Mike MacDonald {Daemen}

We sat down this week with the Head Coach of Daemen University, Mike MacDonald! In this terrific conversation we dive into Coach MacDonald’s thoughts on the ingredients of great teams, handling success, and discusses offensive rebounding and the two-guard offense during the always entertaining “Start, Sub, or Sit?!”

Transcript

Mike MacDonald 00:00

You want to be around people you enjoy. You want to be able to laugh. You want to have some fun. That’s really important.

It’s kind of overlooked like, oh, we’re going to be driven. We got to go win games. We got to, you know, chew nails. You can’t have that turned on all the time or people are going to be miserable. I think you want to make sure you’re able to have some fun. You’re able to laugh. You know, you got to be able to laugh at yourself. That starts with the coach. You got to be able to laugh at yourself. You got to be able to make fun of yourself. And when you can do that, it shows guys an openness like, hey, I know I’m not perfect and I’m going to make mistakes and I’m going to have some fun and we’re going to enjoy this journey that we’re going to take. 

Dan 02:00

And now, please enjoy our conversation with Coach Mike McDonald. Coach, thank you very much for coming on the show. Congratulations on a terrific season, a lot to dive into about that today, but we’re excited to have you on, so thanks for making the time.

Mike MacDonald 02:25

Thanks Dan, thanks Patrick for having me. Big fan of the show and I think what you guys do for basketball and for coaches out there is a tremendous asset. Thank you, Coach. 

Dan 02:33

that. So, coach, we want to dive in with this. You’ve been at this for a while. It’s a nice way of saying I’m old. Way to go. 

Pat 02:41

Thank you. 

Dan 02:43

But, you know, obviously this year was a fantastic season for you all. You’ve also been as an assistant, as a head coach at tougher stops, had tougher seasons and worked your way through it.

And we wanted to talk today to start the show about things that are consistent throughout the years to you that help groups win all the things that obviously you’ve had to go through. You’ve had a terrific year, but what’s the same in both places or that leads to those winning years? 

Mike MacDonald 03:11

It’s an interesting question and something people are always trying to figure out. And if there was a magic formula or some pixie dust, you could sprinkle over any team so they could win. We’d be doing that. We wouldn’t be doing podcasts.

We’d make a lot of money selling it to teams at every sport and every level. I’ve had the good fortune of being a head coach at division one, at division three, and now division two. So I’ve been at all three levels. I’ve coached teams that have won 20 games. I’ve coached teams that lost, I don’t know if we ever lost 20, but it was close, definitely. But we’ve kind of been there. The common trait of the good teams are guys who really care for each other, care about basketball and are connected. And I think when you have that at a special level, we had a really good year this past year and it was a special level of guys who really cared about each other and were connected.

You see that and that really helps you to be successful. I think you need to have people who enjoy what they’re doing as crazy as that sounds, right? We’re coaching basketball and guys are playing basketball. They should enjoy it. But, you know, you guys have been around teams where guys are just kind of doing it to do it. I’ve been around it where guys were happy, they got a scholarship and they kind of achieve their goal. And it’s like, all right, I’m just here to make sure I’m getting my education paid for. And that’s the last thing you want.

You want guys who really enjoy playing, who like to be around the gym and who are, you know, gym rats. I have an assistant coach, Nick Fruccio. He’s like, man, our guys really love basketball. And that’s the thing that, why we’re good. They’re always talking about it. They’re watching it. And I think if you can get that in people, your chance of being successful should be better. 

Pat 04:48

I’d like to follow up on the caring and connected piece that you mentioned. And, you know, talking to you before, we talked a lot about just the changing landscape of basketball and how a lot of teams are kind of more and more one year together and then next year it’s a whole new team.

So with this quick turnaround or constant turnaround, how are you thinking about when a new group comes in, getting them to care for each other and get connected as quickly as possible or building cohesion? Agree. 

Mike MacDonald 05:17

Great question, Patrick. And I don’t know if there’s a right answer. Listen, I know everybody’s doing the same thing, right? People are, especially at the Division I level, you’re signing guys now and then they’re not on campus. They might come in in July and be together for about eight weeks. And during that time, you’re not only gonna play basketball, but you wanna kinda get to know each other. I think it goes back a little bit to the recruiting process, right? You gotta make sure that you’re recruiting guys who fit what you’re looking for. The most overused word in sports and probably in business is culture. Everybody talks about culture. And to me, culture is what you do every day, how you act every day, how you are, how you treat people, all those things, but it’s a day in, day out thing. It’s not a sign you put up on the wall. It’s not a trust fall. It’s not going to do some kinda team bonding event. It’s how you act every day. And I think when people see that, you need people who are willing to absorb your culture and fit into your culture and be a part of how you do things. 

Pat 06:17

When you’re in the recruiting process, or maybe better yet, I guess if we were to be a fly on the wall, what does your culture look like every day? Or what are you trying to live in your culture every day? 

Mike MacDonald 06:29

We want to have people who want to be in the gym, who like to work, who want to get better, but you also want to have good people, people who will say please and thank you. Little things, right? A lot of people don’t do all the time, but I think being able to show gratitude to people who are helping you along the way is very, very important.

You want people who want to have fun, and I think that’s real important because when you’re doing going into this and going into a season, you’re starting, and for us, we’ll start in September. We start classes right around Labor Day. Guys come in, and we’re going to be going pretty much every day with people all the way through until March, hopefully late March, and you want to be around people you enjoy. You want to be able to laugh. You want to have some fun. That’s really important. It’s kind of overlooked like, oh, we’re going to be driven. We’ve got to win games. We’ve got to chew nails. You can’t have that turned on all the time, or people are going to be miserable. I think you want to make sure you’re able to have some fun. You’re able to laugh. You’ve got to be able to laugh at yourself. That starts with the coach. It starts with everybody. You’ve got to be able to laugh at yourself. You’ve got to be able to make fun of yourself, and when you can do that, it shows guys an openness like, hey, I know I’m not perfect, and I’m going to make mistakes, and I’m going to have some fun, and we’re going to enjoy this journey that we’re going to take. 

Dan 07:45

Looking at some of the tangible ways we might see your culture. I know one of the things we wanted to ask you about today too is practice planning and what that looks like through this lens of building teams and culture, how you would think about that within a practice.

And I know it’s kind of everywhere, but if I could focus on two places in practice, the beginning and ends of practice, what’s happening beginning and ends of practice where you’re kind of reiterating the things that are important to you in your program. 

Mike MacDonald 08:14

We always talk, you know, one of the big things we’re big, like a lot of people are in fundamentals, right? We talk about passing and catching. So we’ll usually start practice. Guys will be out shooting, maybe working on a side with an assistant coach. And then we’re starting at three o’clock. The one will go off at three. I’ll talk to everybody for a minute. And we’ll just talk, kind of reiterate, hey, this is what we want to work on today. This is what we have coming up. Or remember to make sure you’ve registered for next semester’s classes, whatever, any kind of thing.

I might have to just remind them about something. And then we’ll get going right away. And we usually start with some kind of passing, catching drill, just to get moving before we stretch, before we’ve done anything, just to get going. And then after that, we’ll take 10 minutes and we’ll stretch. And it’s a team led thing. And there may times through my career where I’ve said, I hate stretching, you know, I don’t want to do it. But when you’re limited in practice hours, are we really smart to take 10 minutes out of your time to just stretch? And people do it all differently. But I’ve learned from an assistant coach tell me many years ago, say, you know, it’s a good time for the guys to kind of talk and bond and have some fun. And it’s kind of their time.

It’s led by the players, it’s led by our captains, and they can kind of have some fun with it. We had goofy guys this year, and they would always, you know, guys would be counting to 10, one, two, three, and a guy would be doing in Spanish or doing something like that. You know, just something to make guys laugh. It’s kind of all right, this is what we’re doing. And they know right after that, we get going. And after that stretch, we always do what we call a giddy up drill. Giddy up is something we’re going to go fast, we’re going to move for it, usually involve making layups. Because I think, you know, especially at the division two level, you want to make sure you’re finishing, you’re getting to the rim, and you’re finishing layups. And I think making layups every day is important to do.

You know, it’s a we stretch now we’re loose, let’s get moving. Before we get into shooting, jump shots, or playing defense, or anything like that. We always do some kind of layup thing in our giddy up grills, that gets us going. And then we usually go on to shooting. One thing I learned I was assistant with john beeline for five years, I know coach was on your podcast with you. And, you know, he always said, do your shooting first, because if you do defense first, your defense is going to look really good, because you guys haven’t shot yet. And I think there’s some truth in that, right? That, you know, we have warmed up, we haven’t done a shooting. So if we’re guarding you, guys are missing everything like man, our defense is great today. And in reality, maybe guys just haven’t warmed up or shot. So we try and live by that we always do co rated the shooting to

Dan 10:48

With the beginning of practice you mentioned starting with passing and catching right away Could you go into a little bit more on right at the top of practice? Why you want to do passing and catching as a warm-up and sort of how that fits into what you do? 

Mike MacDonald 11:02

and I’ll go back and mention Coach Beeline. I think he’s one of the greatest teachers of fundamentals that was ever around.

Everybody wants to talk about the two-guard offense. I’ll give you a little secret. The two-guard offense is an offense no different than running a horn set, running the flex, whatever. It’s an offense, but the keys to it is that all of John’s teams could pass and catch, cut and pivot. Simple things, but being able to do everything you do on a basketball court, especially on the offensive end, involves passing and catching, involves your footwork, pivoting, catching on two foot. Are you a permanent pivot guy? Do you like keeping one foot down? I’ve preferred to teach that way. I’ve had guys through the years who are really good players who are more comfortable using either foot as a pivot foot, and I would let them do it. You start traveling, and I get called for travel, and then we’re going to have to change. But if you can get away with it, I’m fine because that’s what they were comfortable with. So we always start practice with that because I think that on the offensive end of the court, that’s passing and catching, to me, the most important thing. 

Pat 12:02

You mentioned the stretching that it was team led and maybe tying it back to connection cohesion. Are there any other opportunities or moments that you think about letting your players, player led or team led film, other parts of practice, off court stuff or anything else that gives them a moment to really participate in building the culture and being the leaders of the culture. 

Mike MacDonald 12:26

Well, I can tell you two things. First, Patrick, you know, we’ll do drills throughout where I’ll say, all right, you guys know how it’s run, make sure the young guys know and let them do it. Right. So if we’re doing a, some kind of lab drill, I might say, Hey, you know, we have to do explain what we got to do and then go to it, right. And maybe we’ve done it two weeks ago and I’ll say, do you remember it? And you know, there’s going to be a couple of freshmen, like, no, I did this once. I don’t remember, you know, and I’ll be like, make sure the old guys take care of it. You know how we do it and what’s expected. So that’s one way.

The other thing I think, and I think it was funny, this year’s team was incredibly close of coach, almost 40 years at the college level. I don’t know if I’ve seen a group together this much. And I think part of it was they would go over. We had a couple of seniors, Andrew Mason and Ryan Salzberg, who’d been here before. And they have an apartment with a guy who just transferred in Matt Becker and they would invite guys over, they’d have more to watch football, watch games, whatever. And that was that coach led. And see, I thought it was really important to our success this year. So much so that in the end of the year meetings, as I’m meeting with who I perceive to be next year’s leaders, I’ve said, you know, you guys did that this year. Those guys are graduating. Who’s going to be the guy to invite guys over because they would say, yeah, we had the whole team over in my place, the whole team. And I don’t think it was anything crazy. It was wild parties or anything, at least that’s what I found out about. But it was guys hanging out like you do in college, right? With your buddies. And I think it just became that, you know, it was something they did. It was team led. And how do you do that? I indirect it. I’d say, Hey, you got to do this. I think it’s important that it comes from within the team and they do that. And listen, we’ve had other really good teams that have won a lot of games that didn’t necessarily have that cohesion and that closeness, but I think it does help you and it helps you in times when games get tight, the old saying, right? There’s a commercial, I think where it said teams, win games, families, win championships, well, you know, what do you do with your family? You hang out, you go get something to eat, right? You do those things. It helps develop that bond. 

Pat 14:40

Teams in the past that were successful but you felt maybe weren’t as cohesive or hung out so much off the court what was the distinguishing factor there or trait that kind of separated them to still find success good players talent

Mike MacDonald 14:56

I’d like to say coaching, but that’d be a flat out lie, you know, it’s good players, right? And listen, you know, it’s just like anything else. I think too, at this level, right, where I don’t think guys have to necessarily get along off the court to get along on the court, I think it helps. But if they don’t get along off the court, like they don’t hang it out, everybody might have their own thing. And that’s okay.

You know, that’s okay. As long as on the court, you can be cohesive, you can get along, you can respect each other. And I think that’s a big word I probably haven’t brought up enough, is respect, right? You have respect. We’re all different. Dan, you, me, Patrick, we’re all different. We might all be coaches. We might all have a common connection that we all love basketball, right? But we’re going to be different and we’re going to have different values. We come from different places. But in the end, you have to respect me. I have to respect you. I think that’s real important that we do that going forward. And I think if you do that, then you’ve got that common ground that you’re starting with. And from there, it can get better. 

Pat 15:54

You mentioned meeting with some of your what you think could be your perceived leaders for next year. I guess what stood out and how cautious are you in knowing that next year’s group will be a different group. And maybe appointing them or being too quick to give them a leadership or you don’t quite know what next year’s group could look like. 

Mike MacDonald 16:12

Well, first of all, I’ve learned this and I think that’s real, real important that every year is different. And I had this happen to me when I was a head coach at Canisius, division one coach, where you had a really good team and you’re like, Hey, this team is going to be good. And we got a lot of guys back and maybe we’re adding one or two pieces. And it just doesn’t click like it just doesn’t happen. And I think you have to realize that every team is different year to year.

And you have to understand that. And you have to be open to understanding that guys are going to come in and want to be in a different place. They see guys have graduating, they’re going to, is my role going to change? How is my role going to change? And that goes with leadership too, right? That the guy who maybe is quiet is not comfortable being that leader, being the extroverted lead. And I think you have to play to people’s strengths. One of the things we’ve always done, whether it’s offensively defensive is try to play to guys’ strengths. And I think you have to do that in a leadership role too, meaning like, Hey, you know what? This guy might not be a great really vocal leader, but he can be really good one-on-one. I’ll give you another example. My son, Nick played for us. He graduated last year and played for us. And he always would say the point, yeah, I don’t know if I can say something to a kid about this because he might think it’s coming directly from you, but he would let the other captain who was very close with Andrew Mason kind of handle that where he would handle some of the other duties as a captain. And I think just being a captain isn’t one singular duty. It’s not just leading stretching. It’s not just meeting with the officials. There are a lot of ways. And I think you have to play to your strengths as an individual. How do you react? How do you connect with your teammates? And I think that’s real important. 

Dan 17:57

Coach, you’ve been talking a lot about teams that win and some of the common traits of those things. I’d love to ask you about coaching traits that you feel have been important for you to kind of carry from year to year. Things for you that you feel like have been the most important from a trait standpoint as a coach to kind of go through these ups and downs and I know you’ve had a lot of ups but you know the other parts of this job that are tough. 

Mike MacDonald 18:24

think that’s a really good question. It’s being consistent, and I think that’s really important, and so the guys know kind of what to expect that, yeah, we’re all going to have our highs, we’re going to have our lows, but if you can be consistent, win a big game, are you going to act the same way? And then if you lose a big game, you lose a tough game, you blow a lead, it’s easy to be down and carry that over and let that affect people. But I think if you as a leader are consistent, I think that’s really, really important.

I’m sitting at my desk right now, and I have bulletin board in front of me that I look at every day, and one of the things, a quote I have, I actually got at a funeral, which I don’t know if that’s a great thing to get, but I thought it was a great quote. The priest said during the eulogy, he talked about, teach always and when necessary, use words. Teach always when necessary, use words. And that was St. Francis of Assisi said it, I guess, and I stole it right away. I think that’s awesome, right? And again, it goes back to the whole culture thing. How do you act? How do you conduct yourself? And do people see that? Because let’s be honest, we’re dealing with the coaching, we’re dealing with 18 to 21, maybe it’s 22, 23, 24 year olds now, right? But they’re going to be watching you, and they’re going to watch how you act. And I think it’s very important that how you act is how you want them to act. And they’re not going to mimic you all the time. But I think if you can teach by your actions, it’s real important. 

Dan 19:52

If I could follow up on the consistency piece, and I love that quote, are there any areas of coaching that you felt are most important to be consistent in? And I guess what I mean is, is it just, you know, day to day in practice, your tone of a practice? Is it, you know, the meetings with the staff? I mean, I know it’s probably all of it, but it’s an emotional game. There’s ups and downs. There’s emotion in it. 

Mike MacDonald 20:14

Hey, we’re humans, right? So we’re going to have bad days too. Guys are going to have bad days, right? They’re going to fight with a girlfriend, right? They did something. They failed a test, whatever. And they’re going to have down days too. And I think you have to be able to recognize that.

Dan, we were talking before we started you saying about you have your third child on the way. I think I became a better coach as I became a parent. And one of my son’s high school coaches said that he had excellent, tremendous JV high school coach. And his dad said, yeah, he’s a good coach. He’ll be better once he starts having a couple of kids of his own, because, you know, you learn as a father, you learn, Hey, it’s going to be okay.

You’re going to spill something. It’s not the end of the world. I’m not going to overreact, right? You’re going to have empathy. You feel bad for them. You know, they’re going to have a bad day. They’re in a bad mood and they’re not feeling totally perfect. And I think when you do that as a father with your own children, you see go through that you’re going to be a little bit more sympathetic and understanding to your team when they’re having a bad day, when a guy isn’t playing well, you know, we’ve all had it.

You have a guy who missed a couple of free throws in a row and he’s a really good free throw shooter. What is going on? And it’s easy to yell at him. What are you doing? But they’re not trying to miss the free throw. They’re trying to play as well as they can. And sometimes they’re over trying. And that’s why they’re missing the free throw. So I think, you know, being able to understand that I went to a coaching clinic one year, a long time ago. And I remember somebody saying, you know, the games are like a test, right? And practice is like the class. And then the games are like a test. And you don’t want the math professor standing over you at your desk screaming, multiply, multiply divide. What are you doing? Right. And all that. I think you have to realize that as a coach, again, inconsistent. Let them know that, yeah, there are times you’re going to be upset because you know, and you’re going to be upset at referees or whatever, but reeling it back in and controlling yourself, I think is right  important. I think some of what you’re describing is just touch or feel as a coach. And for you, I’m sure a lot of it is innate, but a lot of it was learned.

Are there also people that you go to, mentors, that you watch practices? Do you call people during the season? When situations come up for you to navigate, all the situations we have to navigate. 

Mike MacDonald 22:27

Wherever you are as a coach, you’re going to have to have those core people, people you count on and trust, who you can bounce things off of. My wife has been with me through a majority of this journey. She knows basketball. So I’ve been around her, right? And I will ask her, I’ve had assistant coaches. Ryan Granditz, who was my associate head coach, who was just leaving for a new job and he’s a guy I could always trust and say, what do you think? I have former assistants who have been here know kind of how I think. I think that’s real important.

Then you have friends. I mentioned coach Beillien or Kevin Broderick, who I know you’ve had on your show and Dave Nyland, guys that I kind of grew up in and coaching with that I’ve competed against, I’ve had to coach against them, but I have utmost respect for them as coaches, but also as people. And I think when you can go to them, when things aren’t going well and say, what do you think, what do you do? Have you had this, you ever had this situation? It gets real important to have as a young coach, start now that you have those people you can bounce ideas off of and that they’re going to tell you the truth. You want somebody who’s going to tell you the truth and tell you what they feel. Not, Oh yeah, you’re doing a great job. Don’t worry. You want them to say, Hey, have you thought about this? 

Dan 24:48

Coach, this has been awesome so far. Thank you for all your thoughts on the culture piece. We wanna transition now to a segment on the show we call Start, Sub, or Sit. We’re gonna give you three options around a topic, ask you to start one, sub one, and sit one. And then we will have a discussion about your answer from there. Coach, if you’re set, we’ll dive into this first one. Ready, a little worried. This first one has to do with offensive rebounding. The biggest considerations for you as a coach when it comes to teaching offensive rebounding and being a great offensive rebounding team. So first option is when it comes to offensive rebounding is who is going, who or how many. Second option is how they go. How do they actually pursue the offensive rebound, different techniques, swim, whatever it is, the physicality of it. And the third option is where do they go? Do they all just run to the paint? Do they run to the sides of the glass? Where’s the shot taken? So start, sub, or sit for offensive rebounding. The who, the how, or the where. 

Mike MacDonald 25:53

I think for start, I think I’ll go with who, because I think it’s important to have a, how do you offensive rebound? What’s your system? I know tagging has become very popular, where all five guys are going and they’re kind of doing it. I haven’t gotten into that craze yet.

I’ve had people I’ve met with who’ve tried to talk to me about it and said, hey, this would really work and just haven’t been a proponent of it. You teach what you’re comfortable doing and you want to be good at it. That’s where your guys will excel. And I think that for me, we tried to send three and we’ve adjusted. There are times we’ve sent three people to the boards. Now we send four people to the boards, but I think who the four are. I also don’t think, and I learned this again, I thought, you know, my career is a little bit where I kind of coached backwards. I was a division one head coach first. I was a division three head coach. I’m division two. A lot of times people start division three, move up to two and then one, that type of thing. You know, like most of my life has been backwards.

Anyway, I think, you know, I learned, I had a team at Madai college where we were division three and our center gets hurt at the beginning of the year. So we’re like, what are we going to do? You know, and he can’t cancel the season. I tried to look into that. That wasn’t a possibility. So now we’re going to, all right, let’s look at, we’re going to move our foreman to the center. He’s going to be the center. We’re basically starting four guard. And the kid who was playing our quote unquote foreman was probably about five, 11, six foot, right? But he was tough, hard nose, could guard a lot of people, but he couldn’t really rebound. He wasn’t going to offensive rebound, but we had two guards who were bigger and they were probably bigger than our foreman. And so we said, you know what, we’re going to send our point there to her going to the boards. They’re going to crash because probably the worst box out guy on a team is the point guard. He’s not used to boxing people out because most point guards are getting back on defense. So we’re sending the point we’re sending the two and we sent our foreman, the kid who was playing the four back. Why? Because it was really good at communicating and telling guys, hey, pick him, grab him, stop the ball. It was also very good at taking charges. This was back in the old days when you could take charges. You were confident that he would get back and give up his body. He would direct traffic. And I think that’s what you need. And the person getting back. So who was not necessarily the typical, Hey, we’re sending the three to four and five, they’re going to the boards hard. We’re sending two guards back. You know, I think you have to adjust from your team, see what guys do well. So that’s why I’m saying starting with who I think how is probably just as important. That would be the second one. So because I think how, listen, I think offensive rebounding is very much a want to. And if you have somebody who wants to do it, that is relentless, that they will go get the ball, that’s a unique quality. 

Mike MacDonald 28:37

And that’s somebody you want to have on your team. And you want to make sure you emphasize, Hey, you’re really good at this. Go get it. So that how they’re going to do it, we don’t care how you’re going to get there. Go get it. If you’re going to crash from the corner, just go, because that’s what you want to do. And if you have guys who have that want to go get it, that’s something I think is real, real important.

And where you’re coming from, that would be to me to sit, but I get it. We’ve talked about all the time. Hey, 80% of misses come off on the other side. And I haven’t really charted that. I’ve read that and heard that a lot. And I’m assuming it’s true, but, you know, I don’t know, but I think where guys come from, I think you can tell them, Hey, you want to try and get to the opposite side of where the ball is shot. And we’re going to try and get it. But I think that is a little bit of coach speaking. Sometime it’s more about, Hey, if I got the want to go get it, who am I sending? And do they have that want to go get the ball and that their drive and desire to get the loose ball? I think that’s the biggest thing. 

Dan 29:37

I wanted to start with your start, which was the who, and you mentioned over the years sometimes three, sometimes four. In those years where you’re changing three or four, what are the considerations of why you would maybe only send three versus send four in certain years? 

Mike MacDonald 29:52

I think if I was worried because one of the things and we haven’t, it’s great. We haven’t talked about defense at all.

This whole podcast, my favorite podcast of all time, but the, uh, you know, transition defense is big. It’s one of our big things and we don’t like giving up easy baskets. That’s one thing we talk about all the time. We don’t give up easy baskets. So we might send two back if it’s a team is really fast and really good to get now and we want to try and get two guys back. I think for a long time when I was at Canisius as a division one coach, I was at Madai’s division three coach, we would have our one guy get back and then we’d have a deep back and then our short back and our short back would be the guy who’s kind of at the foul line. He’s there to clean up any long misses. Look for that. And then he would be what we call the dog. He would dog the ball handler coming up. So he would immediately pick up who’s ever bringing the ball up and he would guard them, he’d dog them, try and slow them down. Kind of got away from that at times. I think when I got to Damon, we had a two man who was big. He was like six, five and go rebound. And it was like, you know what, just go get the ball. He was better at doing that. And then we said, we’ll figure out the dog, somebody to get the picking up the ball. We had one guy getting back and every, the other four guys are going and it kind of liked that, but we will adjust from game to game, depending on a team and how good they are in transition. 

Dan 31:10

sure. And I’m always interested in the part that we can dip our toes into the defensive transition, if you’re okay with that for a second. Right. Here we go. Yeah. Yeah. Such a huge part of offensive rebound is and how you transition back and get matched up and all that kind of stuff. You mentioned it’s a huge tenant for you all.

How are you thinking about and working on this part of the game where you’re sending for and then you’re transitioning back to be a great defensive team? 

Mike MacDonald 31:38

So what we do every day, we’ll do a different transition defensive drill. We’ll do something every day, usually earlier in practice, after we’ve done shooting, maybe done some base defensive drills, like some half court stuff, then we’ll do some transition when we got to get back and where it’s even numbers. Our guys are probably sick of me yelling, change the numbers.

You know, the numbers might be four on three, and we’ve got to make them four on four, right? Or it’s five on three. We’re going to make it five on five. So we’ll, we’ll do some kind of drill every day where it’s full court advantage, disadvantage, the offense is at an advantage. The defense is maybe at some kind of disadvantage and they got to get back. They got to get to the paint. They got to space out, find shooters, know who you’re going to and communicate. I think if you’re going to be a good defensive team, it all, it really starts with your transition defense. That’s one of our things is we try not to give up easy baskets and the, you know, the easiest way for teams to get an easy basket or the quickest way that right off the bat is a transition layup and you don’t want to give up a transition layup, you don’t want to give up anything in transition. We want to get back and we want to make it a five on five game. 

Pat 32:47

Coach, sticking on your transition drills, you mentioned having advantage, disadvantage for either offense or defense, but what other considerations do you think about when building your transition drills to make it as representative as possible to a game and to what your defense is going to be challenged with in the course of 40 minutes? 

Mike MacDonald 33:07

I think you try and, you know, there’s obviously running involved. We try and make it continuous where you’re going to go. You might be doing five on five and then maybe you call somebody’s name and two guys and they have to go touch the baseline and run down, right? Something like that.

We call it five on five call a name, but we make it continuous after that. So when we go down and the other team stops them, they get a chance to come back and transition and that’s more natural, like game, like, right? Like a scrimmage almost. And I think it’s, again, like anything else, Patrick, it’s what you emphasize. And if you emphasize, Hey, who’s getting back? What’s your rotation? Our rule is somebody stopped the ball. Everybody get out and communication is so key and being able to talk and being able to match up and get to that don’t care. We say all the time, you’re not guarding a man there, you’re guarding the other team. So we’re not playing man demand defense. We’re playing Damon defense and let’s get back and protect the basket for Damon. And we’re not worried about, Hey, but that’s my matchup. I was told I’m guarding him. No, we’re guarding them right now. So we really emphasize that throughout practice, no matter any time we’re in a five on five situation, we might start it off five on three might started off five on four, but as we get moving, you know, and play, there’s going to be other transition opportunities for the offense. We’ve got to make sure the defense gets back and takes pride and really trying to make it turn it into a five on five game at all times. 

Pat 34:33

When you play against teams with, like you said, they have great pace or when you’re able to neutralize, let’s say the initial break and teams start to flow into like maybe a secondary action, a drag screen, pistol, whatever, I guess, what actions concern you the most and how do you try to build your defense after you’ve protected the rim and taken away the initial thrust? 

Mike MacDonald 34:52

The biggest thing is we have three tenets for defense. Here we go, we’re going defense, I like it. Our three basic things are, and we talk about it every day, is don’t give up easy baskets of transition, right? Control transition, make it a five-on-five game. That’s the first one.

Second one is contest everything, no open shots. Now, listen, I’ve done this long enough to know, and you guys have too, you know, you’re not gonna have a game where you don’t give up an open shot. But what you wanna do is you wanna try make that open shot under some sort of duress. You wanna try and not give up a lot of open shots because I’ve been proven, people are gonna make open shots more than they’re gonna make contested shots. So we wanna try and not give up an open shot. And the third thing we do, and we talk about all the time, is no second shots, right? If you can control them and limit them to one shot down there. Probably the easiest shot of all is a putback. And so if you could say no easy ones in transition, make it a five on five, don’t give them an open shot. And then don’t give them a second shot. Control the rebound. And listen, I’m not reinventing the wheel here or anything. I laugh because we led the country in defense. Everybody’s like, wow, you must be great defensively. What are you doing? And I’m like, we did the same drills we did last year. We did the same drills we did the year before and the same years with drills we’ve done for years and years. And it’s sometimes maybe guys communicate better. If they’re connected better, maybe we rebound better because we’re bigger. I go back to my time at Meday one year. We led the country in three point field goal percentage defense. And, you know, division three, you know, Dan, a lot of good three point shooters at division three. And I’m like, we led the country in three point field goal percentage defense. I went back, I looked at every practice plan and I’m like, what did we do different? Then I looked at the year before and I’m comparing them side by side saying, what did we do different? I kind of realized we had a six, two guard and a six, three guard, we were bigger. And so then even if you play zone, you’re bigger and you’re longer. And, you know, now all of a sudden you have guys who are tougher to shoot over. You know, maybe that was probably the reason we led the country in three point field goal percentage defense. 

Pat 36:56

Coach, you talked about defensive communication. How are you and your staff thinking about training your guys to communicate or building defensive communication? 

Mike MacDonald 37:04

It’s tough. I think in this day and age too, everybody does this, right? Everybody texts, everybody tweets. I say all the time, we’re not putting out on Twitter, not texting something, you have to talk, you have to use your voice.

We played back, I think it was 2019, we played Northwest Missouri, and I know Ben McCollum has been, I think you guys have had him on, great coach, and they were number one in the country, we played them, and the thing that impressed me was everything they did warming up, everything, layups, everything, they were talking. They were communicating. And I think like any other coach, you look at that, I would go back, from that day on, every practice, I’d be like, you know what? The number one team in the country, they can talk when they’re coming through the layup line, they’re calling guys’ names out, and that’s it. You know, sometimes every team is different, just like every player is different, everybody’s individual. I think it’s important that, yes, I understand, maybe you’re not a loud talker, you’re not comfortable talking, but for us to be successful, you have to be that way.

And I don’t know, his answer to be really good at communicating is to recruit a bunch of guys who don’t shut up, maybe, I don’t know, but you have to express how important it is that to be a good team defensively and offensively, you have to be able to communicate, you have to be able to talk, and I think especially defensively, it really helps you if you will talk. I think that’s important, and then we talked about not being selfish defensively. I think we had a really unselfish team this year, offensively, but we had a really unselfish team this year defensively, too, because guys weren’t hesitant to help somebody. Sometimes if you’re matched up on the other team’s leading scorer, but all of a sudden your big man goes to help in a ball screen, and his guy is rolling, and your job is to go help tag the roller, but I’m guarding the number one scorer on their team, I don’t want to let him get an open shot, I’ll let that guy shoot. But that’s not how we play, we have to help each other out, and we have to trust that somebody is gonna rotate to help you. And I think it’s selfish sometimes defensively if I just stay with my guy instead of helping my teammate out. So we talk about that a lot. Being unselfish defensively is just as important as being unselfish offensively. 

Dan 39:13

You mentioned your team, Emadai being best three-point field goal percentage defensive team that one year. This year, obviously you guys were a fantastic defensive team as well.

Do you care about that analytic? Trying to be a best three-point field goal percentage team is obviously great, but do you care about that versus two-point field goal percentage versus free throw margin? Are there things defensively that are actually more important to you than others? We try not to. 

Mike MacDonald 39:39

foul a lot. We try to be better at the free throw line, which is amazing when you think about it. Because this year, if you looked at our stats, it’s funny, Dan, we always were taking less free throws than our opponents. I think it’s because we won a lot of games by large margin. And we might have been fouling at the end, but we weren’t getting fouled at the end of the game.

In a close game, you get fouled, you might get fouled six or eight extra free throws just because the other team’s trying to get back in the game. But we were up by so much teams wouldn’t even bother doing that. They used to drive me nuts because their two-link scores were big guys. So we’d go to be in the paint, score in the paint, and we’re like, aren’t they getting fouled? But I don’t know. And then we didn’t shoot free throws well either this year. So I don’t know. Maybe it was good that we didn’t get fouled a lot in our opponents. Yeah. Okay. So going back to it, we try not to give up more free throws than we attempt. And we try and be disciplined as far as fouling. It doesn’t always work that way, but you try and do that. And then we don’t necessarily come back with, hey, we got to be a great three-point percentage field goal. We look at field goal percentage overall. Later on, I might look at adjusted field goal percentage defense, but for the most part, we look at, hey, we’ll say at halftime, they’re shooting 41%. That’s a little high for us. Let’s see if we can get it down. Let’s do a better job of in transition. We always talk about transition points. At halftime, when things we talk about going in, I’ll have an assistant who charts, I’ll say, how many points they get in transition. And that’s one first thing I’ll put on the board. They have eight points in transition. That’s too many. We like to keep at four or less in a half if we can, and maybe even less than that.

But if we can do four or less, we think we’re pretty good. The other thing we do at the end of games, and we do it during the game, but it’s not always as effective. The charting is we do how many possessions, how many points, like a lot of people do. We do points per possession, and we try and be below one defensively. We want to have the opponent be less than one point per possession that they have. And then we want to be higher than one. Again, we try and keep it simple for our guys who aren’t math majors. And we just try and do better than one, less than one, and see how we do. 

Dan 41:41

I just have to ask this might sound like a dumb question, but I’m asking anyways you started 28 know this year 

Mike MacDonald 41:50

That’s all. 

Dan 41:51

right there. You won 28 straight games, obviously lost an NCAA tournament, but did you find you enjoyed that experience being undefeated this whole year, more or less than other years where you were also really good, but maybe you dropped one earlier?

Because of course we all would love to be undefeated, but did it feel different as a coach winning so many games in a row? Have you looked at my record? 

Mike MacDonald 42:14

So, yeah, it definitely felt different. And, you know, people would say to me, well, you probably want to lose one before the playoffs, before the conference tournament. And I’m like, nah, I’ve lost enough. I know what losing feels like. We’ll be okay.

Listen, I get it. I think where you’re going at is when a lot of people said, yeah, you know, they’re really going to be locked in when you lose. They’ll pay attention more. And, you know, it’s true, right? As a coach, you have their attention more. We just lost yesterday because of this, this, this. We have to do this better. And the next day of practice, you can really focus on this is why we lost. Listen, there were times we didn’t play great or to our standard that we were hoping to do. And we would sit. And like I said, a lot of times, my associate head coach, Ryan Grandis, I would let him and say, hey, pick five clips out. And there might be a clip I would say definitely this, right? Or he might pick five. And then we’d look at it. I said, I’m going to show it to him. I’ll let you show it to him. Because if it’s me harping on him, they hear my voice a lot. It’s good for him to hear somebody else’s voice. And, you know, he would say, oh, hey, we’re better than this. And we got to be careful. If we let this happen again, we could lose. It got to the point where this year was like magic. It’s like nothing you ever, we all do the same thing. Hey, we’re going to go one and oh, we’re going to go one and oh, we started out one and oh, and then we’re like, Hey, we’re two and oh, we’re three and oh. And I went in as a head coach with this, this schedule was very difficult. We had teams that were in the elite eight on our schedule. We had teams that were in the sweet 16 on our schedule. We had the most teams we’ve ever played that had been in the NCAA tournament the year before. And so I’m like, I hope we can be 500 by the end of November. We knew going into November, like we were playing teams ranked fourth in the country, ranked eighth in the country. And we’re like, Hey, we can make a statement a little bit in November if we do this. And we got through November and I’m like, wow, what happened?

Then we had a crazy situation where we had a game canceled because of the weather. It wasn’t in Buffalo before you guys make any of the Buffalo jokes. It was down south of here, down in Pittsburgh area, supposed to go down and play a team down in Pittsburgh. And it was snowing down there and the highway was closed. So we couldn’t go. And so we had just won and beat the number four ranked team in the country. And we played really well. We won by like 40. And then we had Thanksgiving break and we had all this time off. And I’m like, we’re going to get beat like this next game. We’re set up to lose. And then we had to go to College of Staten Island, who was a really well coached team who is in our league, who had beaten us twice in the regular season the year before, had a lot of guys back. 

Mike MacDonald 44:45

They were really good team and we’re going there. And I’m like, we’re going to get beat. You kind of know, this is going to be a really tough one for us. It’s going to be tough.

And then I’m walking to the court before the game. And I hear somebody talking with their administrator saying, this is the biggest crowd we’ve had, you know, in a long time. And I’m like, oh boy, this is crazy. We didn’t shoot well at all. We never shot well. And we won by 20.

And after the game, the next day, I just told him like, look, you guys got a special group here. We got something special here.

Let’s keep winning. Like, let’s win them all. Why not? Right? Nobody ever really talks about that. Let’s go win them all.

Like, let’s make somebody play great to beat you. Like they got to hit great shots. They got to hit big shots. If they do that, we’ll tip our pressure. I never felt like, oh man, we got to keep this going. It was like, we had one overtime game. And during that whole second half, I had a friend tell me, he was smiling like the whole second half. And I’m like, yeah, I just felt comfortable in our guys, kept felt confident in our guys. And you know what? If we lose, we lose. But in the end, we knew we had a really good team.

We just kept going one after another. It was a lot of fun. No doubt. I do it again too. I don’t know if I don’t want to let it happen again. It’s like Haley’s comedy coming around soon, but we’ll take it. 

Pat 45:58

Now, it’s my turn to ask maybe a dumb question too with your start. A lot of times I would think you’re on like a six game losing streak. As a coach, I think you can take a lot away from that. You can see maybe where the cracks in your foundation were or things that are important to your culture that maybe you didn’t hold your guys to a standard when you’re doing a lot of losing.

When you’re 28 and 0, what did you learn about group dynamics or what did maybe you learn about culture that maybe you wouldn’t have expected or that you took away that you think this has to carry over even if we’re 15 and 15 or just trying to go 1 and 0 next season. 

Mike MacDonald 46:37

The biggest thing, Patrick, will be that the guys, you know, they had to care about each other. They really enjoyed each other’s success. That was so unique about this group.

Our leading scorer came off the bench for it. It was a sophomore, big kid, and he came off the bench. He started one game. I think he had 26 points. And then it was because we had an injury. And I said, guess what? I’m going to put you back on the bench. And he was like, okay, two of our top four would come off the bench. And they were comfortable with that. They didn’t like it when we played games without media timeouts because we had media timeouts. I knew they were pretty much going in right at that under 16 mark, that first whistle. But sometimes, you know, the old man forgets. And I’m like, oh, I forgot to put you in. You know, that’s a problem without a media timeout. But they were really good. They didn’t complain. That was a key. Like they really enjoyed other guys’ success. And I think that was a key for us is that, hey, it might not be my night, but it might be his night. And I’m going to let him have his day. And I’m going to enjoy it and be happy for him because I really like him.

He’s my friend. And it’s probably like, you know, when you and Dan are running the podcast, and some days he has really good questions and yours aren’t so good, but you’re like, all right, you were great. That’s awesome. Right? I don’t know if you can compare it like that. It doesn’t happen much, we know. But that’s part of life, right? You want to be able to, hey, that’s great. I’m happy for you. You had some success, right? That’s great. You did this. You got a promotion. Good for you. Because, you know, unfortunately, nowadays, everybody’s thinking about why is it me? Oh, man, that stinks. What was me? And is self-centered and care about others is an incredible trait. 

Dan 48:13

for sure. Pat does have to put up with me asking coaches if they enjoyed their 28 no start on this podcast. He doesn’t have to deal with that from time to time. 

Pat 48:23

hitting questions you’re used to with popping glass here. 

Mike MacDonald 48:28

I had a friend yesterday, just yesterday told me a guy I coached with for many years, Phil Seymour, great coach was a men’s coach, was a women’s coach at Providence. And no, not at all.

I didn’t know. And he goes, yeah, it must just be like being married for a long time. It’s just, yeah, you just do it. Yeah. It’s just like doing that. And I’m like, yeah, I guess so. I’ve been married over 30 years. I guess same thing. How long we’ve been married? Yeah. How many wins we have. It’s the same thing, I guess. 

Dan 48:52

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Pat 50:05

All right, coach, we’ll get to our last third subset this time. We’re going to go to the offensive side.

And as you talked about, you know, which Bellien had a big influence and your career and working with him. So we’d like to ask about the two guard offense and the question we want to ask within the two guard offense, we’ve kind of termed it when it clicks. So we’re going to give you three types of dominant players that you could have. And which one would you choose to start? That you think would make the offense the most potent for its success. So within the two guard offense, option one is having a dominant post player. Option two would be elite off ball shooter. And then option three would be a dominant ball screen player. 

Mike MacDonald 50:52

All right, here we go, let’s see. So I will say this, two guard is designed where you’re gonna shoot a lot of jump shots. I haven’t given you any answers yet, but I’m gonna tell you a quick story. In my second year as a head coach at Canisius, this is back in 1998, 99, you guys were probably in tiny percent anyway. And we have a very good big kid who’s a sophomore. Darren Fanny ended up playing overseas, played in Germany and all these places for a long time and was looking for new ways to get on the ball. I called coach B-line who was at Richmond at the time. He had left Canisius, he’s at Richmond. I said, well, what are you doing to get the ball inside? He goes, we don’t. I go, what do you mean you don’t? He goes, we don’t throw it inside. Go, you don’t throw it inside at all. He goes, no, they want the ball, they can rebound. He goes, every now and then we might throw a high low pass to a guy above it. We don’t throw it inside at all. I said, well, this phone call is not helping me one bit.

So, but it’s funny. Like if you look at some of his teams, go back to West Virginia with Kevin Pittsburgh, what was he known for? A center who could shoot threes, right? And the thing I will say though about Two Guard, and Patrick, I think we’ve talked about this before, I think it’s very adaptable. We all want to be football coaches, all basketball coaches, right? And I always say it’s like the spread offense in football. Some people have run the spread offense and they throw it 60 times. Some spread you out and they use it to run because they have a good running back and they’re good and effective in that. And I think Two Guard is adaptable like that. If you can, if you do have a big guy, which I’ve been blessed. I’ve had a really good big guy who was an All-American this year, Ben Bill. I had a guy, Andrew Sisco, who was a three-time All-American, who was the all-time leading scorer in New York state, his college basketball history. Think about that and people like, well, the COVID, he only got 15 extra games with COVID, but he outscored everybody, any level division, one, two, three, Calvin Murphy, Bob Lanier, anybody who played Syracuse, he scored more points in college as a big guy playing at Damon and didn’t make threes either. So we’ve been blessed to have some really good big guys. That being said, I think the way Two Guard is set up, you probably want really good shooting to start because it helps you to spacing. And that might be the start, but I’m gonna waffle on it and probably start the big guy too, because like I’ve said, we’ve had really good big guys as well.

And so that might be the sub, but then it’ll be a quick sub. It’ll be before that media timeout. Let’s do it that way. All right, can we do that? And then for Sid, I guess you go ball screen, but now let’s look at this. I’ll use Coach Beeline as an example. Go back, it’s amazing. I had somebody email me, it was right when the NCAA tournament was starting and the guys like, been studying your team this year, love your offense, wanna get on a call and go over some Two Guard stuff. 

Mike MacDonald 53:32

He goes, you still watch Coach Beeline at West Virginia and Michigan, wanna see, there’s like a cult of people who do like the Two Guard stuff and think it is really good. But you go back, you watch Coach Beeline’s last couple of years at Michigan, they didn’t run a lot of Two Guard stuff. They had Trey Burke in ball screens, right? They would do double ball screens, single ball screens, they flip the ball screen, they do some different things, right? And again, they went to the national championship game.

They were really good. They would play, they wouldn’t necessarily run a lot of Two Guard, same Two Guard sets he did at West Virginia. Maybe a couple here and there, but they did a lot with the point guard with the ball, which I think in the end, and again, I talked about the quotes I have up here in front of me. One of them is, the essence of leadership is aligning strengths so that weaknesses become irrelevant. That is where Coach Beeline’s great, and I think that’s where any coach who’s good, right? You play to people’s strengths. I always tell the story that John was at West Virginia at the time, maybe, and I was probably a niches, I think. And I called him and he’s like, well, we only have our guys come off a ball screen going to the right. And I’m like, really? He goes, yeah, we only, they don’t go to the right because they’re right handed, they all go to the right. And I’m like, that’s stupid. I was younger and I’m like, that’s stupid. What are you doing that for? You got to teach them to use their left hand and use it. And then as you start to think about it, it’s pretty smart, right? You’re playing a guy’s strengths, right? Putting guys in situations where they’re comfortable being in, playing to their strengths. And now we do that. We play to the guy’s strengths and where are they comfortable coming off the ball screen? Sometimes you have a lefty who’s more comfortable going right, and that’s okay. You can have him going right, but put him in situations where they’re good to use a screen, whether it’s coming off a ball screen or a big guy on the block doing that. I think that’s real important too, putting them in situations they like catching, turning, shooting a turnaround jumper, as opposed to shooting a jump hook. Work on what they’re good at and get really good at playing to their strengths. And then their weaknesses become irrelevant. 

Pat 55:28

I’d like to follow up on, I guess maybe your one B start the post, but obviously the elite post talent you’ve had at Damon. So within the two guard offense, we can all picture the spacing with the big starting at the high post.

How did you think about getting them into the post or getting them post touches within the two guard offense? 

Mike MacDonald 55:49

And that’s the thing where Tugar can be really adaptable. You can figure out, hey, what can they do to get them there? Can they, again, are they comfortable facing the hoop and playing up away from the hoop and doing things where they’re 15 feet away or behind three? We’ve been fortunate at Damon. We’ve had, it’s an amazing run of different centers we had. We started, our first team had a kid, Gerald Beverly. Gerald played professionally for like 10 years, was in G-League for a couple of years with the Cavaliers G-League team. He played in Japan, he played in Germany, Israel, all over the place. It’s a great professional career. And Gerald was a really good back to the basket guy that I was trying to say, hey, I want you to shoot some threes. Didn’t want, wasn’t comfortable shooting threes. And we would try and get him in situations where, hey, set a screen, put him in an off and down screen and let him post off it, which was really good.

When he graduated, our center the next two years was our best three-point shooter. Was one of the best three-point shooters in the conference and was totally opposite. Couldn’t post up a little, but wasn’t good at it. So we wouldn’t run necessarily the same actions we would for Gerald, but we could run some of those things. And sometimes what we would do is maybe run them for somebody else, put somebody else in a situation where they could post up. So I think look at different ways you can move guys around in your offense that maybe is something different. Then you see a lot watching the NBA playoffs. What do the Nuggets do with the Okich? They have him dribble. The point guard Murray sets a ball screen for him. And how many guys are used to doing that with the five-man and the one? We did that back in the day after Gerald graduated the next year, the kid was good off the ball screen. So we would have our point guard set a one-five ball screen and let him do some things out of two guard within the flow because he was good at it. And five-man aren’t used to handling a ball screen, getting screened like that in that situation. And ones aren’t usually used to helping. And are we going to switch? What are we going to do? Do I do drop coverage as a one? They’re not used to that. So I think take whatever you run. And this way I go back to like, I get it. Two guard offense can be like kind of a cult, but I think take whatever you run, whatever you do, and say, all right, how can I have some fun and play to my guy’s strengths and let them be who they are and be the best version of what you do. 

Pat 58:08

they are. When you found that your post player is a guy who wants to play with his back to the basket, did you find in terms of maybe generating a good touch for him, a deep touch, kind of just working off of back screens, cross screens, or putting him in some sort of maybe off-ball or on-ball screening, hand-off action and rolling him into the posts and generating a better touch for him?

Yes, we do a lot. 

Mike MacDonald 58:31

that. I think it depends on what they’re comfortable with. We might run a cross-screen for Ben Bill, who’s our center now, where he’s good at using it, where Andrew Sisco, who was a very good center and scored all those points, he wasn’t as good coming off of that cross-screen. He wasn’t as comfortable with it, where when we ran that for Gerald Beverly, we’d run this cross-screen a little bit further out, and then we could throw it to the rim because of the three, Gerald was the best jumper and the best dunker, and we could throw a lot of things to him.

I’ll give you another quick story with Gerald. When I got the job at Damon, I got it in September. Gerald was a senior, and I had to watch him play. One thing I learned from Coach Beeline I thought was great, and we try and do all the time now, is let your guys play. As silly as it sounds, when practice starts, do you just let them play five on five? Coach Beeline will go sit up in the bleachers. I try and go and sit. Don’t say anything. Maybe I’ll ref a little bit, but just kind of watch and see guys play because, you know, guys are going to do when they’re playing five on five and say, hey, play a game to three baskets. First team to three baskets win. These are the two teams. Go play, and they’re going to know. They know, hey, who we’re going to get a shot for. They know who can we get in the post. Hey, he might be a guard, but he’s good at posting up. Let’s get so-and-so in the post because he can post up. You know, they’ll tell you what they’re good at. When I had to do that, when I first got hired at Damon, and I’m watching him, these guys would throw lobs to Gerald that he would catch things. One day he was throwing lobs near the end of practice, and somebody threw a lob to him, and I was ready to, a little whistle, I was ready to get everybody on the line. What are we making a stupid pass like that? He comes out of nowhere, dunks it. I  blew my  whistle said, good practice, fellas. We’re done. Let’s go. And I think you have to read what hey’re good at.

Dan 01:00:14

 When it comes to adapting the two guard offense to the players you have, when does that start to take place?

Is there a set number of actions within the two guard war? Hey, we’re gonna put in these four or five things, no matter what, every year and start there and then we’ll adapt later or do you adapt it right away? Like when does that process take place when you’ll tweak things? 

Mike MacDonald 01:00:37

It’s always evolving, at least for us. I think that’s a really good question, Dan. We have certain things that we do all the time that we put in some base stuff. And then out of that, we might add some wrinkles. I always say the only thing with more wrinkles in my wardrobe is the offense, because we’ll have a lot of different things. We’ll say off of this, and this guy, hey, we can get this guy coming to his left where he’s really good, or we can get a post up for a three-man right here or something you see, but it’s always kind of evolving.

And there are some things that are really good at being in the air that don’t work as you get in a conference play. And I think you have to kind of be your own critic, right? You have to be your own harshest critic and look at it and say, what are we doing? Is it working? Does this help us? Is it good for them? Can guys score off of this? And I think playing, again, always thinking of playing a guy’s strengths is in the back of your mind at all times. And what can we do to help them be successful? In the end, I think that’s what a coach’s job is, right? We want to help them. We’re coaching. We’re encouraging. We’re helping. We’re helping them be the best version of themselves. And if you can have a little bit of role in that by maybe putting them in spots offensively or defensively for that matter, that will help them be the best version of themselves. That’s really doing your job. 

Dan 01:01:51

Good job. Coach, you’re off the start, sub, or sit hot seat. Thanks for playing that game with us. We learned a lot about two guard and we even got to defense, so I love that.

We got a final question to close the show. Before we do, congrats again on a fantastic year and thanks for coming on the show today and sharing. This was really fun. 

Mike MacDonald 01:02:09

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Like I said, I’m a big fan. I think your work, the things you do are great. And please keep doing it because there are people who really enjoy it and very, very helpful for coaches at all levels. 

Dan 01:02:20

Thank you, Coach. Appreciate that. 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? 

Mike MacDonald 01:02:29

Thats a good one. I think the best investment is people. The people I’ve had work for me, I’ve been fortunate to have assistants who were very good, especially I mentioned Ryan Granitz who’s leaving for a new job, Mike Birkin before him who was a head coach at Buffalo State. A lot of people who have given their time and effort for not a lot of money, and you guys know what the division two and the division three level, the assistants aren’t getting very wealthy, right?

But give them a chance to get in. And I think if you invest in people and you see what they go to, and we’ve had a number of guys who’ve been here for a year and gone on to a different job, whether is it a high major, whether it’s in the NBA or the G league, anything like that. I think if we can invest in people, I think that’s the biggest thing. We have assistant Matt Hart, who’s now in Virginia. And my joke is, I said, I’m going to write a book from the ECC to the ACC. It’s not a normal tale because we’re in the ECC in the East Coast Conference. And now he’s in the real Atlantic Coast Conference. You know, I think we’ve had a number of guys who’ve taken the time to invest and be a part of this program. And I think when you say your best investment, not only in coaches and people, but also the players, right? We’ve had a number of players who’ve given up opportunities maybe to go somewhere else because they like it here. And I think that’s important. We’ve invested in them, but they’ve invested in us. And I think it’s a two way street and people are dual invested. You’re going to get the most out of the transaction without a doubt. 

Dan 01:04:00

All right, Pat, you and I were just briefly chatting before we hopped on these shows where we get to talk to a coach who’s had so much experience, different levels. There’s just like a wisdom that comes through and it doesn’t matter what the question is really. Case in point, we started in one place at a start subset that went about four or five other places and they were all good. Those are some of our favorite shows and Coach McDonald was awesome today. 

Pat 01:04:25

Yeah, you nailed it on the head afterwards saying that it was just like a real life coaching conversation. And I think it reminded me a lot of our second conversation with coach Jeff and Gundy. And to your point, like they have so much experience and coach McDonald’s won and coached at every level. And he’s seen it all. And he was just pretty straightforward and blunt. And there wasn’t much coaching speak. It was all just the truth about coaching, so to speak, like the cold art truth, you what really matters and what’s important and sometimes coaching what actual impact we may or may not have on winning or losing. 

Dan 01:05:02

Yeah, let’s get to our top three takeaways here. I’ll kick it to you for the first one. 

Pat 01:05:07

For the first one, I’ll start with our initial conversation, just about group dynamics and why groups succeed. And again, like we referenced, he’s been at so many levels. Like I said, D1 to D3 to now D2. And these programs looking at his career aren’t big schools. I think they’re unique places probably to recruit to. And he’s done a fantastic job in just going there, finding a way, finding success. And I think being able to have him on and glean, like we’ve had a lot of conversations, Dr. Preston Klein, just on group cohesion, just kind of like experts who really study it and look at it and try to come in and help people understand group cohesion, but to really get someone who’s boots on the ground, who’s been in it season after season, in these different places, what he finds as a why groups succeed.

I think what he said at the top, there is no pixie dust, there is no magic potion. And it’s just finding ways to get guys to care about each other, who of course love basketball, and finding ways to get them connected. And that comes in different forms. And you know, it’s unique to each group for sure. But probably, let’s say that may be the closest thing to a secret sauce. And it’s just like how you go about that. Even when we got into like the practice, his practice planning, just finding moments for them to team lead, you know, whether it’s of course, the stretching, but then also, hey, we’re doing this drill, and putting the onus on his older guys, his captains or the seniors to instruct and lead the young guys to the drill who maybe aren’t or new to the program or uncertain, you know, if like I said, we talked about two weeks ago. And I think those are important moments that allow the team to take hold of the culture, the group, and make it their own, which is probably equally as important as a coach just always steering the ship or, you know, deciding the course. 

Dan 01:06:58

Yeah, a couple of things I’ll add to what you just said. He told, he had that great quote that teams win games, families win championships. So when it came to like the connected piece, he thought that was just such a huge part of their success this year. He also told the story and talked about how guys hung out together off the court at those houses that were, you know, right around campus and just that subtle thing of like, are they hanging with each other, watching football, doing whatever.

The other part that I liked in that first bucket, and there was a ton, but when we got somewhat tactical for a second on what practice looks like, and he kind of went through the opening part of a practice and the passing, the catching, stretching, that’s another way of a connecting point. The giddy up drills, the layup, and then to shooting, you had the little nugget about like, you got to shoot early in practice before defense rolls. Your defense looks so much better than it really is. I kind of liked that. You got a sense of just how they build a practice and then how leadership is kind of folded into that beginning of the practice. And then my other last thing that I liked, and I also think I could have spent more time on, we talked about being consistent as a coach, and you started to just feel this throughout the show, how consistent he is in all things. And case in point, when we get to, you know, them being 28-0 and just the consistency of that season. And I liked the conversation around what guys need from you and what they ultimately need is that consistency of character, of planning, of practice, because that’s something that they can really hold on to.

Pat 01:08:22

 I’d like to follow up on just on the group hangs he brought up. I wish I had followed up.

He did allude when maybe the groups aren’t as connected or don’t hang out and how they found success, which ultimately I think is just talent. I mean, among other things, but that was probably like an overwhelming thing. They just had a lot of talent. I wish I had followed up on how much he pays attention to if the group is or is not hanging out. Is this something he found from this team, just because they were doing it so often and just being around the team, you’re going to maybe always asking the assistants or maybe with checking with his players if his team is actually hanging out off the court. 

Dan 01:08:59

Yeah, he had a son on the team this last couple of years, so that probably helped get him. But I agree with you.

I’ll give you one last quote before we move on from that. I believe it was in this first bucket, but he had the quote, teach always and when necessary, use words. I’m not sure if that was in the first bucket, but wherever it was, it’s worth mentioning. I agree. Great quote. 

Pat 01:09:19

Yeah. All right, Dan. Well, let’s keep it moving here. I’ll throw it to you for our second takeaway. you 

Dan 01:09:24

I’m going to go to the winding road, start subset of just, we started on offensive rebounding, got to transition defense, hopped onto some analytics for a bit. And then ended up talking about being 28. No, I think all in that question, I might’ve missed some stuff too. My takeaway is from the actual question itself.

First, there’s a miss in here for me too, which was tagging. He mentioned, same here, dipping his toe in talking about it. I wish I would have followed up on why or what is the hesitancy? Cause he sent in four and he kind of mentioned, you know, wanting to get back in that guy, the dog, and then the guy back. But I really liked when he was talking about why he would send three verse four and the considerations for all those things and wanting to be able to still build his transition and him feeling like that’s the best way to do it while also still being aggressive on the glass. And so, you know, why he sent four verse sending three, how he can tweak it and change it because they have been great offensive rebounding teams. And then, you know, you and I were talking beforehand on how much time do you put into the where you go to the backside, you send guys to the paint, all those things. And he had good thoughts on, listen, you got to just have guys that want to do it. And with the,

Pat 01:10:36

From the want aspect, tying it to tagging up, talking to coaches to whether they send three, four, five. I do think we’re always hearing like a reoccurring theme is that want aspect, just guys who are great offensive rebounders just want the ball.

It’s not so much a technique thing. And I think too, you know, I know you’ve tried tagging up, we’re trying tagging up. What you do see is it is the challenge of tagging up or saying multiple, I mean, four or five guys, the offensive glass is, can you make it a rule and still have it be effective if you don’t have four or five guys who really want to offensive rebound or want to hit bodies in the paint. And I think with tagging up, you know, when the coaches who maybe are reluctant or who are on the fence about it, I think that is like kind of the pushback. If I have two guards that don’t really want to offensive rebound, am I just going to be the whole year on them to go. 

Dan 01:11:37

Yes, you will be. I can tell you from experience, 100% you will be. 

Pat 01:11:42

You have to be yeah, that’s the end but that’s the end you’re gonna commit to it You absolutely have to be but at some point like are you just spinning your wheels in the mud? So to speak is it kind of shame on them or shame on you?

Continuing to stick with this tagging up. I think it’s just an interesting thought Experiment or something to think about or consider versus. Yeah, okay Hey Just get back and then free up the people who really want to go rebound and this is another point like if I have a really Good offensive rebounder tell him to run the back versus just go get it. I got three guys Just go get it my two six foot guards who would prefer to not touch anyone on the court. Just go get back

Dan 01:12:20

It’s a fascinating sort of conversation that we seem to find ourselves in every offseason in the last three or four summers. I go back to Sean Miller on the podcast talk about, you know, getting two back every time because his philosophy was, listen, the big games, the best teams, you can’t get beat in transition. And they’d prefer to just, you know, give up maybe a couple offensive rebound opportunities to just not get beat back and build it from there.

But then there’s the other side of it of teams that are really good at tagging up and are really disciplined, get those three or four extra rebounds a game. And I guess I’d add this caveat to the tagging up thing is with the guards that don’t want to go or aren’t great rebounders, the thought process has to be also that this isn’t an offensive rebounding system. It is a transition defensive system. And if you look at it through that lens and say, this is how we play transition defenses, we are running to the backs and matching up. And that is the lens that we mostly care about. And then on the way there, we can become physical and guys can swim off and get rebounds or we can get offensive rebounds great. But yeah, if you’re beating your head over against the wall, because they’re not offensive rebounding and physical, that lens can be tough. Yeah. 

Pat 01:13:30

I mean, I’m a proponent of tagging up. I really do like it.

And I think you’re right on like the guys who maybe aren’t gonna have the physicality to really scrum up the pain. It’s trying to win the battle like, Hey, find your tag. And when that guy turns around a sprint, he should be feeling you or see your chest and you just not be waiting for him down at the other end knowing that’s your tag. But at least trying to win that, let’s say physicality or playing with force battle. 

Dan 01:13:57

yeah, we don’t need to go down the tagging up rabbit hole. This is fitting that in this conversation we’re taking tangents.

I did think it was worth mentioning that we joked on the podcast about asking him about being 28. No, I actually just really liked his answer in that part of the conversation. And he mentioned that a lot of people ask him about being tense. And I just thought he was really good, like really true probably to himself. And you saw his personality come through about like, I mean, shoot, let’s just keep winning. Like you and are talking told that story about the game being postponed, and then he thought they’re going to lose it and they play well, they went by 20 or whatever it was. And then him telling the same, okay, well, why don’t we just keep winning? Yeah, as you joke, I’ve had enough losses, I’ve taken enough tough ones, like I don’t need that feeling. 

Pat 01:14:41

I agree. I think this profession is hard enough as it is. And you’re going to take a lot of hits and, you know, a lot of career instability at times. So when kind of the sun shines on you, just soak it up and don’t overthink. 

Dan 01:14:55

Yeah. We talked early in the first bucket about his culture and building it. And then I thought kind of through that answer about being 28-0, you just sort of got why he’s such a good coach. He’s the same person. I’ve been doing this a long time. 28-0, we’re going to treat this the same way as we’ve been. It hasn’t been 28-0, and I just like that whole part of it. I agree. So let’s now stop winding in the windy. Starsubsit, let’s get to our last one. I’ll kick it back to you. 

Pat 01:15:23

The last takeaway I’ll pull from our start subset on the two guard offense. Again, just in our research, knowing he worked for Beeline. And as he talked about several times, like the influence coach Beeline has had on his career and of course his offensive system for me, what I took away is I wouldn’t say we got super tactical into the two guard offense, but I really thought he spoke well on just his philosophy or his approach to offense and, you know, whatever system you like, whatever alignment you like, the course as coaches, you like it and you’re going to know it, but then learning your team and just finding ways and within that. So within the two guard offense, how can I get my players, the ball, you know, on a neat talk and post players, they like to play at the best of the basket from post players who could still are big men that could shoot and just came across very simplistic, which honestly, it probably is just don’t overcomplicate it, whatever.

If it’s the flex, find a way to get your shooters, the ball, you know, if it’s two guard, find a way to get your bigs and target. We’ve done cross screens. We’ve done handoffs, you know, it’s just, what are they comfortable with? And then how can we get them to the spot they’re most comfortable with? And you kind of just work, you know, in some ways we talked a lot with coaches kind of reverse engineering it, working backwards and kind of knowing where you want the finish and then, you know, your start. So you just kind of work on what’s going to take place in between that to get to the end result. 

Dan 01:16:47

You came with this question and I thought it was really good of just, okay, like every year though, you’re not going to have the same type of dominant player in the same scheme. And so one year you got two shooters versus one year, you got one shooter in a post.

What are the things that you consider? And I thought it was good. Lastly, he gave a really good quote that is worth mentioning and I think I wrote it somewhat correctly, but the essence of leadership is aligning strengths and weaknesses become irrelevant. And that was within this too about like, listen, yeah, here’s the base stuff, but then the mastery of this is just getting them to their strengths. He gave the example of the right hand pick and roll stuff, like always going in there right. Those are subtle little koshi things I think are awesome. We both kind of mentioned some things we wish we would have went deeper on. Is there anything else you would have liked to have gone deeper on or any potential misses? 

Pat 01:17:34

He talked about in the defensive communication, he talked about just dumping selfish and having unselfish defense. He gave some good examples.

Yeah, just kind of following up on unselfish defense, being an unselfish defender. 

Dan 01:17:46

Okay, with mine, we talked about it a little bit in the start sub sit about offensive rebounding. We got into some analytics and he talked about the PPP stats of for the simple stats, first defense. I thought, you know, hey, I always get interested in really good teams and the things that they hold valuable from an analytics standpoint could have gone deeper on that, I thought it was great. We got like a Ben McCollum thing in there where he talked about them talking all the time and the warmups I thought was like just sort of interesting piece. And then it’s not a miss. I think it’s something that we touched on.

And I would like to revisit this in another upcoming podcast. So just let’s mark this down. But when we were getting into the transition offensive rebounding stuff, I kind of wrote a note because Robin Fralick Michigan State Women’s Head Coach talked about the great teams are good in the little transition moments of the game. You know, moving from offensive defense, defense rebound to offense. And it’d be fun to dive into with a coach how they think about getting great at these different little cycles of the game that these in between moments and like what you do because coach McDonald talked about repping disadvantage drills, everyday transition drills. And I just think those things are interesting. So I just gave like four more misses, I guess. Again, we thank coach McDonald for coming on. Congrats to him on a terrific season. Thank you everybody for listening and we’ll see you next time.