More Ideas to Steal, Shape, and Bring to the Floor
This week inside SGTV, we’ve added another round of Practice Lab videos, with new installments on 🔒 Ready Ups, 🔒 Ballhandling, 🔒 Finishing, 🔒 Variable Shooting, and 🔒 Games.
Each piece gives coaches a practical idea, constraint, or teaching environment they can adapt inside their own practice.
That’s the point of The Practice Lab.
A working menu of ideas to steal, shape, and make your own.
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Every coach knows their own team best: their players, their league, their practice rhythm, their staff, their gym, their limitations. No video library replaces that.
But it can give you new starting points.
A different constraint to try.
A new way to shape a shooting drill.
A better question to ask before building a small-sided game.
A cleaner way to connect skill work to the decisions players actually face.
That’s where The Practice Lab lives.
Not just: “What’s the drill?”
But:
What problem is this helping players solve?
What information are they learning to read?
What decision does the constraint create?
How could this be simplified, progressed, or reshaped for my team?
The Learning Loop
One Brick. One Takeaway. One Tinker.
Each week, I’ll use this space to share three things:
One Brick: something I missed, messed up, or had to work through.
One Takeaway: a lesson learned or belief reinforced.
One Tinker: something I’m still trying to better understand, teach, or design.
The idea is simple: show more of the work behind the work.
Not just the clean clips or finished thoughts, but the misses, adjustments, failed assumptions, and small details that helped move an idea forward.
So, each week: one brick, one takeaway, and one thing I’m tinkering with.
Brick
This week, I was working with a group of players on using more change of pace instead of constantly relying on change of direction.
The goal was simple: do more with fewer dribbles.
We set up a 1v1 where the offensive player started in the backcourt and attacked a defender positioned near half court on an angle. They had eight seconds to create an advantage shot.
My first attempt was to reward the behavior directly. Any drive that included a change of pace earned an extra point.
It worked… a little.
But after watching it unfold, I changed the constraint. Instead of rewarding change of pace, I limited the offensive player to a single change of direction.
Almost immediately, the solutions changed.
Players began attacking with their initial speed advantage. They became more intentional with their driving angles. Change of pace started showing up naturally. Shot quality improved. The game began producing the behavior I was looking for without me having to score it directly.
Takeaway
This was another reminder that small changes to rules can completely change the landscape of a practice.
By limiting change of direction, players had to become more efficient with space. They had to manipulate defenders earlier, preserve their momentum, and be more selective about when they used their one directional change.
The lesson for me wasn’t that change of pace matters. I already believed that.
The lesson was that sometimes the best way to encourage a behavior isn’t to reward it.
It’s to design an environment where that behavior becomes one of the most useful solutions available.
Tinker
I’m still exploring when it’s better to reward a behavior versus when it’s better to constrain the alternatives.
Both can influence outcomes, but they seem to shape learning in different ways.
The challenge I’m working through is figuring out when to point players toward a solution, and when to reshape the environment so the solution has a better chance to emerge on its own.
🔐 Become an SG+ member to gain complete access to The Practice Lab today!
Attacking Hedge & Plug
On are most recent Youtube Deep Dive, we took a closer look at one of our SG+ breakdowns on attacking Hedge & Plug coverage with the reject and Gortat screen {🔒}.
This is a topic we’ve been tracking closely at Slappin’ Glass. A few years ago, Hedge & Plug felt like an incoming trend. Now, it feels much closer to a staple. More teams are using it, more teams are building out of it, and there is a good reason why.
At its best, Hedge & Plug {🔒} allows a defense to pressure the ball without fully committing two defenders to it. The big can impact the handler, the guard can plug the short roll, and the rest of the defense can stay compact behind the action. That combination gives the coverage appeal for both aggressive and conservative defensive coaches.
For offenses, though, the answer has often been too simple: move it twice, get to the second side, and attack while the big recovers. There is still value in that, but the best Hedge & Plug teams are getting better at sitting on those passes. They are staying home away from the action, trusting the coverage to handle the ballscreen two-on-two, and preparing their rotations for the obvious outlets.
So the next layer is not just getting the ball out earlier. It is finding ways to create the advantage before the defense gets to its rotations.
That was the center of our Deep Dive conversation: rejecting the hedge, attacking the plug defender’s “micro closeout,” and using the Gortat screen to punish the recovering big.
Moments Of Vulnerability
In our conversation, we kept coming back to two moments where Hedge & Plug is most vulnerable.
The first is the guard’s disconnect from the ball. In a lot of great ballscreen coverages, the on-ball defender stays attached, fights over, and works back in front. Hedge & Plug asks something different. The guard has to leave the ball, even briefly, to plug the short roll.
That small disconnect creates the window for the reject, or the dribble back away from the hedge, allowing the ballhandler to alleviate ball pressure and begin manipulating the passing angles.
And while many high-level Hedge & Plug teams are built to take away the short roll the reject can reopen that pass in a different way.
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The guard plugging the short roll is often responsible for eliminating that catch on their own. To do it, they may cheat toward the ball, trying to stay between the handler and the roller while taking away the passing lane.
The problem is that the guard is not always fully connected to the screener. And because the screener is usually the bigger body, with a larger catch radius, the plug defender can get caught playing the space between the ball and the roll instead of attaching directly to the roller.
When the ballhandler rejects the hedge, that positioning can suddenly put the guard on the wrong side of the action.
Now the pass that looked unavailable on the original path of the ballscreen opens back up, not because the offense forced the short roll, but because the reject changed the angle.
The second is what we called the “micro-closeout.”
When the guard plugs the short roll, they often drop a couple steps toward the nail before recovering back to the ball. It is not a long closeout, but it is an awkward one. The defender is usually square, wide, and loaded toward the roller. Now they have to change direction and recover back to a handler attacking with momentum.
These are the moment offenses are beginning to exploit.
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Win The Race, Clear Some Space
That is where the Gortat becomes such an interesting answer.
If Hedge & Plug is designed to take away the short roll, savvy offenses are realizing they do not always need to fight the coverage at the nail. Instead of the big wrestling for a short-roll catch in traffic, they can sprint through the lane, win the race to the front of the rim, and get to the right side of the recovering defender.
With the guard rejecting the hedge and the plug defender stuck in that micro-closeout, the Gortat creates one more layer of separation. The big clears the path, the handler turns the corner, and the coverage that was built to stay two-on-two suddenly has to solve a much different problem at the rim.
Boomerang Screens
Another concept we discussed is the use of the “boomerang” screen, a secondary uphill ballscreen after the primary action.
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Zooming In: In this action, the offense is baiting the defense into the coverage with the initial ballscreen. But instead of the big rolling through and filling to space, they roll short, forcing the defensive big into a two-way closeout to exploit in creating a drop or late lateral hedge on the rescreen.
Executing that coverage once is hard enough. Executing it twice, in rapid succession, with the big needing to recover and re-engage, is a much different challenge.
We thought this could become another layer in offenses efforts to create better advantage against the coverage. If the first action does not fully break the coverage, the second action may stress the same pressure point again before the defense can reset.
At the top of the Deep Dive, we talked about Hedge & Plug as something more than a passing trend. It is now embedded enough in the game that teams are building variations out of it: different levels of off-ball protection, different plug depths, different hedge angles, and different amounts of pressure on the ball.
Because of that, there is not going to be one magic answer. The coverage is evolving, so the offensive solutions have to keep evolving with it.
And that is what made this discussion so interesting. View the full conversation available now on YouTube!
