We were joined on the podcast this week by the NAIA Coach of the Year after leading Grace College to a Final Four, Scott Moore. We explore Coach Moore’s unique thoughts on post play, including efficiency, focus points, and much more, along with building selfless teams and being great on transition defense during the always fun “Start, Sub, or Sit?!”
Transcript
Scott Moore 00:00
I tell these guys constantly, you gotta be great at simple. And then the great teams do simple, over, over, over, and almost boring, right? But you can’t be tired of boring. Because winning is fun.
And if you don’t want to win and you want to get in my office and you’re upset because you lost three games in a row in January, you can struggle on it. Well, boring is kind of fun now, isn’t it? As boring wins.
Dan 01:50
And now, please enjoy our conversation with Coach Scott Moore. Thank you so much for coming on, making some time. First off, congratulations on a terrific season, Coach of the Year, all sorts of great stuff for you and your program, and so we are really excited to have you on today.
Scott Moore 02:16
I mean, I was just telling you guys, I love the show. You got so many great guests and just good insight. So when my assistant said you were interested, I said, let’s do it. Let’s hop on because these guys are fun to be with. So excited to be here.
Dan 02:29
Thank you. We appreciate that. And yeah, shout out to one of your assistants, Stephen Halstead. Him and I connected out at the Final Four, which was awesome. And we were able to set this all up. So couldn’t be more excited where we wanted to start your thoughts on building your offensive structure, focus points, points of emphasis. You know, you and I were chatting a little bit before the show last few days. And you guys were the number one or number two team and AI this year in your points per possession in post-ups. You post everybody up. You’re highly efficient. We’ll get into that to start overall. Just your thoughts on building your offensive structure from the ground up.
Scott Moore 03:08
I’ll start with Steven first, because go back and we say Assistant Coaches, there’s nothing to assist them about that guy. He is co-head coach. You know, I’ve got an awesome staff, Emma Jordan Widener and Charlie Warner. We talk more about that all the time, but any coach will tell you, you know, my name’s on the door, but man, oh man. And it’s tough because I don’t really post a whole lot about awards and things like that. One thing I realized, I need to make sure I talk about those guys because we won coach of the year and they do so much where honestly, I could disappear for a little while and things keep going. You realize pretty quick how replaceable you are kind of humbling, but yeah, Steven’s fantastic. Jordan and Chuck are fantastic, but yeah, offensive starter. So like anything else, when you’re 25, you know, everything. And I knew everything when I got into this and I was a player, unbelievable high school career, had an opportunity to play like Grace for Jim Kessler, who was the longest tenured coach in college basketball 44 years at one place. My twin brother and I played here. We followed my older brother Matt and then had to play professionally for a couple of years. And so when I got back, that was the point guard. And so just kind of running the show, right? And I thought this coaching thing, well, this will be easy because we’ve been successful my whole life as a player. Now coaching can’t be that difficult. So I joined staff with my older brother at Mount Vernon and realized pretty quickly, man, I stink at this. I’m not very good. I would rather play because it was a lot easier. I had the opportunity to come back to grace after three years and be with coach Kessler for seven as he finished his career, took the job in 2019. And really the way that your offensive, it kind of took on legs of its own. I was very much hands on with offensive stuff and just very not a dictator, but like I wanted to control a lot because that’s how I wasn’t to play, right? Ball was in my hands. And I thought as a coach, I could help, you know, our league guards do the same. So my first year coaching 2019, we were playing a conference game at Marion in Indianapolis. Marion was really, really good. Top 20, 25 in the nation. And we were just getting our butt kicked. Half time, we got to be down 15, 18, 20 points. We came out in the second half and I knew that Marion was going to switch multiple actions. And one of my assistant coaches now, Charlie Warner, was a 6-5, 6-6 shooting guard for us. He was a senior. And we started to, by the way, he shot 50% from three for his career, 49 and a half. Bad coaching on my part. He should have shot a few more time, but we started putting Charlie in some actions. And I said, Hey, instead of coming off pin down flares, what I want you to do is I want you to get yourself to the mid post and I want you to get some mismatches and we are going to find you and we’re just going to stay out of the way.
Scott Moore 06:03
And so we started running simple pin down corner actions and he would tight curl or he’d back cut and we’d flash and go high, low stuff. But we started getting him the ball from about eight to 10 to 12 feet. And, you know, turnaround jumper, good. Next possession, up and under and one. And so I don’t know what he had in the second half alone, but it had to be close to 20, 25 points in the second half by itself. And we closed the gap and had a shot to take the lead late and come back and win that game. And we’re on the bus driving home. And I looked at my assistant, Jordan Weiner at the time, and I said, Hey man, it’s probably January at this time. I was like, we’re scrapping everything. I need to get out of the way. I’m doing way too much as a coach and I’m really realizing that our plays are not winning games. These guys are making plays. So how could we figure out how to put our guys in the best positions and then get out of the way. And coach, how did that realization, that game, I guess then bleed into what was to come eventually with your overall offensive philosophy?
Scott Moore 07:09
So, starting the next year, we really had this idea, you know, we played in the crossroads. So, beating the Marians and Wesleyans and Huntington’s and Bethels in St. Frank, it’s a juggernaut. So, I wanted to be different. And one thing we started doing, it’s not a secret, you look at my team, we’re humongous. We’re 6’5″, 6’5″, 6’7″, 6’7″, we had Elijah, who was kind of a unicorn at our level, 6’10”. But even the guys we bring in, you know, 6’4″, 6’5″, they’re all physically built. And so, what we did all that off season was, we taught them how to play from certain spots on the floor. And a lot of that had to do with the low and mid post. So, we’d go from 8’10”, 12 feet, we’d get actions to get them at their spots. And then we taught everybody. And remember, I was a point guard. I posted up two times in my life. So, here we are, my staff is me, Jordan Weiner and Stephen Allsted, all perimeter players, all point guards and shooting guards. And we’re teaching something we have no idea what we’re talking about.
But I kind of had this idea in 2019, Spring Harbor from our conference, won the national championship. And so, it kind of tied together because what does every coach tell a recruit? Hey, we play fast, right? We won’t play fast. And you hear it all the time. My argument would be, well, if you’re crappy and the other team’s better than you, if you just play fast, then the team that has better players and has more players, essentially more possessions, you’re going to get beat. And I can argue with coaches all day long, but that’s just my thought process.
You get a better team, more possessions. So, we were scoring the ball at a high rate. We can stop anybody. And we were winning games. I think we’re 20 and 12 or 20 and 11. So, on paper, you look at like, that’s a good basketball team, but I felt we could be so much better. And when I saw Spring Harbor, they were one of the lowest paced teams in the country at the time. And not as talented, they had a couple studs for sure, but not as deep as some of the other teams. And Coach Coddingham is one of the best coaches in the country. Their efficiency was just phenomenal. And we got in that second year, my assistants, and I said, okay, what if we still have this idea of this space and pace, right? This is kind of up and down tempo, but what if we focused more on being super efficient in how we play?
So, what we do is, everybody has stats they look at. Our goal, you know, you made the comment, 1.2 points per possession in the post specifically. And this is crazy when I say this, but we want to be over a 1.0 on our offense for the season, all season. That’s a goal for us. And typically, that puts us at top five in the country, right? I stole some stuff from Bellarmine that I liked that Coach Davenport would do, focusing on more of the skill set of like passing. So, three years ago, we were one of the lowest ball screen offenses in the country. We do a little bit more now, but teaching guys how to play motion and finding opportunities where they can, okay, I have a mismatch. And now, once I have my mismatch, what actions are we going to do? And I always wanted to do a couple of things. I always wanted to lead the country in federal percentage. I always wanted to lead to the top in points per possession and focus on this idea of efficiency, right?
You’re not going to shoot a lot of threes. And that’s where guys would tell you, you know, we’re so different than the normal is three or four years ago, I think we averaged 17 threes a game, which was not very much, especially in today’s game. My comment would always be, hey, I’d rather make a bunch of twos than miss a bunch of threes. Now, obviously, threes add way more value than a two does if you make them. But what we had to do then is we had to get to the free throw line. And so being able to shoot a high percentage, you know, I think we set the school record for field goal percentage back to back to back years. So we just kept beating our own record. We want to shoot over 52, 52 and a half percent was kind of our goal for the team for the year, which typically would put us in the top two or three. 1.0, 1.1 is obviously the goal bars for points per possession. And then getting to the free throw line was huge to make up for the lack of perimeter shots we were making at the time.
It’s hard to lead the country just because the style of play and just our league. But we wanted to lead the league. My goal was always to make more free throws than our opponent attempted. If we could make more free throws than they were shooting, then that gave me an idea that, hey, we were being super aggressive and we were making free throws. So I think this last two years, I think we averaged around 21 and a half free throw attempts and we shoot the ball so well, you know, we’re 75 or 76% from the free throw line, which again made up for those lack of perimeter making nine, 10, 11 threes a game. We did improve that quite a bit this year. We were like 8.8 made threes a game. Last year alone, we were down in the mid low sixes. So you can see over two, two and a half. So the reasoning for that is we got better shooters. And so coach fled a few more threes.
Coaching is what you teach and it’s what you allow in your system. So I’ve never told a kid in my system, you can’t shoot threes ever. They figure that out pretty quickly on how we play offense. You know, we talk a lot about paint touch. It was talking about all that stuff that coaches talk about, but our five man, our backup five man this year, Ian Scott, who’s got a chance to be preseason player of the year in our league, he took four threes as a sophomore. And this year he shot 68% from three. Now he didn’t take a lot, but he made, you know, 20 threes where if I go in and say, hey, Ian, you’re not a three point shooter, you can’t take that shot. I can argue he won two games for us this season just because late in the game, he was open, unguarded, took that three with confidence because it came out of the flow of our offense and what we allow as a staff. So yeah, there’s a lot to it. There’s a lot of intricacies about it, but again, confidence is a real thing, teaching them how to play and then what to look for when they get to their spots.
And then my favorite statistic that we don’t talk about outside of the CIS, we want to lead the country in a CIS and we were close again this year. I think we were second overall, 21 at a CIS a game is I’ve been doing this for five years. And I think, if I’m looking at my pictures over here, we even five years have coached eight 1000 point scores per career. And so the idea is, okay, if we have six or seven guys constantly in double figures, who do you stop? We had the player of the year in the country, Bevo Francis winner and Elijah Maloney average 17 a game. So that idea of unselfishness where, okay, you take Elijah out of the game. Jake Wadding has 20, you know, Carter Stoltz can have 20, Bryson Graver gauge seven, like it’s just down the list. I think we had eight guys this year score 15 or more points which led the country, which again, it’s not a stat that you think about as a coach or talk about, but it fits who we are. And if we can hit those numbers, I know we’re winning a lot of games.
Dan 14:14
Coach, thanks for going through all that stuff. Really interesting points and thoughts on all these things.
And one of the things I would like to ask you about is the efficiency in the post and the amount of times that you will post up. We were talking beforehand, the best teams in like the EuroLeague this year are under a 1.0 on post-up possessions. As an action in general, it’s one of the lower PPPs generally, but you guys, it’s top in the country, getting into the details of what goes into being so efficient. It’s one thing to say we’re going to post everybody up and go in there a lot, but then you’re really efficient in it. And I guess more of the details and your thoughts on one, getting it there, but then two, like actually scoring and making it a place where it’s deadly.
Scott Moore 15:01
I think one thing it’s not talked about, this goes back to the idea I had with the Bellarmine ideas, people view post-up and post-action. We’re going to sit, we’re going to spin, we’re going to seal, you know, field goal posts, we’re going to throw it into you, and now it’s going to be a large one where it’s going to play one-on-one. And there’s just so much to that. The efficiency comes from, I believe, it’s your job as a player to get in a certain position that you can have an advantage. And part of that is screens that receive actions, whether you’re back cutting or curling, and now you have a mismatch, like that’s the first part. The other part that people don’t talk about is the passer. And so we spend a ton of time on what passes to make and how to make them. We start every day in practice with the Bellarmine passing drill. We do a two ball and a four corner passing drill, and it gets monotonous for these guys, but then they get in the game in their national tournament and, you know, we’ve got a mismatch and I need somebody to flash from the opposite because the corner of the backboard is open. We’ve done it so much now that it’s just, I don’t have to think, it’s just, I see it, I do it. So as far as the efficiency goes, I would say 50% of it comes from the guy with the basketball making the pass. And that’s kind of what we focus on is, how can we get you the ball where you have to do very minimal? There’s your efficiency, right? When you’re throwing a ball and a guy’s at 10 feet, he has to do a ton of stuff. Well, 50% is pretty good. You know, if you were, gosh, you said it, if you were over a 0.9, you know, points per possession, 0.95 or whatever in the post, pretty good. But we don’t want to be 0.95. We want to be 1.2. We want to be higher if we can. So taking a little pressure off those guys and reps, man, we rep it constantly. Our point guard, our 6.5 is huge, right? He’s big. 6.5, 6.6 point guards. They are spending time doing one-on-one from the low and the mid post, and they have to be efficient there. Otherwise, we won’t ever get them there. That’s not good because that’s how we play. We need five guys on the floor who can constantly find those mismatches and take advantage of them. And if you can’t, honestly, you find more time sitting next to me than out on the floor.
Pat 17:15
What are you working with from a skill standpoint when you get guys in the mid post working out of the mid post?
Scott Moore 17:21
The first thing we work out before anything else is just getting there. Just the fact to be comfortable. I think about zone offense where zone has areas that we want to focus on catching. Everybody knows that. But then I found that a zone defense, when you catch in the high post, the elbows or things like that from the wings, everybody’s in a hurry. But you don’t realize you have way more time than you think. You’ve got to catch and then you’ve got to almost go through progressions like a quarterback and take a deep breath survey. And then I will help you with your reads, right? I will help you with like, OK, instead of looking catch corner, mid post, low post shot, there’s a progress through this. First off, catch it. Always be a threat. We talked to all the anyone who catches it in the low post, mid post, be a threat. So the first thing we do, Patrick, is we spend a ton of time getting our players to that position and then repping out different things of just working on their craft. It’s always face up. We want to face up every time we’re in the mid post. Now we add some Barclays. We add some stuff once they get there. But the very beginning is catch it. Teach them how to pivot, reverse pivot, front pivot, whatever that entails. And then take a breath, slow down survey. And now can you create space? That’s what we want.
And then create your shot because we’re physical. One of the things we teach early on is facing up and then using our body to be able to create that space. And then as long as we get some separation now, I need you to get comfortable taking that 10 foot little mini fade. Right. And you’ll see that more than any shot that we do with our guards. You’ll see a face. So we had a really good player, Jacob Gibbs, this year who could catch it in that low block, he could create that. And then there was enough separation where even if he didn’t have five, 10, five, 11, six foot guards, he could still do it against six, five, six, six guys because of what we just kind of teach. He was special.
He got really good at that. So a lot of it is reps face up, strong side counters. That’s the thing, too, is you don’t need 15000 moves. We’re not teaching a lot of them, right? We’re not teaching you just shake, shake, shake. I tell these guys constantly. You’ve got to be great at simple. And then the great teams do simple over and over and over and almost boring. Right. But you can’t be tired of boring because winning is fun. And if you don’t want to win and you want to get my office and you’re upset because you lost three games in a row in January, you’re struggling. Well, boring is kind of fun now, isn’t it? That’s boring wins. So simple, simple stress it. We can’t do it enough. You will not see us take 5000 dribble moves. Once you catch in the mid post, the low post, high post, you got to dribble one. If you can’t do something with one dribble from there, then by that time, you know, people are collapsing. We’re trying to rotate. Guys, we cut through a lot, even in the post.
So if we go mid post, high post, we’ll backside dive or we’ll do the pro guard actions, high, low, whatever is based on, you know, tendencies or who we’re playing. But if you’re dribbling 15 times, that’s where Elijah struggled that honestly, a lot was early on, he would catch it, bring it down. He knew it was getting double, but then he’d start taking three or four dribbles and once you got to that second dribble, third dribble, you completely blew it. Everybody’s there. Guys don’t know if you’re passing shooting. So simple wins. It’s crazy.
Pat 20:57
What kind of spacing are you looking to get to when you get a mid-post, kind of high-post catch?
Scott Moore 21:02
It changes in year to year. We keep taking a look and different players, obviously all for different skill sets. So, you know, this year we’re losing Elijah, who is obviously a dominant low post mid post player.
And then we’re going to feature our six, seven Ian Scott, who will be a senior for us. He’s such a great passer and he’s more of the typical posts that we get in our league, you know, six, seven, he’s long, he runs the floor really well, probably 210 pounds or so, but getting him lifted, getting the ball in his hands. And then we will create actions. You saw it with Yukon a lot. We’re not as extreme as that. You know, Hurley does an unbelievable job of just putting guys in blenders and we’re going to do a zoom here, followed into a zoom here. I don’t want to confuse the defense. I just want to get, Hey, there’s the matchup we’re going to attack. Let’s get this action. Let’s get it to that point and then go be a basketball player. That Charlie Warner idea, that first year coaching gets a 12 feet, get you the ball. You’re a good player. Now we’ll do action. So we do all of our actions require a loaded side or a single side. It’s not that complicated. And then based on where the overload is, if we overload or we do a power side, which is typically the three guys, right? You have to triangle and there are certain actions that will do if the ball is thrown into the low or mid posts from that strong side. I changed this the last couple of years. I don’t like having a deep corner guy. That’s ball side. You know, typically like getting thrown in the post, I can just throw it directly to that corner guy, but I wanted to create more space. So the slot guy, we will always move, whether it’s a dive, whether it’s a cross screen or whether it’s just an exchange with the passer. But the one rule we do have, and this never changes, ball side low guy has to lift. He’s got to get up to where that slot is. We never want more than two people in a 15 foot area. So essentially we tell our guys, if you can both stick out your hands and you are close to touching each other, it’s terrible spacing for us. We got into more of the single side action. So we would overload the weak side. Like this is what we’ll do with Ian Scott. What’s the balls in his hands and he’s lifted and we have a single side. Now he can play with that guy and there’s so much that he’s so skilled that we can do. We can go D H O’s, we can go pass and follow. We can shark and get out of that ball screen quick. If they’re hard hedging, if we don’t like the single side, he can turn into a zoom or go follow ball screen with the strong side. And now you’ve got a shooter that’s just in the corner by himself, you know, dragging, just kind of fading to the corner. So it seems like a lot and it seems like, you know, their head spinning in August, September, October. But once you see that the actions are the same actions, everything we do looks the same in the end. Once you get to that point, you see light bulbs come on like, Oh, I know what I’m supposed to do here. I’m supposed to do this. If the ball’s here, you know, we’ll tweak things based on who we’re playing, you know, dive and lift.
Obviously, we got some guys that can really shoot the ball. And so part of our advantage there would be if one of his rules is we’re going to backside dive and lift. If he’s one of our best perimeter shooters, we may say, Hey, forego the dive, you’re always going to be in lift spot. We’re going to go ahead and just baseline cut the guy who’s supposed to be lifting. And that just comes with time and getting used to playing with each other and knowing that, Hey, this kid’s on the floor right now. He’s probably not going to dive. He’s probably going to stay out in pocket. You’re going to have to do that if you can.
Pat 25:49
Obviously, too, we’re talking like when you post up kind of more your traditional bigs, but when you invert the offense, like you said, you like to post everyone when you are going to post a guard in that mid post, what are just over the years, the considerations you have to take into account year by year to make sure obviously, again, the spacing or what you’re going to do with the other bigs. So the offense continues to stay efficient, even though you just think, yeah, okay, it’s a good mismatch. We’re going to post a guard, but making sure then he has room to operate and find players and make reads.
Scott Moore 26:17
You know, the funny thing is zone offense, the same thing as our motion and the difference in our zone offense, that’s not our motion is there’s less screening involved, but if you watch us play, and again, I’m not giving away any secrets, a lot of teams will just gap in zones. They’ll find those gaps. And I was a big, Hey, find the gap and the defense, whether it’s zone man, doesn’t matter, but there’s a lot of standing and that works for some people, but I just didn’t want to get into that. So any action, especially with our guards, now, remember with guards, there’s not a lot of double, it’s already confusing because not many guards or wings are going to double the point guard. So it’s already messes with people by being able to do that, but we always talk to them about, okay, when the ball does go in this area, what are we doing? And there’s always action. And I just want to keep defense busy. This is the term we use is keep them busy, be a threat with the ball, keep them busy, don’t stand, don’t be a spectator.
Now there are certain times, obviously we’re just spacing and standing and getting ready to catch and shoot. That’s the best thing we can do. Don’t overthink it. But if we throw it in the low post and it’s a guard, maybe there’s a split action on the weak side, or maybe there’s just an exchange as simple as that. Maybe there’s a dive in a lift. They just can’t stand. They can’t stand there with their hands up saying, Hey, look at me. Throw me the ball. Now, if we have a matchup we like, and we know they’re sending no doubles and we can say that, then I will scrap everything. And again, I’ll just say, Hey, Charlie Warner, get to your spot, get them the ball, everybody’s face out. It’s your go and they’ll do that. And that’s not common teams are smart. They figure stuff out, but try to put them in the best position possible. And again, get out of the way, get out of the way, coach and players alike.
Dan 28:07
Coach, my last question on all this is more the benefits of playing this way from like a mentality standpoint, the innate toughness, I guess you build into your team where if everybody’s posting and learning to play through contact or wanting to post any other benefits that you see or difficulties that you have as a coach of trying to get everybody in there to post up.
Scott Moore 28:29
Well, one thing it does is a negative thing is it limits some of your recruits. We have exceptions to the rule. Carter Stoltzfus is an exception to the rule for us. He is just a bulldog, you know, he’s barely six feet tall. And, you know, I tell Carter all the time, dude, there’s no reason you should play for us, you just don’t fit. But all the intangible stuff that you cannot measure as a basketball coach, the dude just wins, constantly just wins. So I tell him all the time, I just can’t keep you off the floor. So the negative part of that, Dan, is it sucks to hear this as a recruit. But, you know, if you’re five, nine, five, 10, five, 11, six foot, we’re not looking at a lot of those guys because it just, you want to go to a school that also shows off and uses you to your success. If I have a 5’8 guard and he’s coming to play for us, like the fact is he’s going to get lost in the shuffle and then he’s not going to play. And so we still spend a lot of time recruiting those guys. That’s kind of a negative.
The positive is it’s amazing how this has created everything to do with our program. So being able to post up all five guys creates this focus on passing. The passing leads to high assist and high field goal percentage. That idea leads to, okay, we have five, six, seven guys, double figures. We have constant 1,000 point scorers. We have concept, you get 15 and next thing you get 15 and you get 20. And then what that leads to is it leads to a locker room with a lot of dudes that are happy, it creates this, you hear the word culture so many times, you guys probably are sick of it, but I think everybody’s version and statement of culture looks a little different. That’s what I would argue, come into our locker room and you sit down and you see these guys and you see, Hey, I’ll never say never, but there’s a good chance. I’m not going to coach too many 20, 22, 24 point scorers per game at Grace, just the way we play. And if you want to come in and you want to be the dude and you want to average 24, this is not the place for you. Doesn’t mean you can’t be great and you can’t help win a lot of games, but again, just stylistically how we play, what we focus on, we’re going to get a lot of guys that average 12, 17 points a game. And you just realize, man, so much fun to play where there’s a little pressure taken off of you. Let’s not be, you know, missed to say that the mental side of college athletics and these kids today is a real thing. Like it’s a struggle, man. These kids have so much going on, so much noise. That’s one thing you want to do is you want to help them and show, dude, you’re valuable, you are extremely valued. You got to add value. Otherwise you can’t play for us, but where’s your worth at? And if your worth is a, I didn’t score 18 to 24 points and that’s all you’re focusing on, it’s amazing how that can just tear you up inside and parents too. Hey, you know, why aren’t you getting more shots than John? You know, why aren’t you getting more time? Aren’t you starting? Ian Scott’s hasn’t started a game for us guys.
He’s an all American. He’s going to be the player of the year potentially in the crossroads league next year and hasn’t started for three years. But the idea is, Hey, if you give up a little bit of this, look what you’re going to get, you know, Elijah, you’re not going to score 28 a game, but trust me, we went a bunch, you’re probably going to be the front runner for player of the year in the country and then they see it and then that happens and then guys just buy into it, man.
Dan 32:07
Coach, well said on all that stuff. Thanks for being so thorough. We want to transition now to a segment on the show we call start, sub, or sit. We give you three options around a topic, ask you to start one of them, sub one of them and sit one of them, and then we will discuss your answer from there. So coach, if you’re ready, we’ll dive into this first one for you.
Scott Moore 32:28
Well, I laid off at this starting might be the most overrated thing in the history of basketball. So it’s not a good segment for coach more because I throw starting out the windows. If you can play, you can play. And I need you in the last five minutes. So we’ll go with it.
Dan 32:43
Okay, all right, we’ll see what happens. So this first topic, it’s called tough to build, and this is from a team standpoint. And so I’m gonna give you three different qualities of a team that in your opinion, the start would be what is the toughest to build into your team? So option one is selflessness. Option two is toughness, or option three is cohesiveness.
Scott Moore 33:12
Great question. I think all of those tie in a little bit together right in one way or another. Speaking on behalf of my experience in coaching at the college level, I think the hardest part is probably the first one, selflessness. I think also then cohesiveness. Remember you’re talking about, we’ll get into this a little later. And the reason why I have toughness at the bottom is because we spend a lot of time recruiting that. I think we can implement certain things that can help a kid get tough, but we spend more time recruiting toughness than we do building toughness. Parents are involved in that, your family, dynamic, your coach. I’ll go selflessness, cohesiveness, and then toughness.
Dan 33:53
Pat and I were talking before, and obviously these are all huge traits for a team and tie together in some point. I wanted to ask you about the selflessness. Before we recorded this, we were kind of talking a little bit about, you have a term competitive selflessness in your program, and would love to know more about what that is and how it kind of ties into this answer here.
Scott Moore 34:14
Yeah, so difficult, right? Difficult because you’re taking, let’s be honest here, you got to get good basketball players to win basketball games. So these guys are dudes. Everybody was the best player in their high school team, and everybody was all state, all conference. They’re all coming from the spot where they were the man. And now you’ve got to bring them together, and you have to convince them. Essentially, if we win, we all win, then we’re going to have a lot of guys. But how do you do that with an 18-year-old, right?
And that’s something that’s 38 years old in my 15th overall, 15th year as a head coach, I’m still trying to learn that process with the selflessness stuff. So the competitive selflessness comes from here is you’ve got to be competitive. Everything we do and we build our program around, we compete. And I know that’s not a new term for everybody, but I’m telling you, you ask our guys, we have this thing called Toughness Week. It’s a fun conditioning. People call it Hell Week. We call it Toughness Week. Part is my assistant coaches are also super competitive. So we draft teams. So in the summer, we’ll do something, whether it’s we get on the golf course or we have some sort of competition between the four of us. And then you get first pick. First pick’s a big deal. You want to have first pick, and then we draft our players. So we know our teams ahead of time. And then when we come into school in September after Labor Day, we do our qualification week where the guys have certain things that they have to complete through the summer. We do some testing. But then it’s 10 straight days of Toughness Week. And those 10 days, typically it’s three days, morning, an afternoon, and the evening. The evening one is always typically like a chalk talk. We talk about kind of some pillars and things that our program stands for. And it just gives me a chance to just talk to the guys. Maybe it’s a devotional that we’ll do together. The morning stuff, whether it’s lifting, whether it’s doing some sort of physical conditioning. And then we throw everything out the window. We’ve gone canoeing. We actually do a Ironman. We’ve gone paintball, escape room. We do trivia. We do a lake day. We get on the lake. Anything we can compete, it’s my team, versus Coach Widener’s team, versus Coach Halstead’s team, versus Coach Warner’s team. The whole idea is it’s creating this competitiveness for 10 days, you’re with a group of five or six people. That’s your team, right? And then when it’s over, you got to figure out, okay, boys, we’re no longer against each other. All 15, 16, 17 of us, we’re together now. So I think recruiting competitiveness is a real thing. It’s a lot like toughness. I think either you love to compete or you don’t. And I can tell you right now, there’s not a single guy in our program that doesn’t love competing. And everything we do, from practice from day one to toughness week, anything, they compete. And then when the selflessness comes in, that’s a lot of the teaching. And I’ll be honest, we spend a lot of time talking about it. Guys have to see it, they have to see it come true. So the last five years to see, hey, we’ve got eight guys who scored a thousand points. We’re winning a bunch of games. All this team success leads to individual success.
Hey, you know, we can have the national player of the year and he plays 24 minutes a game and averages 17 points a game. They have to see that come true. And once they do, now there’s belief. And once you have belief, and at 20 years old, if you believe in something, it’s tough to get it out of them. It’s stuck, man.
Dan 37:49
You mentioned you do some summer testing when they come back. What are you testing?
Scott Moore 37:53
I’m OCD with organization, so I don’t do many things right, but I can organize. And so we put a packet together, as you can see here, we’ll do a team burst that will come up with the fits, the new team that we’re going to have. And then the picture, this is Kansas city, sort of the sweet 16 is trying to go of ours to get there. Within this packet, there’s a bunch of stuff, calendars and stats. And then we’ll be able to see things that they have to do that when they get back the day after labor day, they have to hit a certain number, right? So it’s very individualized.
I’m not big on posts and guards and wings. I’m more than a you, you know, Dan, you as a player, where do I need to get you? What are some things you need to accomplish? Let me give you some numbers. And then we have a great strength and conditioning program. These guys will work through this summer. I’m a big believer in creating a, Hey, don’t let that guy down mentality. Like I want to see my family in the summer, you know, a lot of these teams, they’ll practice and they’ll do stuff. We don’t practice in the summer. We’ll play a couple of games, but I tell them it’s the selfish point of the year. It’s the point where we need you to be selfish and be great. You have to individually get great.
So once they do that and they come back after labor day, we will test them and we’ll test them all and they have to hit their numbers. And if they don’t hit their numbers, then there’s some things that they have to do in order to be able to practice and remember practices a couple of weeks away. So there’s some stuff that some of these guys, you know, we don’t have a lot because they know we don’t want to let that guy down. If I don’t get my bench press max, if I don’t get my, we do a conditioning test called 17s and it’s brutal. You can’t just show up in September and just run and get your time. You’ve got to practice. You got to train to do that. What I noticed is by doing the qualifications and doing that, it’s created this idea of, man, our guys are coming back into the season in the summer.
They are so ready to go. Last year I was shocked. We were probably one of the best conditions teams I could put up in the country, September 10th. Now you don’t want to go too fast. You want to be ready to go in the beginning of November, but it was just amazing how they looked around and look, I don’t want to be left out. If all my guys are doing this and they’re training and they’re getting bigger, faster, and stronger, I don’t want to be the guy that brings up the rear and finished last and everything. That’s where the competitiveness comes in. The freshmen are a little bit different. Our incoming freshmen, we try really hard to teach and try to teach them the proper way to train to be a collegiate athlete. So I’m a little bit more lenient on some of the testing for the freshmen, but they pick it up pretty quick. Like any other freshmen, they think they’re going to come in and change the whole program anyway, and they’re going to be the man. And then they get here and they go, holy smokes, Jake Wadding is a machine. I have no chance, but it’s fun. That’s what you create.
So I don’t have the guys three straight months. I want them to be a kid and I want them to be home and go see their friends and their family and go on a date with a girl and just like, meet me alone. I just want to go fishing, but also get your work done.
Pat 41:06
You mentioned with toughness that you recruit to it. And I would just like to follow up with how you recruit toughness or what you are trying to find out in the recruiting process.
Scott Moore 41:16
For five years in a row, I’ve never went to a score book in an AAU tournament or an open gym or anything and looked how many points a kid scored. I could care less.
You look for things you like as a coach that stand out to you, like his ability to get to his spot, right? Or his ability to continue to talk and read. I know a lot of coaches do this, but we spend a ton of background and homework. Any kid that comes, sits on my couch when we’re recruiting, that’s on a visit. The scary thing is like, I know way more about them than they know. And we will not get to that point until that. But high school coaches spend a lot of time pulling on high school coaches, getting in the gym at high schools. Recruiting certain high school teams also matters. It’s kind of crazy. If I’m getting a kid from a certain school that I know their program, I call that coach, like I know what he’s been taught. It’s really hard when I get this kid. We’re skilled every day. I don’t have as much time to teach a kid how to get to the middle of paint and play off too. Yes, we’ll do that stuff. It’s like, dude, if you can’t figure that out at 18, 19, it’s going to delay what we’re trying to do, which is the next step. This is a trick I learned from coach Kessler. I’ll call office ladies. Now that sounds weird. And not even just office ladies, just people who are just regular teacher. Like if I know a certain person at a school, I’ll ask a non-basketball coach, hey, what is so and so like on a daily basis? How do you view him as a student athlete? And for us, that carries so much weight.
And then our players, I am not exaggerating on this. I promise you, our players make the final decision on if a kid’s coming to grace or not. I’ve never offered a kid that hasn’t stepped foot on our campus and has spent time with our players. We have something going so well right now. That’s where I could screw it up as a basketball coach, where I just see a kid. I like the kid like, hey, we’re going to take you because you’re a good player. We have kids in all the time and they’ll come to me and they’ll say, coach, yes. Like this kid fits who we are. We love him. And they also do a great job of, they’ve come to know that they like to win. So if a kid is talented, there’s no, hey, he might take my spot. I don’t really want to make it easy on him. No, if he’s good and he fits us, those guys will come and they’ll tell me yes. If he’s not, or if he doesn’t fit in a certain way, they’ll tell me no, and we won’t offer a kid. If the guys that I trust in our program are telling me that it doesn’t fit, then we’re not pursuing any longer. There’s no point in going down that path because I think that’s the strength of our program. I think that locker room has to matter.
Pat 44:35
We’ll get to our last start subset and doing our research, looking at the defensive end, we also saw that you guys were one of the best transition defensive teams in the country. So we’d like to ask you about your transition defense and which would be the most important additional consideration to having a successful transition defense. You know, of course, there’s the hustle back, stop the ball, but these are kind of a little bit more on the peripheral that you would value or say is most important. Is it shot selection, offensive rebounding strategy or philosophy, or your offensive spacing?
Scott Moore 45:12
Well, that’s an easy one, the number one by far for us. So first off, transition is one of the least taught things in basketball. And we spend a ton every day. We work on offensive and defensive transition. That’s one thing that’s changed over the course of my five years coaching here is putting a emphasis on we want to be really, really good at that end of the floor and leading into that end of the floor.
So we feel like we have an advantage if we can get a team to have more defense. Problem is there’s a five second point to get to that. You got to stop them. So everyone always asks about how many offensive rebounders do you send? You send two back, you send three backs and one. I am just big on shot selection and taking great shots and taking shots that don’t surprise you. Someone takes a shot and we go, wait a minute. That’s bad because it typically leads for defensive transition that we struggle in. If you’re not surprised by a shot, then one, we got better opportunity to get in a position to rebound and two, to be honest with you, we’re not rebounding very much anyway, because the ball is going through the basket. Anytime you got to get out of bounds, that’s your best defensive transition. So shot selection, we spend so much time and it’s amazing how much carry over that has to be defensive transition. The other thing is it’s basically talk about an offense, but we don’t talk too much about that in defensive. We want to focus on getting a guy on the ball early. We don’t want a free runner and I’m really big in just getting the ball to a side. We spend a lot of time and my thought process is whether it’s right or wrong. If you’re in the middle of the floor, like that’s what we’re trying to do offensively. Well, yes, we want to get up the sideline and attack, but essentially we want to get the ball to the middle because now it opens up both sides. Defensively, if I can just shuttle to a side and keep the ball there, we know our rotations like clockwork. So you teach your rotations. Problem is, is these guys are robots. So if the ball gets to the middle of the floor and it opens up both avenues. Well, that’s much harder to guard, right? Now your rules with like, okay, we’re not going to give up one catch and shoot. We’re going to maybe like stunt that and get out. Well, that’s harder to do. That’s where great offense is way better than great defense. Guys are just going to make plays and make shots. So again, it’s one of those things you stress, right? You are what you stress, you are what you practice. And we spend every day in a transition segment, both offensively and defensively. And another thing that the emphasis on is speaking. Instead of offensive rebound, I would just trade that out and say, just using the words. You have to speak and communicate. And if you do that, it is unbelievably over the course of my five years doing this, how much better we’ve gotten at defensive transition. Just by saying words, I have ball, not that hard, right? We know who has ball.We know who has basket. We know who has rim runner. We know who has corner. And then if we can get the ball stopped, now we let our half court defense take over.
Pat 48:20
I’d like to ask about shot selection. And going back to the post conversation, what are the shots that you’re working with your players, say, this is a good shot, this is a bad shot, especially when you’re in the post, when a guy can get in the paint or close to the rim? And making them understand, just because you’re close to the rim, maybe, yeah, this isn’t a great shot for us.
Scott Moore 48:40
Yeah. Just look at me and I’ll tell you, you know, they’re with you for four years. They know they start to look out of the corner of their eye and be like, yeah, that was my bad. One thing I do as a coach, though, fear is a real thing too. And I never want our guys to play in fear.
I want to take that out of the game completely. Now I’ll make decisions as a basketball coach and my assistants will make decisions based on this player is hurting us right here in this case, but I never want a kid to look over their shoulder and go, Oh man, what does coach think? I’ll tell you what I think, but you got to play because I need you to get over and move on and be great. The next possession, right? And so that’s one thing we spend a lot of time teaching on. As far as shot selection, I am much more about where the ball gets to and we stress on just certain actions for us, even if you’re a great shoe, like Brett, sick of boots for us. He is a green light and I tell him a lot like, Hey, you can probably take more bad shots than anyone else on this team. Just because you make shots, right? Steph Curry’s issue, whatever he wants. Anytime it’s not a bad shot, but he knows even, Hey, we stress field goal percentage and effectiveness, right? The effective field goal percentage and all that is a big deal for us.
So if we get the ball in transition and we’re throwing the ball up and you take a corner three with four seconds going into the shot clock and we don’t have any offensive rebounders down there, they know you go back to our films. You don’t see us do a lot of those. Now we’ll throw the ball up the floor. We’ll attack the paint. We’ll get to the basket area and kick and the trail one, two catch and shoot. But I would tell you that’s a higher percentage shot than it is maybe a quick corner three off the break where that may be a 35% shot against certain players. You know, for Brett, sick of boots, probably a higher. So you prize a little bit more leniency, but getting the ball to the paint paint touches shoot pass rebel, right? Shooting is offensive rebounding. That’s what we stress.
And in paint times I’m a little different. I don’t necessarily say that if the ball gets to the painted area, then that counts. Obviously you can get the ball to the paint and take a crappy shot, but it’s more so on defense. We stress the hardest thing to do is close outs, long close outs, like close outs in basketball. I don’t care how great you are. It’s so difficult to do. So on offense, we want to create long close outs while getting the ball to the painted area. Now I’m drawing help. Now I’m creating mismatches by moving guys. And now, okay, that’s a great perimeter shot for us. There’s not many post actions, Patrick, that we take that are bad shots. Cause I would consider, okay, get the ball in your area. You’re one on one. We’ve taught you how to play from that position. That’s a great shot for us. It’s more so probably from the perimeter. What’s a quick perimeter shot, but again, stressing paint touches, stressing offensive rebounds.
Scott Moore 51:41
If you don’t have it up, that’s a great time for a kick out catch and shoot three. I mean, the NCAA, you guys have done statistical data on that where that’s a high percentage shot. And so if I go back and look into the game and I look and say, Hey, we track it by the way we track paint touches and movements and stuff like that. So if I get one dribble inside the three point line and I move that guy and I kick it and that dude shoots a mid range jumper or attention, shoot three, that’s a paint touch for us. It’s a movement of guys. So we qualify that. If I look at the end of the game and say, we stressed with 75% paint touches, which are really high. And I’m going to be honest, we probably don’t hit it very often.
But what we’ve seen is more than not, we’re at 68, 70, 71% in a game. If we hit that number, then you just look at our free throws and you look at our field goal percentage. Hey, we shot 56%. We got to the line 24 times. It is impossible almost can’t say impossible, but it’s almost impossible for us to shoot the way we shoot and not have a high paint touch ratio. Just the way we play. We have to help each other. I do not have a lot of guys that can just say, okay, get out of my way, break you down. I’m going to dribble 17 times and go get a bucket because again, we don’t recruit those guys and that’s not what we teach.
Pat 53:08
And a quick tangent because you mentioned, you know, you teach the guy, you work with the guys in their spots and that they can go to work there and that it’s usually going to result in a good shot you’d want. And at the beginning, too, when we started the conversation, you talked about, you know, working with guys in spots. So we’ve talked a lot about the mid and low post as spots. I’m just curious, are there other spots on the floor that you work with your team season and season out, or is it more maybe player specific than if you add different spots?
Scott Moore 53:35
It all goes back to spacing. So there’s different spots that obviously we want to play from an attack areas, but every place is an attack area with the right spacing. And we’ll spend time on the perimeter where again, I’m a big believer and just don’t waste dribbles. So if we can get to a single side and you know, you can get into DHO or some zoom actions, even on a double side, you’re trying to teach them how to play from that spacing, if there’s a guy by himself on the opposite wing, you’re coming off a ball screen, you get to the middle, the nail hole. We don’t want him as a statue. We want him to slide and create more spacing so that the closeout now goes from 15 feet to 25 feet. It’s all about creating the easiest shot possible. And the offense seems, it seems like, holy cow, there’s a lot to this. I’m telling you, like I’m not that smart. It’s get the ball in the hands of the best players in the best positions possible to make easy place.
Dan 54:36
Coach, you’re off the start, sub, or sit hot seat. Thanks for going through those couple of options with us. That was a lot of fun. We’ve got one last question to end the show. But before we do, once again, congratulations on a great season. And we really appreciate your time today. So thanks for coming on. Yeah, thank you, guys. Coach, our last question that we asked all the guests is, what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career as a coach?
Scott Moore 55:01
It’s two fold. I’ll start with this. My assistant coaches and their families. When I started this, Coach Kessler gave me the best advice. He said, build a team that you want to play with. And so I tried to do that. And then also, it’s important to have assistants who you can kind of do life with. And so it was really important to me where there’s nothing against really young guys or really older guys. It’s just, I wanted to get guys that were similar in my life where they were at so that I could, again, it’s just this friendship, man. It’s like, you love these guys. So Coach Widener was kind of my first one. And I’ve had a bunch, you know, Coach Miller and Coach Bowen, but now Coach Halstead and Coach Warner, where I’m not exaggerating. We’re not in the office, just grinding this out. You couldn’t have a more false way of doing things where you got to sit down and watch film and solve the world’s problems. We got a golf course two miles away. We got a lake two blocks away. We go and we’ll play 18 holes and we’ll talk fake and we’ll talk our guys. We’ll talk relationships. And now we’re getting to the point where I have a son and they’re all married, you know, Charlie’s getting married this summer. They’re going to start having kids and just to be able to go on these trips to bring your families with. It’s the best investment a head coach can make is the quality of people that you surround yourself with.
And then I’ll lead that into our program with relationships. You guys have had guys on here that are way smarter than me with X’s and O’s. They could call timeout in 30 seconds. They could draw you something up. You cannot believe. And then they can get it to work. Gosh, that’s incredible. That’s not me. I like basketball. I don’t love basketball. I know that surprises people, but it’s always been a part of my life. I love the development of the age and I love the impact on relationships and what it can do. You know, we’ve won a lot of games and, you know, my staff has gotten some awards here with coach of the year stuff and all that. And I’m going to turn my screen so you can see outside of the pictures of my kid and my wife. The only thing I have hanging up right there is every player that’s graduated for me in my five years. And I got, you know, five more to put up here in the next couple of weeks. That’s the best investment I got was if you can create something where these kids can look at you as an extension to their father or an extension to an older brother and you can make it real, then it’s amazing what you can accomplish on the floor. But man, when they hug you after the season’s over, when you see the tears coming down their eyes and what they say to you after that last game, if you didn’t win, it just hits you quickly. Like that 20 seconds is worth anything we’ve ever gone through. That is the, my ad calls it the eternal paycheck is we don’t get paid. I need to move up a level of, I’m going to be making millions of dollars here, but it’s not why we do it, right? There’s so much more on why we coach and relationships. It’s the number one thing that I invest in and it will continue to be that until I stop doing this.
Dan 58:10
All right, Pat, you and I were really looking forward to this conversation with Coach Moore this week, because just an interesting first bucket, which we’ll get into about playing through the post and guys posting up in the efficiency thing and just love to hear different styles and amazing run, ton of success, obviously to back it up.
Pat 58:30
I agree. Really great. guy. I think quickly, just what stood out, just an overall kind of theme was, he keeps it pretty simple, you know, to an extent, and he’s a whole coach at relationships, just building relationships, meaning before relationships, what we got into with the Start Sub Sits. And you see where, like, the success really probably lies in his program, is his ability to build a cohesive team that trust each other, like each other. And like he said, you don’t want to let the other guy down.
Dan 58:59
Maybe we should start at the end and work back. That’s what we’re doing. His best investment answer about building a team you would want to play on and then also his investment and assistant coaches, you can just tell a lot of the secret sauce is him and his ability to bring people together, get people pulling in the same direction, whether it’s getting a ton of talented individuals to sacrifice and obviously see the success on the court and build a culture. Yeah, a lot in there.
So we’ll shift back quickly to the first bucket, which was building an offensive structure and especially diving into his thoughts on post play. And I’ll just give real quick kind of backstory as we were prepping for the show, you know, watching film, talking to him, they just post up a lot, everybody. And they obviously had a terrific team this year and terrific center, like you mentioned, it’s going to be a Colorado next year, but that it wasn’t just him. It was just the whole team, the way they play, the way they flow into it. And like what I was really interested in personally was when you look across the board analytics right now, most people kind of go, the post up is analytically one of the lower efficiency type of shots, let’s say now creating out of the post might be a little bit different as far as kickouts, but his team not only posted up a ton, but they were so efficient. I think they were the second most efficient team in NAIA this year at the post up as a shot. So that was just interesting to me. How the heck do you one, do it all the time, but then also make it so it’s hyper efficient and it’s really a weapon. And I thought his early thoughts on field goal percentages, where they’re trying to get the ball to little details on facing up and one to two dribbles, just a lot of gold in there on how they play and why they ultimately are so good at what they do.
Pat 01:00:55
Efficient with how usage. I think that’s pretty rare in today’s game, especially with the post. I liked his thoughts when he really would talk about trying to create the simplest finish or the simplest catch on the post and the emphasis they placed. And of course, that has to go into the passing. And imagine that passing is probably like 50% of the puzzle. Let’s say, and you mentioned the Eller mine passing drill that they’ll warm up with. You watch them and yeah, it’s a ton of high, low stuff. Those guys know how to seal, they know how to work. And then they run that opposite corner up and they’re just getting simple catches for finishes. But I do like going back to his simplistic approach. I mean, of course, trying to play efficient, but he shared the backstory and how he kind of settled into it. But just understanding, let’s just find spots that work for us and let’s teach those guys how to play into spots. And then everything, we’ve had this conversation before, but reverse engineering from there. So if they know they want to be mid post, high post, low post, what do we got to teach our guys to be effective out of it? Footwork, finishing, passing. And then from there, so like, how do we get them in there? How do we find match-ups? And I think we didn’t go into it too much, but it was pretty relevant throughout the conversation. The mismatch hunting, if they’re switching and just, all right, that’s the match up we’re going to go at and just kind of making sure wherever it is in the post, we know how to play out of it. We know how to score out of it. And everyone knows how to react accordingly.
Dan 01:02:16
What was evident throughout was how every part of what they do as a program connects to other parts of the program and the ability to say, well, okay, with wanting to post up everybody and play through that action led into recruiting, led into like a toughness piece, led into just like, it was like this full circle thing. And I think you heard that throughout, but especially here when we were a little bit more tactical in the beginning, you can see how a coach like himself and the program he has set up that the tactics also lead right into the personality and the personality builds in the relationships and like there’s this whole cyclical thing.
And so what I also like too, was a lot of modern numbers, analytics talk about space, pace, all these things. That’s not untrue, but it’s really cool to get in these conversations where here’s a team that was in the Final Four, 34 and two. And yes, they’re trying to play certain ways, but they’re just a little different and a little different thoughts on things like less pick and rolls for them at their level and more just simple actions to get guys in space, get to spots. And, you know, he kind of joked with me before the podcast about just recruit great players and stay out of the way a little bit, sometimes it is pretty simple.
Pat 01:03:35
Well, first, I thought this conversation too on that note about just playing to a searching for efficiency. It reminded me a lot of our conversation with coach Ben McCollum, now how they played was different than coach Moore’s teams, but just kind of the same philosophy that, you know, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a space game, a game of possessions, playing fast shooting threes. So different approaches, but like the same kind of philosophy underneath that found a lot of similarities in both those conversations. And quickly, just before we get in the start, so I’ve said I did on this kind of like simplicity thread, he had a great quote, or kind of paraphrasing, he said that he wants his guys to be great at simple and that great teams do the simple things over and over.
Dan 01:04:15
Yeah, he followed up about winning is boring or like the boring parts of just doing the simple over, but being 34 and two is pretty fun. Let’s flip to start sub or sit. As he mentioned, he doesn’t care who starts it’s overrated. He cares about how I finished, but for purposes of our game here, we appreciate him answering these. Let’s start with the first one, which was the tough to build for a team. And we wanted to get into a little bit of his culture building inside of the walls of what he does to build it non tactically, I guess. And so I’ll kick it back to you on first thoughts on the tough parts to build for a team.
Pat 01:04:55
Two things that sit out in this conversation, but I’ll start with just the first one that sit out with his toughness week and enjoyed hearing what they do, what it’s about, drafting teams, playing different sports, but just building this competitive nature in the team. And yeah, anything from what he said, canoeing, Ironman, paintballs. So I really liked it. And I mean, it wasn’t all straight basketball stuff, but just building this cohesiveness, I’m sure it comes out of it at the end, but this competitive nature that he’s searching for isn’t so important to his program.
Dan 01:05:24
Yeah. So he had selflessness as the start for him is the toughest. And I think that we can all imagine bringing in really highly talented players like he does and getting them to buy into, like he mentioned, like a little bit less minutes for the good of the group can be the biggest challenge for a coach to just really, truly get everyone to be selfless and give up a little bit. And he mentioned, as this now bleeds into the recruiting of finding the right type of person. I also thought in here was just some gold on recruiting and the thoughts on building rosters and people into the program. And I loved how he talked about if his team doesn’t feel like it’s a fit, it’s just not going to work. And you won’t go with that player. I thought that was really interesting.
Pat 01:06:13
Yeah, that was my other thing that really stood out to me that he wants his players to kind of give the final OK and that if the guys he trusted, they say no, then like you said, he’s never signed a player. But that was really we haven’t heard on this podcast.
Dan 01:06:25
Yeah, obviously for him he’s found the success doing it and I remember hearing Jay Wright talk about this with Villanova after they started to have some success maybe after his first national championship run and they were able to recruit maybe a little higher level player than they were before and then it ended up being situations where they maybe got more talent but it wasn’t the right fit for the culture of Villanova at the time and then they ended up going back to kind of recruiting how they did before maybe not the five-star guy but someone that they knew was going to grow and build and have that Jalen Brunson-esque toughness for the program and just going back to like what Coach Moore was saying how important it is to have the right person and he said I can mess this thing all up if I just bring a guy in because I think he’s talented but our team doesn’t like him and you know the kind of fabric of the team suffers for that reason.
Pat 01:07:16
Yeah. He has a really good understanding of doing what he preaches or falling through all he preaches. And he mentioned too, if I go back when we’re talking about the selflessness, you know, he’s very realistic in that it’s one thing to talk about it and they do all these extras, but the guys like have to see it come true. And that’s why he kept stressing like the importance of their all American player of the year was the average 17 points only played 24 minutes. So yeah, he wasn’t like he said, you know, if you’re coming here just to be the dude, it’s probably not going to fit. But he’s shown that look at this guy, though, he’s committed to the team, he’s selfless, and he’s still getting all these accolades. So it is possible. It’s not just lip service. Absolutely.
Dan 01:07:54
Let’s move to the second start sub set, which was transition defense and looking at all the stats of their team this year and watching some film in our prep. They were terrific in transition and so it’s fun to pick his brain on these three things and like you and I talked about before, get back, find your man, build a wall, all that stuff. Yes, you got to do that. But we were trying to figure out some of these other more nuanced things, how they can relate to transition defense and I’ll once again kick it back to you on your first thoughts on shot selection, floor spacing, and offensive rebound philosophy and like his answer.
Pat 01:08:28
Like so much of the time, I think whenever there’s a shot selection conversation or whenever shot selections brought up the conversation kind of natural, it’s our kryptonite. Yeah. And naturally goes there. We got to ask, but I think too, what was interesting about this question or why we wanted to ask it, I mean, of course, because we saw the stats and it stood out, but knowing that they’re also so post heavy, how that influenced their transition defense and what factors it contributed to the success of their transition defense, and we bleed into this shot selection conversation.
And you mentioned obviously kind of the quicker perimeter shots are the ones that really aren’t his favorite, but going back to the posts and that they worked so diligently, routinely on these spots, the mid post, low post that, you know, I said, when they get in there, it’s very rarely do they get bad shots or those are the shots they want to take. And I think it goes to then, like he said, they’re not surprised by those shots. So they’re always able to really have, he’s setting their defense. And he mentioned too, with their success, they’re scoring more times than not at 1.2 PVP. That is obviously a very good way to start your transition defense. So what did he mention that they try to get 75% paint touches off their possessions, not always obtainable, but that’s like their goal. Cause then obviously, like I said, you’re shrinking defense, creating long closeouts, like we all know, and generating higher quality shots that fly your transition defense to be more set or in balance, better court balance with spacing.
Dan 01:09:48
I’ll give you a miss for me, not by Coach Moore, but something I wish I would have followed up or maybe I’ll just follow him myself after because I’m really interested and I love when a coach has these statistical markers that they as a staff figure out. We want to get to this marker. He mentioned the 75% pain touches. He mentioned wanting their goals to be like 1.1 as a team for points per possession. All these markers that they have, one, how they get to them, and then two, then how that works with how we’re going to teach. I just really like when there’s clear markers and then how that leads into how they’re going to teach, how they’re going to play, or just their philosophy on style and how that kind of runs throughout the program.
So that was a quick miss for me. I wish I would have followed up more about that. I also just quickly on all this, boy, is there anything more important than shot selection conversations right now? Not just from like we’ve hit on it from like an emotional standpoint and you say in front of the guys versus not. But I think as coaches, we know bad shots hurt you more than just because it pisses you off as a coach and players roll their eyes. It’s because you get beaten transition then because they’re not sure where the shot’s coming from. Everybody’s scattered. The ball deflects not right around the rim usually. It deflects out. And so if they rebound it, they’re out where if you miss a post-up, well, if you miss it, the ball’s missing 94 feet away and you guys are probably ready to be in transition from an offensive spacing. Yeah. So anyway, another great shot selection conversation.
Pat 01:11:23
One of my misses piggybacking off of yours is with all these stats that he emphasized, I would’ve been curious, like, how much is he relaying to the team, stressing with the team on a day-to-day, week-to-week, game-by-game, talking about these stats with guys, or is it more of internal discussions with his staff?
Dan 01:11:39
Yeah, probably a lot more there and just get to know him a little bit. I think he would have loved to gone down that rabbit hole with us as well. I gave one quick miss of mine. Anything else from your standpoint you wish you could have gone deeper on?
Pat 01:11:51
Yeah. The other thing he mentioned too within the transition defense is he said he would have taken away offensive rebounding and put in speaking or communicating. So of course makes a lot of sense, but how he teaches that, how he helps his guys communicate better or get them to communicate at all, I think is always an interesting conversation.
Dan 01:12:10
Yeah.
Pat 01:12:10
Can get taken for granted or just assume your players are going to talk, but then just a bunch of crickets out there. So yeah, I would have liked to have followed up more on that is kind of sub that he would have preferred speaking and communicating and his thoughts on teaching that.
Dan 01:12:23
Yeah. I’ll just end it with I loved his best investment answer. Once again, I just think, kind of encapsulate, I think, who he is and why they’ve been so successful. Obviously, they’re really efficient in the post and they’re getting good players, but it stems from, you could tell, just putting a staff together, putting a team together and the relationships I thought was really cool to hear at the end. So Pat, if there’s nothing else, we’ll kind of start wrapping this thing up. Sounds good. Once again, thanks, Coach Moore, for coming on the show. Congrats to him and his staff and all the success and thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.