GM. They did a great job the whole season. And we wanted to make sure that for the days they were on the road or maybe not doing something else during practice that they knew exactly what we were doing so they could evaluate both us as a staff and our players in the most proper way they could. By doing all that and diving into all that gray, we had a more defined sense of what we wanted to present.
Pat 23:50
Going back to these concept developments, was the goal to walk out with like maybe one strategy to take to the practice or was it let’s have two, three, and see what organically works, what was the ideal outcome when you left these concept developments?
Dylan Murphy 24:05
was for us as a staff, we already came in having an idea of how we wanted to guard or whatever it was, how we were going to teach it, and then let the players sand down the edges areas where they thought, oh, what about this? What about that? It’s like, hey, if we’re saying we’re switching this and the players are saying, no, we’re not switching it, we’re not going to go that far with it. But if maybe there was confusion on the way it was communicated or angles of footwork or whatever it is, that was where we tried to limit the amount of conversation.
And then obviously, players encouraging them to come to us as a staff with whatever they had to not disrupt the flow of practice. Maybe afterwards, hey, what do you think about this? Oh, sure, let’s look at it. But in those film sessions, we’re trying to keep them under 10 minutes. So we want to make sure it doesn’t go too far into left field.
Dan 24:55
Coach, this has been awesome so far. Thanks for all your thoughts on that. We want to transition now to a segment on the show we call Start, Sub, or Sit. So we’ll give you three options around a topic, ask you to start one, sub one, and sit one, and then we will discuss from there. So if you’re ready, we’ll dive into this first one. Let’s do it. Okay, this first Start, Sub, or Sit, a little bit of a pivot. So you studied the classics at Columbia for your undergrad major. All that time spent in Aristotle, Plato, Greek, Roman tragedies, things like that. We’re gonna ask you to start, sub, or sit. We went to chat GPT and pulled out some main themes that someone with this major might know. And we’re gonna ask you to start, sub, or sit three of these main themes as it relates to coaching and which one you think most relates to coaching for you at this current time. So option one is identity and self-knowledge. Option two is human suffering and resilience. Or option three is human nature or the human condition.
Dylan Murphy 26:04
And what was the first one again? Sorry.
Dan 26:06
Identity and self-knowledge.
Dylan Murphy 26:08
I think that one’s the start. I think it ties into kind of everything we were talking about is the most important thing as a staff is to be self-evaluating properly. I think everyone looks at what they’re doing, but to correctly identify what’s going well and what’s going wrong, I think is extremely difficult. So that self-knowledge, I think, is super important.
The human condition is probably the sit for me. It feels weird to sit the human condition, but the struggle and resilience are the second one. I mean, everyone goes through the ups and downs of the seasons, the winning, the losing, especially in our league, the G League, where everyone’s trying to get to the NBA and rosters are changing and just the ability to withstand all of that grind, super important. So that probably would be my sub.
Dan 26:50
And pulling out all of this. Thanks for going back in time for us, by the way, on that. Kind of wanted to ask you, because you have a unique path to getting to where you’re at now, and obviously studying the classics, but then I read somewhere that you were thinking of going to law school, and then you wrote about basketball for a time. You had your own blog, which is terrific. It’s sort of like your path to studying the game and figuring out who you were that’s led you to how you are as a coach now. Yeah, it’s funny.
Dylan Murphy 27:18
A super random path. I think everyone in basketball has a different journey. My parents were teachers, not basketball, sports-related careers were not something that was on the radar, but something I fell into. I got an internship with the 4-Way and Mad Ants 11 years ago now and just been scratching and clawing and trying to learn as much as possible. I think being able to have a perspective that’s not been baked in by the traditional basketball path, either playing or being a student manager or whatever. I didn’t get to a basketball team until I was 23. I played high school basketball and I’ve played my whole life, but I wasn’t like a high level player or anything. I think trying to always maintain that perspective of doing things in a way that’s true to who I am, but be trying to just continually ask questions of why things are done a certain way, not being afraid to experiment, not being afraid to get it wrong and then immediately throw it out when it’s wrong and look for a new solution has always driven my perspective. With how we’re discussing these meetings, some of it worked really well, some of it we’re going to change for next season. I think that’s been maybe the biggest driver.
Trying to stay true to that is what’s gotten me here. It’s just learning from everyone as much as possible. Our staff in Orlando, one of the really cool things is we have a ton of people who’ve been through the G League and our staff in Orlando. Our head coach, Mal Moseley, is a very storied path with coaches he’s learned a ton from, so being able to soak up all his knowledge and taking all that and then also trying not to get away from the perspectives that are outside of that. What I think all coaches do, read stuff that’s outside of our sport, even outside of sports. One of our coaches was talking about Renee Brown and this Rumble idea and I was like, you know, we’re just going to try it and see what happens.
Dan 29:12
Following up on your sub, which sounds intense, but suffering and resilience, it kind of sounds like coaching, I guess, in a nutshell. But what you’ve learned so far about bouncing back as a head coach and keeping on to the next thing, and I know you’ve been around other great coaches, and learning on your path about what the really great ones do to keep on getting to the next thing.
Dylan Murphy 29:36
think about that Motor City game. We had a good beginning of the season, the showcase portion of the G League season. It’s like the first 16 games, we were 10-6, we were feeling good. Our point guard got called up on a two-way with Dallas Mavericks, which was awesome. Brandon Williams, he played so well. And then Trevlin Queen, one of our other two-way players, he got called up to Orlando to play. Next thing I looked up, he was playing 40 minutes in a double overtime game. So two of our three best players are all of a sudden gone. We’re one and three to start the regular season. We’ve got four more games on the road. We just lost by 20. And just the swing of you’re feeling good, then all of a sudden you’re not feeling so good.
And I just remember sitting in my hotel room with a Jets pizza, not knowing how we’re going to score ever again. I think dealing with that is obviously the ups and the downs, but it’s more so really our players. I think they go through it the most, especially the guys who are not NBA level players, the Americans, they bounce around to 11 different teams in 12 years. I think it’s really hard to feel like if you’re not producing, you’re not going to make money. I think what they go through, especially in the G League, is really intense. And the difference between whatever the G League salary is, $40,000, something like that, it’s a two-way contract and making $500,000 plus. So it’s a big difference and you could be right there from a two-way. So I think that resilience is, to me, the most impressive.
Pat 30:58
You’re talking about just your perspective that you try to bring to coaching, you mentioned not being afraid to get it wrong. And with this being your first year as a head coach, how hard was that to stay true to that when every decision kind of rests on your shoulders, the winning, the losing, as a head coach as we carry that record?
So just maintaining that perspective, what was the struggle for you with that when going from an assistant coach, now you’re the head coach?
Dylan Murphy 31:24
People have asked me a lot what I learned from this first year and the thing I’ve kind of settled on is head coaching really clarifies your belief system in basketball because you actually have to make the choice. And when it’s your team and you’re the leader of the group, you learn really what you actually would do in certain situations. You have that clarity when you get to do it and you learn what you believe. Give quickly the instinct to win and develop guys and grow your group takes priority over any selfish, I want to be right. There’s such a responsibility.
I think you just feel I have to do more, I have to watch more film, I have to invest more in my players and my staff. So if you are wrong, that instinct of wanting to get it right far outweighs the instinct of wanting to be right because your stubbornness can really cost your whole group. I don’t know whether that was forced out of me or probably more so that. But yeah, you go into a game and you think, hey, we’re going to run this part of our offense tonight because we think it’ll be effective against this other team. And then you’re in the second quarter and you’ve got 19 points. I mean, you’re just going to keep banging your head against the wall or you’re going to change. You might have thought you had a brilliant idea and maybe it is a brilliant idea, but maybe it’s not. And I think our coaches who I talked to before this and all I talked about, just be willing to change when you’re wrong. You have to admit that first and you did make a mistake.
Pat 32:47
When you finally became the head coach, did you know what your belief system is? I mean, I’m sure you had an idea of course, but it’s something that was really clarified as you kind of got into training cap and actually got, let’s say into the fire and then it really crystallized what your belief system was.
Or was it something you were pretty clear on going into that first day of practice?
Dylan Murphy 33:05
I was actually looking at my notes of my install list from the first day of training camp. And then I looked at my play card from our lone playoff game and they were just like two different things. So what I believed and what happened.
I mean, I think certain principles of play, obviously, a lot of it’s dictated by Orlando for us in the G-League and what Coach Moses wants to do. But Coach Moses really is unbelievable in this way. He gave me the freedom to kind of adjust to the roster we had. And Orlando has a bunch of guys that are 6’10 and taller. And Osceola, we basically had a bunch of guards and wings. So we were adjusting pretty quickly. So what I believe they wanted to do was irrelevant. You’re just trying to figure out, how do I make this work for our group? And for us, we talked about all that guard-guard action. So that was nowhere in my install list for preseason and training camp. And then it just kind of evolved. And so if there’s anything I learned, it’s just being able to change quickly and find solutions fast, whatever group you have.
Pat 35:17
We’ll step away from the classics for a little bit, get back to the court. This start, sub and sit we’ve kind of themed winning the pick and roll battle. So we’re going to give you three battles. And I guess what would be the most important battle to attack in order to win over the course of the 48 minutes, the pick and roll battle, is it attacking the tag, is it attacking the big in the pick and roll or attacking the on-ball defender, winning the battle, the on-ball defender, the big or the tag.
Dylan Murphy 35:45
would be the on-ball defender. We kind of had a quantity over quality belief in our offense. So if you just start with the principle that if you run six pick and rolls in a possession, the defense has to be perfect. They have to go six for six defensively on whatever their coverage is. The offense has to go one for six. So we felt the more pick and rolls we could run into possession, the more likely it was that we were going to get a breakdown. And so all we were kind of looking to do is get the guard, on-ball guard or defender to change his feet to allow us to get downhill, draw two, spray. We’re in business.
So I wouldn’t say that we were particularly tricky with our setups, trying to attack tags, bigs, whatever it was. It was more, let’s just get to a lot of pick and rolls with proper spacing, as many as we can, and count on you not being able to be perfect for the whole possession. So that would be my start. I would say the sub would be the tag. Again, just kind of how we angled pick and rolls and where we set them with what types of floor spacing. We’re just trying to attack whatever team we were playing and however they guarded. And that to us was more just, are you tagging? Are you not? Are you stunting to a pop? Are you not? That was the sub and then the sit, the big. We didn’t really run a lot of one five pick and roll. We had a shooting five DJ Wilson and he was good in pick and roll, though it got me wrong, but he’d pick and pop or he’d be spaced and he’d attack with the ball on his hands. So the G league also, there are a ton of bigs. So for us, that wasn’t a big point of emphasis. It was more important to get our fast guards downhill. And we felt like there was more of an advantage when we were guard guard and that action to get them downhill with speed than having to put guys in jail or whatever in one five pick and roll.
Pat 37:33
You mentioned that you kind of emphasize quantity over quality and trying to get as many pick and rolls with good spacing or you could constantly reinforcing teaching with your team to keep the pick and rolls flowing with good spacing and not letting it die out and then Reset a pick and roll die reset a pick and roll
Dylan Murphy 37:52
Well, two things. One, we talked about spacing constantly. That was probably the thing we talked about the most throughout the season on the offensive end of the floor, particularly making sure the ball and the screener had room to play. So we weren’t balanced on the weak side. It wasn’t like guys were evenly spaced. We called it like deep wing spacing. So if you’re playing pick a role in the left slot, we’d rather let’s say left corner field, right corner field, and then we’d want the like right break field as opposed to the right slot. And then they can play two man game. And they’ve got all that room to play. So, you know, the ball handler can go left or right. The screener can pop or roll just to create as much for those two. And then once they did whatever they did, then we’re going to move and relocate and cut or whatever is appropriate after that. So we were just kind of trying to give those two guys as much space as possible.
And then, you know, to not let it die out, I think like anything, things become thematic with your team. It’s just kind of what you do. So I wouldn’t say that, you know, we put any like special sauce on something or emphasize it just became what we got good at. And so that’s what we did when things broke down. Guys, this new just go set one and see what happens. You know, making sure that we had good space before we did it because we didn’t want to just go set one and then you pop a roll. But, you know, our spacing is crunched. So any advantage we gained is immediately cut off because there’s somebody in the gap or we throw back to the pop and they pop on top of somebody else.
Dan 39:15
when you’re talking about the quantity and number of on-ball screens and the spacings and things like that, in order of operations, what was the priority in each one of those things, whether it’s spacing, whether it’s slipping, cutting, all that stuff.
Dylan Murphy 39:28
The main priority was that the ball handler could go either way. So we didn’t want it. So the ball handler came off and there was only one obvious direction to go. If you’re guarding the screen, you don’t know what’s going to happen. You’re concerned about both directions. You’re concerned about the reject. You’re concerned about using the screen. You’re concerned about the slip roll, the slip pop. It just becomes, you know, all that. We didn’t want it set up. So where there was only one obvious play to make, and then the defense could load up, take that away, and then we were stuck. But truthfully, like we did get stuck sometimes and the spacing wasn’t always good.
So we just found another action and another action. And sometimes we’d have just gross possessions for 17 seconds. And then we’d spring one loose in the last six, just because of the volume. We try to stay away as much as possible from the actions that lasted 10, 11 seconds. And then we’re only doing one thing on a possession before we’re tossing grenades to each other at the end of the clock.
Pat 40:23
With guard to guards, I guess what did you learn about spots on the floor where maybe they were most effective versus where they were less effective?
Dylan Murphy 40:32
I wouldn’t say spots on the floor as much as like variety of types of screens. And we’d always kind of kudos to guys. We’d call them like spicy screens that just like got super creative with what they said. We found the best ones were the most illegal ones that we got up with.
Pat 40:47
Makes sense.
Dylan Murphy 40:48
Yeah. Sounds stupid to say it out loud now that I just did, but there are just some screens without giving away all the secrets that we felt we could set illegally that would never get called. And so we would do those. And that was more important how we set it versus where. No matter where the screen was set, the goal was the spacing was pristine.
So any advantage that we were able to gain and get the ball handler downhill made the help pretty violent because we were spaced so well that they’re going to have to sprint over to help. And then that’s going to make the draw to and spray pretty obvious. And then you kind of get them in the blender and you’re off and running. But we didn’t want it to be like we gain an advantage and then we kick it, but our spacing is bad. So when we kick it, they just close out and it’s a six foot close out. So nothing happens. If there is an advantage, we could really take advantage of it.
Dan 41:38
At the G-League level and I know working with the magic as well, is your thoughts on preventing versus I guess punishing or provoking a pick and roll coverage? You know, so in the course of a game, if they’re in drop or they’re switching or hedging and you and your staff thinking about, well, let’s just let them do what they do and we’ll punish it if they’re hedging or switching or whatever it is versus the decisions to when you want to maybe rub screens or ram screams or all these things you can do pre pick and roll to kind of control what the defense is doing. I mean, I guess the back and forth chess match of what you think about throughout the course of a game with the actual coverage.
Dylan Murphy 42:13
Yeah, we didn’t do much re-pick and roll again, because we felt that slowed us down. We wanted to just go set it. We would have, hey, they’re in this coverage tonight, so we know we do A, B, and C. But if they’re in that coverage for 1, 5, I think one of the good things about Guard Guard is everybody guards Guard Guard the same way, which is you either switch it or you don’t. So you don’t have guards and drops. That allowed us to do what we do, independent of what the other team did.
The coverage has really only changed with bigs, whether they’re up, edging, in a drop, whatever it was. We didn’t really face many Guard Guard shows a little bit, but it’s hard to show when you’re slipping the whole game. So we were able to play our game kind of regardless of the opponent’s coverage. But when we did play 1, 5, yeah, we had more teaching points for what we were trying to do. But again, just kind of going back to what we were saying at the beginning, it was pretty simple. It’s like, hey, tonight they’re in a drop, so we’re going to set it, set it, make huge contact roll. We don’t need to think about it any further than that. They’re up, we’re thinking, hey, maybe we can swivel it, get them on the wrong side of the screen. So just kind of simple things for that, but otherwise we were able to kind of do what we did from a Guard perspective.
Dan 43:19
Coach, you’re off the start sub or sit hot seat. Thanks for going through the range of questions there with us from Play-Doh to pick and roll coverages. Yeah. That’s why we love star sub sit, but we appreciate that.
Coach, we got a final question for you. Before we do though, again, thanks so much for coming on the show today and sharing all your thoughts. This was a lot of fun.
Dylan Murphy 43:37
Really appreciate you guys and I really enjoyed this.
Dan 43:40
Coach, our final question that we ask all the guests is what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career as a coach?
Dylan Murphy 43:47
Yeah, I mean, I think everyone has said it on this show, my wife, the number one. But in honor of being specific, I think also, I shouldn’t say me setting ground rules, but her setting ground rules of kind of where the coaching life stops and where family life starts and how we don’t let that bleed. She’s super supportive of my career and the journey I’ve been on. And, you know, I kind of owe her that to have clear guidelines and boundaries of when I’m going to close the laptop, turn the TV off. First, you know, having a supportive spouse, and then second, just us kind of setting those rules. And have I broken them at times? Sure. But for the most part, trying to stay disciplined to that so I can have both.
Dan 44:35
All right, Pat, that was a lot of fun. Coach Murphy obviously has a unique past and done a great job. Really great job.
His first year got into some Play-Doh and Aerostatl. Right up our alley. The first time in a while. Yeah. So like we’ve been doing, we’re just going to get our top three takeaways from the podcast, and I believe it is my turn to go first, correct?
Pat 44:59
Yeah, you have the honors.
Dan 45:01
Yeah. So I’m going to go back to the Rumbles and adding that into, he said, every seven to eight games, they would do that in just a way to get things off people’s chests, get things out, put in front of people to discuss, to debate, try to break it down, poke holes in it, whatever it is, for different ideas. And the reason I like that so much is when you get into a season and every meeting is just about the next thing, the next thing.
And if there’s not a space to just for a second pull back, try to throw out some bigger ideas or different ideas that may or may not help, but at least talk about them and have a place for, like he mentioned, I think as an assistant, to just voice some ideas, whether or not it’s used or not work through them. What he got to was that it eventually helps with moving the big rocks or whether or not it moves the big rocks. I wrote that down as well. And so now I’m going to definitely steal that myself and see if going forward, that’s something where a staff can really benefit from these Rumbles or the Rumble idea.
Pat 46:04
Yeah, I really like along the lines of when he was talking about, you know, what big rocks to move, they’re trying to win every game, of course. But instead of like in the grand scheme of things, can we win 80% of our games by focusing on these big rocks and not getting worn down by the day to day problems or trying to, you know, fix every problem that arises, but really taking the macro view of what really are the problems and fixing those.
And I thought the great example was the guard to guard, you know, it became a problem, so they had to address it. But he said, there’s still these gray areas and that 5% of the time they still would mess up, but if you can get it, you know, 95% of times, like you’re going to be successful and taking that approach, we don’t have to be 100% right on everything, but let’s just get 80% and let’s approach it that way. And it made sense when how he talked about how he structured his meetings with the self-scout meetings, the rumbles, and just trying to really focus on like what matters.
Dan 47:01
Within all of that, he talked about guarding against bias and emotions, being a part of why he does all these things, and mentioned like as a coach, you can have knee jerk reactions. He gave some examples of games where you just want to fix whatever just happened or you don’t feel good after a loss and having a way to come back, look at the film, discuss as a staff, was it just a bad game or did somebody just make tough shots and there’s not anything that really needs to be fixed, we just need to stay the course.
And I think we’ve heard that over and over in different ways throughout the history of this podcast about coaches as they get more experience or go through their own processes, just understanding what to worry about and what not to spend too much time on and to try to take some emotion out of the game. That’s what reminds me of the variety of coaches we’ve talked about, not over talking in a post game speech and saying things that may be detrimental that might not even be true. You haven’t watched the film, you haven’t really had a chance to cool down as a staff and as a team and that’s why I heard a lot of coaches say, listen, I’m not going to say a lot after the game. I want to watch the film. I want to try to get some sleep that night and move on to the problems the next day. I just think he talked well throughout that first bucket, going back to the rumbles about trying to get to the meat of what the issue is or the adjustment or the new thing, but in a way that’s taking out negative unhealthy emotions from it. Yeah.
Pat 48:25
And I was really smart with the rumbles and all the meetings and even the individual ones. I think he always, the structure, the specialization of these meetings always though did provide the outlets.
And I think it allowed coaches to compartmentalize like, all right, I know when I can get this out or when I can voice, when I can vent. And I know first when I’ll have the chance to give my voice and the chance to express my emotions as well in the structure that I really like with these meeting types, the specific specificity, I still can’t say specificity of these meetings.
Dan 49:01
Absolutely. What I like too is the different types of meetings he was having, the walking meetings he’s saying to just 15 minutes ago, grab coffee, the rumbles I would imagine is sort of like a community feel, not just like a meeting where it’s, hey, I’m going to sit behind my big desk and you’re going to sit over there and sort of leveling the ground a little bit. And I think that different ways that people can feel more comfortable voicing their ideas, because I think he really wants to get the barometer of the room from his players, his staff, support staff, people in the film room. And as a leader, being able to do this in different ways that it’s not just, hey, come sit in my office and tell me your thoughts. I think it’s really smart in a way that people over time, over the course of the season, probably feel more and more comfortable voicing the true concerns or the true needs of the entire organization because of how he sets these things up. I just think it was really smart. Let’s move on to number two here. So I can take away and I’ll kick this one to you.
Pat 50:01
Yeah, my takeaway came in the start sub sit section when we were talking about winning the pick and roll battle and his approach with the pick and rolls overall, when he mentioned quantity over quality. And I thought he gave a great example.
If they ran six pick and rolls, the defense has to be right six times and they only got to be right one time. So when he talked about, you know, it’s getting as many pick and rolls with proper spacing and then just getting into the spacing conversation and also what’s important to him in the guard to guard screens and really learning from your players, letting it be more organic. With the spacing, I liked when we talked about that deep wing spacing. I think recently that’s something we’ve been looking at a lot. You know, we talked about with TJ Sane. We got a video project with TJ Sane coming out. Yeah, just talking about ways to space around the pick and roll outside of, I think, kind of the traditional ways we think and, you know, sometimes with like this cluster or bunching guys together and the effectiveness that can have in just creating bigger pockets, double gaps or removing tags. Enjoy that conversation as always, just getting into what makes an efficient pick and roll offense and what coaches are kind of stressing and thinking about.
Dan 51:09
I’ll really quick give you a miss of mine was in this section. It’s not coach Murphy’s miss, this is mine, but asking more about the spicy screens and just screening in general. He did go into it a little bit, but I think I could have personally spent more time on angles. And, you know, we talked about the guard to guard stuff. And I just think great screeners are really interesting. You talked about clever screens and how certain players kind of figured it out themselves. And I thought that was just like an interesting side topic within all this stuff.
And then my other miss within this start subset was when it came to what was his sub, the tag, going into their film, prepping for this show with him, they were so good at cutting against some of their pick and roll stuff. They would 45 cut or sometimes corner cut and cut that tag really well. And analytically, they’re really good in their cutting actions. And a lot of that was on a penetrating drive baseline, or if I got to reject the screen and would have had more time, maybe talked to him a little bit about some of those cutting concepts when it comes to punishing a tag that’s rotating over or something.
Pat 52:14
Yeah, cutting around the pick and roll is always interesting and kind of the systematic cutting versus instinctual cutting, always an interesting conversation. One other thing I liked, and I don’t know if, I mean, there was much of a follow-up, maybe it was a little bit of a miss on my end, but, you know, when it came to the big, he mentioned that they really didn’t emphasize too much. I mean, he said they lost their big early in the season, so they’re primarily guards or they had a five that pop, but they didn’t do a whole lot of pre pick and roll setups with the bigs in terms of RAM screens or rub screens, however you want to call them, because he felt that slowed them down. And I thought that was an interesting note for me.
And I think it goes back, obviously, to quantity over quality and something I’ve been thinking a lot about just, I mean, I’m not breaking any news, the importance of pace, but basically prioritizing pace sometimes over the correct read or execution in terms of execute as best as you can, of course, but if you just keep the pace, sometimes the pace will create the confusion. Obviously, of course, we know with the ghost screens, but even with the big, like, we don’t really want to slow it up, make a methodical, like just get into the screen, keeping it simple. If it’s not there, move it, and let’s get to another one. And if it’s not there, move it, we can get to another, we can get to three, four, like you said, you know, it’s kind of like a battle testing, the defensive resolve versus our ability to make it one action and just make the right reads every time. you
Dan 53:40
Yeah, the quote that it’s not the wrong decision that kills your offense, it’s indecision that kills the offense.
Pat 53:46
I think that kind of sums it up perfectly, that quote there. So Dan, to close, I’ll throw it back to you. What was your last takeaway from our conversation today with Coach Murphy?
Dan 53:56
Yeah, we didn’t get too much into the weeds about Plato and Aristotle and some of the tenets of stoicism in that classic start-subsit. But I will say that what I liked within that conversation was a little bit about self-study, understanding who you are as a coach, as he’s become a head coach now. And he mentioned in there in that start-subsit about becoming a head coach really clarifies your belief system. And I think he talked to just about once you have to make the final decisions and it’s on you being both open, because I get the sense he’s very open, he wants feedback.
But then he also said stubbornness and cost the whole group as a head coach. So if you’re too stubborn, it can kind of cost people. And so I just thought it was interesting to hear his thoughts on self-study, knowledge, being able to continue to grow as a coach. He’s done some really interesting stuff in his past as a writer before and so we wanted to kind of dive into that. But I just thought that was great. And lastly, embracing the gray I think was like a theme kind of throughout each sub-topic that we went through. How he manages the gray as a coach when it comes to decision-making, how he talks about drilling the gray going back to the first bucket was something I think he put a lot of onus on.
Pat 55:16
You are spot on with the gray and it’s conversations we’ve had several times before. And I think it’s always interesting looking at it now tactically, how you can make better decision makers on defense. I mean, of course, I think we’re always talking offensively and, you know, looking at how skill acquisition players learn small sided games to build better decision makers, but defensively, it’s just as important. I think kind of has risen more to the surface over the years.
Like he said, especially when they’re facing such difficult situations like these guard to guard screens, night in, night out, and with the rise of this gray and his emphasis, I like another thing going back to the first bucket. He talked about the concept development videos. So I know I’m getting kind of a little bit further away from your point, but we’ve discussed a reason like using videos to teach concepts pre-practice, but I like the spin that he took on like showing them the gray areas, these tough situations where maybe there is no perfect answer. It’s not like, here, this is what we want to do. This is what we don’t do. It’s kind of very open to interpretation. And I like him explaining kind of the process of how they work through those 10 minute sessions.
Dan 56:21
Yeah, maybe tying in the pick and roll conversation and really good offenses are going to put your defense in gray situations a lot, whether it’s spacing, whether it’s masking actions, whether it’s just great players playing together, all these things that we just have kind of discussed. Yeah, good teams are going to do that.
And so I think like him throughout you heard like, let’s just clip them, let’s bring it to the team and try to figure out, okay, how can we best solve this as a group when there’s no perfect answer and how do we play through it so it’s not a complete breakdown each time. I gave a couple quick misses on my end. Anything else you wish you could have went deeper on or missed with Coach Murphy?
Pat 57:02
I wish I had asked. His in-game approach to staff meetings, assistant coaches feedback during the game, if he has any sort of structure or how he tries to keep them efficient and get information from his assistants. I was just curious, I’m sure, I mean, with obviously how thorough and thoughtful he was with the staff meetings outside of the game, if what his approach was in-game as well.
Dan 57:24
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m sure, yeah, like you mentioned, equally thought out as well. Once again, we thank coach Murphy for coming on and sharing all his thoughts today. We appreciate everybody listening and we’ll see you next time.