This week on the Slappin’ Glass Podcast, we sit down with Chattanooga Mocs Head Coach, Dan Earl, for a masterclass in offensive creativity, teaching, and decision-making.
Coach Earl dives deep into the evolution of his Princeton-influenced offense, where the five-man acts as the hub—a quarterback-like figure who randomizes actions, flows into concepts, and keeps the ball moving with spacing, cutting, and decision-making at the center of everything. He details how to teach bigs to pass, pivot, cut, and make reads, while also emphasizing the importance of allowing freedom and randomness within structure.
We discuss:
- Randomizing offense through the five-man: spacing, ball screens, and empowering skilled centers.
- Teaching cutting, screening, and timing—why Chattanooga was one of the most efficient cutting teams in the nation last year.
- Shot selection and assist stats: how Coach Earl teaches decision-making and efficiency without overloading players.
- Late-game conundrums: fouling up three, defending full-court situations, and the eternal debate of putting a defender on or off the inbounder.
- The role of relationships and trust in building a successful program.
From X’s and O’s to late-game philosophy, Coach Earl offers both practical teaching points and big-picture lessons that coaches at every level will take something from.
Transcript
Dan Earl 00:00
UC Irvine, they play off X5, right? And it’s awesome. It took away a bunch of our cuts. It took away a lot of our drives. And we had this younger guy for us, a kid named Colin Mulholland, who’s a good shooter. He comes out and hits his first two shots and, you know, Chattanooga Mocs fans are going crazy. And then this is like nine in a row. Well, we’re coming over to timeout and it’s like after the six miss, I’ve just, I can’t believe they’re playing off and we’re like, should we change it and like do something different or check somebody else? And we’re just like, double down and he’s teeing off. So I’ve reminded him multiple times. I said to him, do you know how many threes you took in the championship game? And he’s like smiling. He’s like, yeah, 16. I’m like, no, no, 17 threes kind of remind him, like, you know, many staffs in America would allow you to take 17 threes. He’s like, not many. I’m like, no, no, no, one.
Dan 02:13
And now, please enjoy our conversation with Coach Dan Earl. We wanted to start with this. Anybody that watched you play last year knows your offense was just fun to watch, a lot of movement, passing, cutting, all the stuff that you love to watch in a great offense. We thought it’d be interesting to start with how you randomize offense through your five-man based off of actions, spacings, or they end up in the corner, in the middle, in a drag ball, all the things that can happen, and how you think about randomizing them so that your offense can continue to click and flow.
Dan Earl 02:56
We run somewhat of a Princeton-ish style offense. My brother, who’s now the head coach, William & Mary, previously at Cornell, he had played at Princeton and the old school Princeton was like kind of one set to the next to the next. Ours is just kind of, we have starters, if you will, that we can call out, but then it is a little decent amount of just where’s the ball and where’s the five man. So it allows you to do all those things, which is, you mentioned passing, cutting, spacing, ball movement, player movement, dribble handoffs, ball screens, all those things.
But if rather than just a set play and if somebody forgets or messes it up and then resetting the offense or whatever, you just kind of play out of it again. And it takes a little time to get it going. And the more skilled your five man is, both passing, shooting, all the above can he score on the block. You have a variety of different things you’ll do or tweaks to the offense. But in general, our five man is, for lack of better terms, almost our point guard or quarterback or what have you. And you just kind of find the next concept. So if somebody screws up one of the actions, because there are some actions that you want to try to do, it just kind of flows into the next thing. It’s something that my background, again, with my brother playing at Princeton, I played overseas for a while, you know, the European style, if you will, of skilled guys, and again, the spacing and passing and cutting. And it’s kind of evolved for us over the years. It’s not as, you know, the old school Princeton was like run down the shot clock. Again, they would be mad at me for saying that, but we’re trying to play fast and just get those actions. And look, you see a lot of teams doing it even at the NBA level, you know, certainly the Denver Nuggets, I mean, Jokic and all that they do. And, you know, there’s different variations, but that’s what we’re trying to do from an offensive perspective.
Dan 04:48
When you talk about your five men and it can be tough for them to learn the skills to pass, pivot, handoff catching areas. Like there’s a lot put on that five man to do to constantly be that retrigger man. What is the progression or things that are maybe hard early on that you have to really get over so the offense can flow pretty quickly with that five men being kind of the hub of everything.
Dan Earl 05:13
When you go through it, like all basketball players for us, you want them to be basketball players. You want them to be good decision makers. You want them to be able to see. So in many ways, the ability to pass is a really big thing that we look for in recruiting. If you can shoot the ball as well from the five man, as you can imagine, that opens all different things up because of the gravity that that guy commands and makes X5 go out and guard them. It opens up the lane even more. If you have a guy that can also score in the block, now you got a little bit of everything, if you will. So trying to get that person to have the ball in their hands, they have often have high usage rates for the balls in their hands a lot. And you can deal with all different types of five men, right? Now, obviously, sometimes when you get a more skilled guy, you’re giving up maybe a rim runner at a decent amount or a shot blocker on the other end or a lob catch threat in our world of mid-major plus college basketball or whatever you want to call it. But we really try to emphasize the skill portion of it. And one of the big things is repping our offense and then repping the concepts that we’re doing. And while they don’t have to be the fastest cat out there, they got to move so that, hey, after they come off a ball screen and dive to the rim hard in our threat at the rim, oftentimes that ball, if it doesn’t go to the five, it’s going somewhere else. And then they got to get on their horse and be flying back up to the elbow or to the top of the key or whatever the next action is. So it takes a while to get them on the same page.
Pat 06:49
Attempting to play three or five men or playing three or five men, what considerations then do you give to the pace at which you want to play? Also within that pace conversation, your transition flow and designating a lane line for the five versus really opening it up and randomizing even how he runs in transition.
Dan Earl 07:08
Yeah, great question. So if you’re pinning me down, I’d love to play fast, push the ball in transition, get those guys running. And I love the random nature of everything of the game of basketball, right? So I’m going back a little while, but years ago, oftentimes when I played, and even after that, you’d have one post, you know, your four and five, you know, run to the strong side block, the other one as the trail post at the lane line extended, if you will, right? And then we ran different actions or whatever. When I say we, I don’t know, 75% of college basketball or more, we still do that somewhat, but we’re running to a five out. Usually, if the post is trailing, if he’s the first man down, he’s usually running to the strong side block. So you start off in that form, if you will. I love it when, hey, the five man can go wherever he wants. And I just see it as if the five man’s in the weak side corner, how often is X5 used to guarding the guy in the weak side corner, right? Or in the strong side corner or in the slot area, whatever. So I really like the random nature of the whole thing, but we try to push it in transition hard and our offense as well, the randomness.
So the five man has a lot of freedom to go wherever he wants, right? And we’ll play out of that action. And sometimes they’ll see similar concepts that occur. We reference our ball screens. It’s how many guys are you driving into? So a one ball screen would be driving into one guy. There’s two guys behind you, the five man set in it. Now, if he dives, certain things happen. If he pops, so you burn a guy next guy in line, or a two ball screen. So you’ll see those actions come up all the time throughout offense, whether it’s a get action and he’s handed off, it’s the same thing. It’s a one, two, or three ball screen would be when they’re driving into three guys. So the concepts pop up constantly. I’d like to play fast. I’d like to play random. Oddly enough, this year we were not as fast as maybe I’d like, but I think you’re constantly tweaking your style into what your pieces are, right? And we had some pretty good decision makers and maybe lack for a little athleticism. So we were okay playing a little slower. I don’t want to force the ultimate, like we want to be the fastest team in the nation, or we want to be the most random team, like you got to take your pieces and just kind of see what you do best and kind of tweak your offense that way.
I will say one other thing on that front, when we’re at VMI, which is a tougher job because of the military constraints and stuff in the Southern Conference, one of our goals was to kind of lead the nation in three point attempts. Like we really try to do that. We’ve kind of backed down on that a little bit where the three point line is still ultra important to us, but it’s not the ultimate goal to lead the nation in three point attempts.
Pat 09:57
When randomizing the alignment or how the five man runs up the court, is there an alignment, whether it’s weak side corner, strong side corner that requires a little bit more massaging in terms of what concepts you get to or how to keep the flow or often seem to stagnate when like I said, the five man ran ball side corner or weak side corner that you kind of felt that you as a staff had to really consider and help your guys find solutions?
Dan Earl 10:21
That’s the trouble with it being so random, right? So again, as you’re teaching a progression, we start a little bit more five men on the strong side block or five men in the dead center in what we call one, two, two, right? Trailing down the floor. And there’s different actions you can do as you get to learn each other and get each other. He can go anywhere if you will, but it is harder to run actions that way, right? Because if he ends up in the strong side corner, depending if the guy throws the ball to him and decides to cut through, Hey, what’s the five man do with it? It’s a different kind of offense.
So I get that question a lot away from the five men, but you know, it’s like, we come off what we call a three ball screen. There’s three guys in the fence, the five man setting the ball screen. Usually the top guy’s burning for us and he’s burning and going through if the ball handler throws the ball forward, right? And he’s burning and going through to have some level of spacing. Well, I get often asked if that guy doesn’t burn and they throw forward and the point guard, you know, the guy coming off still continues forward rather than like, Hey, that’s wrong and blowing the whistle to be, Hey, don’t you see that there’s three guys already over on that side of the court? Just bounce out to the other side. And that’s a hard thing to coach, but you’re constantly talking to you guys about seeing and finding the next concept. So coming back to that five man, yeah, if he’s in the weak side corner, they don’t initially know what to do. It’s like, wait, where’s, uh, what’s going on? So we would just like play basketball. So he throws it to somebody he can cut or pin down. He being the guy with the ball, inevitably the center is going to just start flashing towards the elbow or the top of the key or what have you. If you didn’t in transition, just get a skip past three for the five men, you know, so not giving you a good answer other than it takes a while. And eventually they figured out and you’re trying to, you know, stop practice occasionally, but not all the time. Doesn’t it make sense? Do you see this kid? Like, why would you do that? You know, like, let’s find the next concept fairly quickly.
Pat 12:23
On the other side of the coin when you want to encourage this randomization Was there difficult to get the center off of just going to drag screens at all? Like you say hey, we’re gonna play for him do you want and they just keep going into drag screens?
Dan Earl 12:35
Yeah, no doubt. And if you get a center doesn’t want to run, right, it’s easier to be the trail guy all the time. So the first thing is, hey, get your rear end down the floor, and let’s try to put pressure on the rim at the very least, if not maybe an early post touch or what have you throw the ball forward and then get the ball inside. When he’s coming down the middle of the floor, yeah, they inevitably want to just go ball screen, you know, we do a lot of dribble acts, right. So early on in the year, a couple of things like when you do a dribble at we’re telling the guys cut, cut, cut, right, because if you just say, you can cut or come get it, you guys know, right, what’s the kid gonna 90% of the time he’s coming to get right. So we would a be like, hey, you got to cut a high percentage of the time, and then open it up for those different actions, right. So similarly, you know, young kid comes in or a new guy to your offense, he comes down, he’s just like, I’ll just go ball screen to what you were saying, right. So to keep from doing that, we throw the ball to the center a lot, right. And then he can play in what we call one, two, two, he can dribble at or, you know, snap it to the next guy, ball screen dribble at, and then you have that back cut or come get it. So they’ll get away from a little bit, because they’re touching the ball, I think, too, you know, quite a bit. We also can set a random pin away, again, from the logic of a player, that’s a little bit tough, because it’s like, wait, I’m not touching the ball right away, right. So we try to incentivize them talk to them, explain to them what we’re trying to do, and incentivize them a little bit.
This is not, you know, to keep from that trail ball screen, but back to the cutting. So we keep track of analytics and stats of everything. One of the things that we don’t penalize a team for early in the year is turnovers off the back door cuts because we want them throwing that ball. Now, it’s hard because you’ll play a game to seven or whatever, and it’s ultra competitive, they don’t want to turn it over. But from an analytical perspective, as your turnover rate, we keep track of all that stuff, we’re not penalizing them, because we want to encourage them throwing that back door pass.
So we don’t do the same with the drag ball screen. But when a kid’s going to touch the ball, he might be less apt to go just immediately ball screen out of the five out
Dan 14:39
On the cutting, kind of sticking on that for a second, you all were one of the most efficient cutting teams in college basketball last year, analytically, and one of the teams that cut the most. So it was one of your top actions. So not only were you doing it a lot, but you’re efficient in it. And staying on the conversation we just had, what’s the balance between the speed of cuts versus the precision of a cut that you want within all this? Because there is a lot of timing elements in this when you’re doing split actions and backdoors and reads. And how much are you talking to your team about, listen, don’t try to be overly precise, just cut hard versus how much do you work on really setting up the precise cut with that balance? I think
Dan Earl 15:20
I think the first and foremost is being bought into, A, it works, if done correctly, B, be unselfish and either free yourself up, and that obviously will get through the kick if they’re getting the ball on a back cut, or it frees a teammate up, right? Because if you cut, it’ll drag in the weak side guy, hopefully, and then maybe you skip the ball. So you’re being unselfish in that act. So that’s always on the spectrum of, hey, are you setting up exactly how to cut or just forcing them to cut and cut hard at what point, you know, I don’t know exactly where it is. I think I’d start off first with, if you’re going to cut, sell out and cut hard and cut all the way to the rim and then out the weak side as well, right? Because we’ll double cut sometimes, right? So if you cut to the rim and the selfish guy or the guy that doesn’t understand our offense yet, he cuts and then he starts lolly gagging out. If you’re dribbling at the next guy and he cuts, now hit the help defender standing right under the rim. Hey, finish your cut out to the weak side. And then we do break it down a decent amount. It goes back to the buy-in of the players, right?
Because whether it’s pivoting, which is another thing we work on, tremendous amount of time or cutting, inevitably you’re trying to institute this to your team and some guys that you get have never really done it. And they’re like, who can’t cut, coach? This isn’t a science or an art or a, you know, that hard, you just run to the basketball, you’ll show them on film. You can’t cut. They’re better and worse cutters, right? And we’ll, again, first and foremost, is the willingness to do it and being bought in that it matters. That’s first. But then there is an art to it, you know, and you try to tell a guy, hey, sounds silly, but look, don’t give away your cut. So the ball’s starting to be dribbled at you and you’re leaning in the direction that you’re going to go. And by the way, you’re going to cut because the defender is going to lean that way, right? So somewhat maybe set them up with a lean the other way and then cut really hard and be low and in a stance and all that stuff, or just play dead, just stand there and kind of wait for the defender to bite one way and then cut hard, you know? So there’s a little bit of art to it, but again, first and foremost, it’s the understanding of how it helps us in the willingness of the player being unselfish, being a good kid, being bought into what we’re doing, I would say matters more.
Dan 18:13
The other thing in watching you guys play last year is so we’ve been talking about randomizing the five and their actions and where they’re at, but also randomizing the other cuts that are involved with the other four players. And one of the in running the style offense things I’ve come up against that can be difficult is when you want to implement, let’s say, like flares from the corner instead of zoom actions and things like that. Could you talk about anything like randomizing flares versus pin downs versus splits and whether those are triggers or calls that you make early or whether you let them naturally find those solutions as you get deeper in the season.
Dan Earl 18:50
Yeah, another great question. You guys do this quite frequently, right? I would love it to be completely random and have unbelievable communicators and unbelievable guys that know each other’s roles or what have you. And that’s what you’re trying to build towards, right? So inevitably snap it up to the top of the key, you’re in a five out situation. I mean, some people, you know, we do it different ways, whatever, but, or you hit the center and point or whatever, but like, hey, the guy’s going to pin down or a guy, a down screen, or sometimes you want that randomness of, Hey, you can also set a drift screen or a flare screen. Well, if you just say, Hey, do what you want, which is my most ideal, but you need the communication, you need understanding of roles. Then one guy’s going for a down screen. The other guy’s coming for a drift and it’s just a hodgepodge and it’s all jacked up, right? So trying to keep that out. So we do try to, again, have the guys communicating. And I’ll get back to that a little bit, but no roles. So oftentimes you can start off at times with the worst shooter, be the screener in that action, right? If you have like, we had a young man, honor Huff, he led the nation and threes this past year. We had another guy, Garrison Keith slur, who was a three man led the nation and all time assist to turnover ratio, like just a glue guy. Awesome. If they’re in an action, Hey, Garrison, you should be screening for honor or more, right? That makes sense. I say all that. And there’s a benefit to suppose honors, you know, in this scenario of one, two, two, five out, if honors in the corner and Garrison’s on the wing, if Garrison’s a good enough shooter that they’re going to still guard them, right? Not stand in the middle of the paint, which he was. If you have a better shooter, setting back screen or flare screen and Garrison comes off and they’re to trail them, you know, like then you can wrap that guy and get a layup or honor. Now his gravity, he’s not the honor is the driller, right? They’re really good shooter. They’re going to stay tight on him. So they can maybe get a layup. And if not, if they drop off, like he can pop and knock down that shot as well. So there’s times when you don’t want your best shooter to be the receiver of the screen always, right? So that would get into some set plays, which we certainly have. And then we do have some calls where on the fly, if I see something, you know, and probably harder in gyms that are super loud or whatever, but if they’re in front of your bench, like for us, a D screen is a drift screen. So if I see something and it’s like, we’ll be in like, say point, which is when your center comes up to, you know, the elbow and the balls at the top of the key and you hit and you usually go screen away, right? But I might just randomly, but just be like, D, D, D, right? And that’ll tell the wing to come up and randomly drift the top guy, you know, so long winded answer to all of the above, right? I would love the randomness.
Dan Earl 21:43
I’d love the communication, which we try to do. There’s a little bit of that as they get better, they’ll start yelling D occasionally on their own, which I love as well. And then certainly some set plays to get the different action.
Dan 21:56
When the offense gets bogged down, and we’ll go back to the five man on this question, either because a team has come out and said, listen, we’re going to overly deny your five and not let him get a catch, or we’re going to completely spy off and stand under the rim and make you shoot threes and deny the heck out of everything. What are the thoughts from a flow standpoint so the offense keeps connecting in one of those scenarios where the five man is either one dribbling around because they’ve got a lot of space because no one’s guarding them, or they’re being denied and helping the offense flow that way?
Dan Earl 22:32
Awesome question. You know, the other thing is when teams switch against you and have smaller guys on you. And if you don’t have a guy with our progression of Jake Stevens, one of our centers, it was really good. A couple of years back, he wasn’t physical and strong enough to be able to dive and then make them pay. Well, as he got better at his post moves, we would definitely dive a switch and those kinds of things.
And there’s an art to, you know, just stopping your offense immediately, or just continuing to run offense, even with the switch. So you don’t want a different tangent, obviously, but the full denial, we will try to back cut the center even. Again, when you get somebody that’s been in our offense for a while and whatever, they’ll realize like they can kind of swim stroke and like cut really hard and we’ll try to get him or have a set play to do that where it gives the guy denying him, you know, he’s a little more nervous about something, you know, you get a backdoor layup or something or one or two, or come up and set a back screen for that guy and jack up x five and then get a layup. Then he’s like, Whoa, okay, they can do this too, you know, so trying to do that with the denial portion of it, you know, go right into some ball screens at times if they do that, but we don’t want to become, to your point, teams might try to do that to us because we don’t want to just become a ball screen team the whole time, right? The playing off him as well as another right now, you have a non shooting center and that becomes difficult, certainly, right? So a lot of D H O’s in that situation and try to get some stop behinds for our guards or have them coming off downhill to make the other opposing team come out and guard you.
Interestingly enough, we were talking a little bit before this, but UC Irvine played us, they had German center, right? Like really good player and we’ve lost our starting center during the course of a year who wasn’t a great shooter. They play off x five, right? And it’s awesome. It took away a bunch of our cuts. It took away a lot of our drives. And we had this younger guy for us, a kid named Colin Mulholland, who’s a good shooter. He comes out and hits his first two shots and you know, Chattanooga Mocs fans are going crazy. And then this is like nine in a row. Well, you know, I’m all for doubling that one, but we’re coming over to timeouts and it’s like after the six minutes of this, I can’t believe they’re playing off them. And we’re like, should we change it and like do something different or check somebody else? And we’re just like double down and he’s teeing off. So I’ve reminded him multiple times. I said to him, do you know how many threes? This is one of our backup things that was thrust into like a starting role. And he’s a really good player and other, but I’m like, do you know how many threes you took in the championship game? And he’s like smiling.
Dan Earl 25:06
He’s like, yeah, 16. I’m like, no, no, no. 17 threes kind of remind him like, you know, many staffs in America would allow you to take 17 threes. He’s like, not many. I’m like, no, no, no. One this, you know, I’m teasing there a little bit, but yeah. So if you have the ability to have somebody shoot threes, do what you do. Go down, swinging and shooting. If he’s not a shooter, you know, some of the D H O’s amongst other things to try to get them to play, you know, away from the rim when they’re playing so far off.
Dan 25:37
If I remember correctly, I think you did hit a pretty big three down the stretch too of that game.
Dan Earl 25:40
He hit a huge one. I was super proud of him. You know, he missed a game winner. I’m a tough one or guy, so hopefully he doesn’t listen to this, but he missed a game winner regulation, I believe. But then he came back in overtime and hit a huge shot with 47 seconds left or something. It was great.
Pat 25:55
With the ball screen, how much you talked about your center randomizing their role versus pop decisions?
Dan Earl 26:00
Yeah, so back to what you guys are very into, obviously, but you’ve got to put yourself in the head of the player and know what they want. This has come up a couple of different times in the conversation, but is he a dive post or trail put, right? Well, if you let a kid, he’ll trail, especially if he’s a skilled guy or he thinks he’s slow, buy into that role and just be trailing the play the whole game. You got to like make him run.
When we’re recruiting, we’re often getting skilled guys, right? And I mentioned Jake Steven, Colin Mulholland, who’s the young man that I just referred to a redhead, et cetera, that took 17 threes. If we let them, he would pop a hundred times out of a hundred times because he can shoot right now. He’s not the most physical guy. Hey, that’s a little more work to run down to that block and get the ball. And then how efficient am I going to be down there? Although he’s getting much better at it. And then by the way, if I don’t get it now, I got to run back out here and like, let me just hang out out here. So again, in an ideal world, we allow them to do what they read, right? If teams are switching, we make them dive a heck of a lot more, but we just talk to them about like, Hey, what makes sense? You can’t pop all game and we’ll have some guys that are 80, 20 guys pop. Like you have the freedom to do that quite a bit. Other guys that can’t shoot. They’re also tired or lazy or don’t want, you know, there’ll be 20% pop 80% dot and just be truthful. You can’t shoot and make this shot. Let’s put pressure on that rim. So it goes into their roles, their ability levels, selling them on what they could be good at and, or what our offense, you know, could be good at. And then as they build confidence as a ball player, the young man, Jake Stevens, again, if teams switched against him, and I know we didn’t go over that, but he would dive and then he was really good at like holding off a smaller player that’s going to front them and whatever, throwing it in and playing slow in the post and then making them play. And then when they see success, Oh, wow, I can do something like this. And then if a team has to double, he could throw the ball out. So as guys get better, they buy in more to changing that ratio of pop versus dive.
Dan 28:09
Coach, this has been awesome so far. We probably need to stop ourselves, Pat and I, because we could keep going on this conversation with you and have a three hour podcast, but we do want to transition now to a segment on the show we call start, sub, or sit.
We’re going to give you three options around a topic, ask you to start one of them, sub one of them, sit one of them, and then we’ll dive in to your answers from there. So, Coach, if you’re all set, we’ll dive into this first one. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. This first one, the theme of it is stats that matter. And we’re going to specifically look at assist stats that matter to you and your start here would be the assist stat that you deem most important for you and your program, but start, sub, or sit. The first option is the assist to turnover ratio. The second option is the number of assists per game. The third option is assist percentage. How many of your made baskets percentage wise were assisted baskets? So start, sub, sit, assist turnover ratio, assist per game, or assist percentage.
Dan Earl 29:13
Yeah, that’s a great question. I love assists in general, so they all matter. You know, I might say assist the turnover ratio from a, especially as an individual standpoint. I think, again, it all comes down to decision-making that I would start, right? So assist the turnover ratio, assist percentage, right? And then assist per game. So I would assist per game reluctantly, and then that would lead to sub-assist percentage, you know? So assist the turnover ratio, I would say most important, again, because the game comes down to decision-making, and oftentimes that just tells you, especially when you’re recruiting an individual or whatever, like they’re a good decision-maker, right?
They take care of the ball, they don’t try to do too much or be somebody they’re not, and they’re making good decisions overall, you know? So the assist per game while the ball is moving, it shows that the ball is moving, and you’re an unselfish team as well, and you’re trying to make the right play, you know, because I could argue any of them or whatever, but not as important to me as the assist percentage, the amount of baskets that you’re scoring off an assist. We want to create easy baskets. If you have a high percentage of your shots are coming off assist, that matters to me, right? So you’re getting in lane, you’re dumping off to a big, and you’re highly efficient with making that, you know, two-point dunk or layup or what have you, or you’re kicking out and getting in highly efficient step-in threes. I like that stat, you know, certainly from a team perspective as well. So I’ve listened to your podcast before, and some of these things are hard. I notice you guys haven’t asked me any defensive questions either so that it hurt my feelings with this. There’s more show left. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stay away from that. So, you know, which I really like that you do this, I’ve listened to a bunch of podcasts, but it would lead you to believe that, yeah, he doesn’t care about, I forget what I even said, but assist per game, like, it doesn’t matter to him, you know, so which is not the case, you know, so.
Dan 31:11
Sure, absolutely.
And the interesting thing about what you just mentioned, which I wanted to dive in a little bit deeper on, the assist percentage, which is your sub, is as that stat relates to shot selection, and so how you use that to discuss with your team the shots we want versus don’t want, what this offense we talked about in the first half of the podcast should generate, and the connection, I guess, between those two, and how much you really talk to your team about the types of shots you should be getting, say, 90% of the game.
Dan Earl 31:40
There’s an art to that, and I know a lot of people have spoken about it, but we do the shot ranking system, you know, I’m sure you guys, but like, you know, five to zero, you know, zero and one being turnovers live ball or dead ball fives being, you know, catch and shoot open threes or easy layups, free throws in there, you know, contested to being a to one of the worst shots. So we do it, but it’s always a question of, yeah, how much do you present to your team, because you’ll get some kids that really listen and buy in or trying to do the right thing or whatever.
Right. And if you’re, in my opinion, inundating them with like, look, I got the ball within live play and I’m on the wing. And I have a, you know, what I think is a really good pull up two point shot. We want certain guys, especially, but anybody like just play within the flow of the game. You can’t be like, wait, coach told me that that’s only a two and we’re striving for. Right. But we definitely bring it up to them and they know what it is so that in general, you’re trying to get those good shots. Right. So coming back to the assist percentage and how that flows and we give them a broad understanding of what we’re trying to do and the efficiency points per possession. And we’ll do one, two, three sit downs at the beginning of the year as we’re putting in offense and watching film and explaining it to them. But it’s not usually, you know, sharping on it and coming back to it all the time. It’s more generalization of like, hey, fellas, you understand we’re trying to get highly efficient shots. You understand what those are talking about points for possession. Do you understand the fact of being unselfish or you driving, drawing to and trying to take a step back to being, you know, extreme is way less efficient to where if you can snap that ball to an open shooter or one more. Now that ball has a chance of going in at a super high rate. Yes, we discuss it good amount, but we don’t crush the guys with it. It’s more the overall concept.
Dan 33:39
Coach, if I can, follow up with a defensive question for you now.
Dan Earl 33:43
Yeah, you weren’t going to do this and then I put pressure on you, right?
Dan 33:46
This is why we pivot on the show sometimes. I do want to ask so defensively, when you’re facing a team that has an offense like yours or is a high assist team and you’re facing those teams, I guess defensively, how do you think about knowing that you go against us every day in practice and it’s something that is hard to guard obviously from the offensive side, how you think then defensively what bogs it down or what you hope to bog down from the other side of the ball?
Dan Earl 34:12
It depends on the personnel of your team, obviously being physical with cutters, playing in front of them, chucking cutters, which comes down to a, obviously the game’s officiated, you know, certain times, you know what I mean? But really hitting our cutters, staying in our path, that hurts us at times. Switching things, depending on our personnel, will hurt at times, especially if you’re going through the process of having, again, we talked about this quite a bit, but a five man that can’t do both at a high level right now, right? So he can’t roll into the block and just throw it to him and get a bucket or create a double team. He’s a little bit weaker or what have you. So that at times will bother us.
You know, there’s a variety of different things. Now, the other thing that’s tough about switching, as we get better, we can roll a guy in the post or you have the mismatch on the perimeter. And I put that in quotes because that’s always for us coming back offensively talking about it, but difficult because you get a young guy comes off a ball screen, they switch, there’s a guard on X5. You don’t want to stop everything and be milking that mismatch or, as you know, everybody clear out one for, you know, being extreme again, you know, and this guy’s going to go to work.
I was listening to Coach Van Gundy about guy’s bag and when I was cracking up laughing, you know, a little bit younger, but I’m an old soul with the way I view the game. I was loving that. But we don’t want a guy dribbling around 14 times and then taking a shot. It just stops the offense. So teaching them that as well, if a team switches, you know, there’s an art to like, yeah, trying to attack that guy or if you have something quick, have we ever talked about boomerang and a snap it, snap it back and go, yes, but more often we want to keep that ball moving and you’ll find the mismatch or the good offense inevitably. So those are some things defensively that might hurt us that we try to do when we’re playing a similar style offense that we run.
But you see, I turned it back into offense anyway. I like that.
Pat 36:09
My follow-up is in looking at what you talked about with shot quality or, you know, charting the shots, the assists, the role decision-making plays in it. And so how you think about practice structure or building a practice environment to what these players need to become better decision-makers. You know, I guess my question is more outside of, of course, dedicating five-on-five time, but how you can think about other segments of your practice or development to help your players become better decision-makers.
Dan Earl 36:40
it’s hard because a lot of drills you do, it’s so contrived, do you know what I mean? So it’s not out of the flow of offense and five on five or what have you, we’ll do some disadvantage drills, you know, some passing drills where you’re at a disadvantage or advantage and having guys get open, which is a big part of it.
But just the ability to see matters to me. It’s more just reps five on five and explaining a decent amount of film work, showing them on film, pointing it out in the flow of the game. And then if you’re a young man that can, it makes sense. We talk to our guys about asking questions constantly, if you don’t understand something, but, you know, trying to point those things out, we’re constantly talking about decision-making. I wish I had a drill that was just like, Oh yeah, this tremendously helps with decision-making, you know? So again, we do do some things where just keep away drill where you have a either disadvantage or advantage side. And even when I’m teaching camp, we had a bunch of campers out here or whatever, but, you know, you have on the extreme levels, you’re dealing with, you know, fourth graders on the floor, you know, and one guy’s dribbling around 15 times. The other kid is jumping up and down past me in the past. Well, there’s a guy right between them, right? So it’s both the guy seeing, but the receiver of the past, like you can’t stand monkey in the middle with the kid, like get to an angle to be able to receive that ball. Again, such simple stuff, but some guys don’t understand, right? So get that window for a passing angle as the receiver. So we’ll do some things, press drills, passing drills, where we try to get in that situation and just stop at different times and say, look, are you trying to be a good teammate? Your guy’s being harassed, double teamed, and you’re standing monkey in the middle or you’re standing next to your teammate and one guy’s guarding too. Like, what are you doing kid? You know? And over time, again, I think they start to figure those things out, but it amazes me that in some of these drills we do, as you know, like somebody passes me the ball back to that field thing. So we’re trying to mimic that, but some guys catch the ball, turn and now they’re evaluating and they’re like, oh, that guy’s open. I think I’ll throw. And by that time he’s covered up. Other guys can just go like that. You know what I mean? Like, how did you not, you can’t take your eye off the ball, but like, just see that, like, that’s the next pass in line. We try to mimic some of those things, but a lot of it is just out of playing.
Pat 39:02
He also mentioned the value place on pivoting with teaching pivoting. And I mean, more so than I think the pivoting, I would imagine helps with limiting your turnovers, trying to decrease turnovers is pivoting so much that you’re just going to give these guys repetitions like the menu of pivots or how you think about teaching pivots in just a live setting. And again, maybe it’s just seeing vision, seeing space and knowing using the footwork you have available to get to that space, to find that pass, work with your teammates versus here’s a forward pivot, here’s a reverse pivot, and you just give them the menu.
Dan Earl 39:32
So we give them a little bit of a menu back to being old school a little bit. I’ve done this a couple of times, I apologize, but post moves, we’re teaching post moves, right? I just believe in having the basics and being really good at that, and you can be affected, right? So it’s like, hey, middle hook, maybe drop step, go the other way, and then add a shot fake kit, you know, we’re not doing a ton of up and unders and step slides, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But in my world, you come back to pivot, those are pretty darn advanced moves, you know what I mean?
Now, you are really good post score, and you can score and you want to add something to your game as you get really good. Hey, that’s fine, but I don’t want to see our assistants are working on ball screen, just come off and know how to pivot and throw it back, or maybe a hook path, but we’re not splitting it and coming off and Euro stepping and doing all, you know, my assistant’s gonna be mad at me because like some player is going to be like, oh, coach is so plain Jane and all this stuff, whatever. So pivoting. So it’s more just playing off two. And we’ll introduce a certain amount, you know, reverse pivot, you drive the lane, and you maybe shot fake and front pivot and snap the ball. But to me, it’s more about balance and your, you know, for lack of better terms, give a damn level, you know what I mean? So we’ll do again, the most simple, a four lines on the baseline, and dribble out to the free throw line that everybody does with their campers and turn and pivot and then like fake a post entry pass and then take over the top and pretend there’s a defender. And when they first get here, you know, you got nine guys, and some of them are good kids, some are not sure they’re reading the room, you know, but six of them are like, what the and they go out and they don’t do, you know, so it doesn’t care. And then you just ask him like, hey, are you trying to be good? Are you bought into what we’re saying, whatever, and like, you can see, you know, I’ll often stop drills and go, yo, hey, who’s the best pivoter on the team? And I go, you know, what are you talking? I’m like, and then they’ll watch each other a little bit. And they’re like, Oh, yeah, that guy, I’m like, yeah, why? And they’re like, Yeah, because he was down in a state, you know, it’s still boring to him. But I’m like, Yeah, because he cares, because he’s pivoting balanced, and he’s faking that pass, and he’s snapping the ball in. So it’s trying to get them to buy into that more than absolutely teaching all these types of pivots, right? Just be bought into the core thing of playing off to pivoting of caring, much like the cuts, right? It’s not all an exact science. It’s just do you care kid? And do you believe us in that it’s important?
Pat 43:06
All right, coach, the last start sub sit we have for you, we call this late game conundrums kind of you’re damned if you do damned if you don’t. So we’re going to give you three scenarios. And the start would be the one you’re still perplexed on that you still don’t have a hard set rule. So option one is it if you’re on defense, putting a defender on or off the ball in a full court situation, if your opponent has to go full court, whether to put it on the ball or keep them off.
Dan Earl 43:39
So that’s my start, no matter what.
Pat 43:45
option two would be fouling up three whether to do it whether to play it out and then scenario or option number three is offensively knowing when to go for a three versus when to try to play the long game and get a two and foul again
Dan Earl 44:04
start is the most perplexed, right? So just because it happened to us late in the season with UC Irvine, and we go round and round with our staff, whether we go on or off the ball. I’ve talked about this a little bit other times, but I think the Christian Leitner situation from years ago, Grand Hill thrown to Christian Leitner, I think they were, I got to think even now, but off the ball. And then people, years are like, well, you got to put a guy on the ball, of course, you know, so I don’t know what you do. We’ve done both. We’ve lucked out in some wins. Neither of them worked. So that continues to perplex me. I don’t know if I have an answer. So I’d probably sit fouling up three. I say that and it’s not like you would think if I put that in third, that I absolutely foul up three or don’t write and I don’t write. So our default is we do foul up three.
So if we’re in that situation, there’s no timeout. Our guys know that we’re fouling up three with six seconds or less, you know, so you back, you know, kind of rolling into the other one, right? You don’t want to foul up through 17 seconds. That whole thing amazes me though, because you know, you’ll talk about it and we go over situations and then in practice or in games, like somebody will throw the ball in and the balls 80 feet from the basket and our guy goes up and fouls them. And you’re like, well, why don’t you take more time off the clock? I mean, fascinating this whole industry of coaching. So our default is foul up three. They know that, but I’ve been in games where that’s our strategy. And I’ve asked the team number one at times. And I’ve also said, okay, look, they got some really big guys and our starting center is out and I’m worried about an offensive rebound on the free throw line. So we’re just going to play it out. Right? So, but I would, for some reason, I think I just said sit that and then going for three or two is always an interesting dynamic. At what time do you do that? I might flip those two, but we’re never bashful about taking a three, but Hey, how much time’s on it to where if you miss that or, you know, you can make a quick to cut it to one or what have you, whatever the scenario is, and then you got a foul, they go to shoot free throws. Do they go back up to, you know, the whole thing? I’m not necessarily sure when to do that. We will always take a three, but if there’s enough time, we’ll go try to get an easy bucket. And what does enough time mean? I don’t know. You’re talking back to that. Probably the opposite of the found, you know, six or more seven, eight, nine sec at times we might take it too, but we’re usually running a play to get a good three point look. And if that doesn’t happen, Hey, just drive it down there and take a quick two.
Pat 46:36
Obviously all very tough situations. I’d like to follow up with your start, the on versus off the ball decision. When you’re referencing the foul up three, you said you know maybe the default is you always do it except in certain situations and so in the past when you’ve looked at that on versus off decision, is it really just a gut for you in that moment or are there key factors or how the game has progressed up into this point that will influence if you’re gonna go on or off the ball. you
Dan Earl 47:06
I’m more playing off the ball is my instinct, have another defender there because I kind of can’t understand how if you have an extra defender down the court, they can’t intercept the pass, you know what I mean? With one extra guy down there, right? Now you then watch basketball and like somebody’s on the ball and he deflects a pass and they win because the ball bounces around the free throw line, time runs out and it’s like, of course you put them on. So you go round and round.
My staff has seemed to be a little bit more on the ball, maybe for that reason, or you can’t get a good pass. I think that the guy can back up enough that you’re not, if he fakes or whatever, can you run the baseline? That might factor in. Certainly we’re talking, you know, distance of the court. So there are different factors, but I think you can get enough distance. You should be able to throw that pass. I’d rather have the defender deep. Now, this is part of the reason why I’m still perplexed because when you have those defenders deep, I think there is a sub.
So I’m arguing against myself now. There’s a subconscious, it happened against UC Irvine, right? And there’s a subconscious, like if I go for this ball and foul the guy, so you, maybe you shy away a little bit, right? And don’t go to receive that ball or whatever. So you’re up one and they throw the distance and you take out the guy’s legs, jumping for a ball or hit him, they call a foul. Now they’re on the line to, you could potentially lose, you know? So I’m arguing against myself again, but there are different factors. We against UC Irvine, and I think we had talked about it a little bit, whatever, but elected in that game to play on the ball. They threw it 75 feet, get a catch, perfect pass. The kid makes another pass and they ended up missing a little flipper layup, which I feel bad for the young man.
It’s a tougher shot than you think. When the score is running out, it was like 2.4 seconds by the time they caught 0.5, whatever. And he missed the flipper. We were lucky to win. Long story short, I don’t know what we’re doing. By the way, we’re in the game and we call a timeout to set our defense. It’s like, we’re going to go on or off the ball. And it’s like, you know, 29, 28, 27, you got to make a decision like that.
Pat 49:07
If the role was reversed and your team was coming out on offense with the ball, I guess if you saw them on versus off the ball, how would that make you feel if you were on offense?
Dan Earl 49:17
Yeah, I think going back to so I should just stick with my guns, but I would probably prefer them be on the ball, which would then tell you defensively, yeah, I should stick to my guns and just play off the ball. Again, can the guy run, you know, then I definitely want him on the ball. And you know, there’s so many factors. But are you trying to throw the ball deep? So UC Irvine had 2.4 seconds, right? So it’s not obviously that they’re going to throw it deep. I might try to, in some ways, you got a better chance to catch the ball at half court on the move or whatever, and take one or two dribbles and launch something rather than getting that catch deep. I say all that Irvine was unbelievable, threw it deep, got the catch, it worked out perfectly for them, they ended up missing the shot. But back to the fouling thing, we were thinking about, hey, subbing in a big to have a bigger guy in this big German center, like seven foot guy, whatever. And we’re going to have one of our other guys in, but I was worried about fouling that guy. So we kept a shorter guy on him. And I literally before the time I’m like, what are the chances they throw at 75 feet and throw it over the head of our smartest player, this kid, Garrison Kiesler, and sure enough, it happens. And therefore, that’s why I was like, just basketball so crazy.
Dan 50:27
A similar situation happened to us this year, off the ball, kid hit her buzzer beater, doubling off the ball on their best player, he still got the catch and made a running bank shot three. So where did he catch on the floor? Yeah, so this could be my question is, and the question with our staff after the game was, if we’re going to be off the ball, where should we put that guy off the ball? So that if he does get the catch, you can plug or corral him, make him change direction. There was about four seconds. So the kid had time to verge a couple dribbles. I think the time factor that you mentioned is a big part of this, whether they have to chuck it and do a quick shot versus they could get in the back court and maybe speed up the court a little bit with the guard. So we tried to kind of bracket the kid, one in front, one behind, not let him catch it. He still caught it and got the shot off. But the consideration of where that plug guy is, if he is going to be off the ball, is he deep? Is he at half court? Is he three quarter court? Is he at half court? Is he at half court?
Dan Earl 51:20
So again, coming back to the time situation, if I think they’re going to throw more on the move to half court ish or short of half court, my gut is I would do what you did is try to bracket or double that guy that you think is going to get it and have him play on the defensive side of anybody that’s going to get it, you know, like maybe try to deny with the guy playing him, playing the best player or whatever, and then play on the defensive side and be like a free safety or what have you, you know, if there’s one point one left on the clock or something, you think, hey, they really got to throw the ball deep or less, then I’m putting them deeper, some of that, you know, around the top of the key or what have you, so that he same concept, he can be a defensive back or free safety and make a play on the ball. So some of it where I think they’re going to throw it, but I’ve seen, you know, you talk about four seconds.
So I work for Ed DiCelis at the Naval Academy in Penn State, but we used to run somewhere, hey, you throw it in and then much like a sideline out of bounds, right? The guy taking it out is sometimes dangerous, right? So we’ve been throw it in full speed and throw it in and get that guy running and flip it back to that guy. Now he’s on the move, you know, four seconds is getting tight, but you could take two dribbles, three by the time he gets it back and then launch something and get something decent off. Again, don’t know that I answered your question. I would play him, you know, somewhat as a free safety, probably in that situation, corralling or pinching one of the better players you think might get it.
Dan 52:46
More of a philosophical question. When you come across situations like this with you and your staff, what’s the thought process and the flow of do we need different personnel decisions versus scheme decisions versus teaching decisions? This is what we’re doing it well, we just need to teach it better. Or we need to make sure we have better personnel or we need to scheme this better. I guess when you come across these interesting coaching decisions, what’s the flow with you and your staff to think through the hopefully best thing to win.
Dan Earl 53:18
Yeah, great question. I wish there was a better answer than all of the above, right? Like we’re from the scheme standpoint, we’re trying to constantly like at this time of year where there’s a little downtime, quote unquote, we’re picking up those plays and going over them and talking about them. And what we would do is to scheme it differently. Or hey, if we get in this situation, again, this is what we should do. Obviously, the teaching is a big point. And we go over situations a lot in practice, oftentimes in practice, will allow the players to coach themselves. So we won’t even coach them, see what happens and then talk about it afterwards.
But as you know, there’s so many different variables, we just went over something and we’re doing it quick or whatever. But hey, length of the floor four seconds is different than two and a half seconds. And then what personnel do they have? UC Irvine had a really big kid. So the likelihood of them throwing it deep probably goes up a little bit more than some other teams. So all these variables, you just want to, you know, coming back to personnel and a little teaching, you want the guys to be thinking the game as well. And you want unlike, like we play a lot of five on five so that the guys see things over and over and are thinking the game. So the more situations we can have, the higher IQ guys we can have, the more explanation we can have, I think the better. But you know, when you’re around this game, well, you’ve seen it all. In fact, I think before I was at Penn State, but they had a situation, I think they’re down one length of the floor. There might be seven seconds left. They being, I think it was Georgetown, Penn State was playing, I’m going off in a tent, but they roll the ball in. Well, the Penn State defender, it was right before I was there, goes to like dive on the ball and takes out the legs of the Georgetown guy. So now no time comes off the clock and he’s shooting again to win. So guys will do crazy things at different times. You just want to make sure they’re thinking the game as much as possible. And you put them in as many decision making situations as possible.
Dan 55:13
Well, coach, you’re off the start, sub, or sit hot seat. That was a ton of fun. We could keep going on those forever. So thanks for playing that game with us. We’ve got a final question to close the show. Before we do, congrats again on the great year last year. Best of luck to you all this year. Can’t wait to watch your team play. And thanks for giving us such a great interview today. This was awesome.
Dan Earl 55:30
No, I appreciate you guys. Again, I listen often and you guys do a heck of a job and much like other pocket, you know, the start subset, I’ve heard that before. And that’s what you guys do. Right? So I’m not telling you, you know, but you’re at a tough job and but you have to do something different or whatever, you know, so you guys do an unbelievable job and I’m sure a lot of people know you, but other people might be like, Oh, are those the guys that do the start subset? You know, there’s something to it. No, so hard for us users. So appreciate you guys.
Dan 55:56
Thank you, Coach. 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?
Dan Earl 56:05
I think just relationships across the board, you know, whether that’s relationships with players, certainly you want to see them go on to be successful young men in life and whatever they’re going to do, whether it’s coaching, whether it’s a business world, family men, the relationships you have, I think are such a big part of this whole thing. We’re all competitors. We all like the winning and losing or talking X’s and O’s, which we just did. But to be around good people matters.
My former coaches that I played for, you take a little bit from everybody, right? And you watch them. Not unlike parents, they’re watching what you’re doing and how you’re running your program. So the relationships with the players, seeing them get married, seeing them have jobs, my assistant coaches as well, you want the same for them. And, you know, my former boss, I still reach out to all the time looking for advice, you know, administration, donors, like it’s the relationships that you form throughout that I think really make a difference in this game of basketball.
Dan 57:06
Okay, Pat, one of those pods where, uh, man, could have just talked for another couple hours on all things and what a great guy, a terrific coach, obviously had heck of year last year. And I know they’re ramping up for this year, but that was a fun one today.
Pat 57:19
Yeah, I loved all the buckets we hit on today and to your point, I don’t know if we came out any closer to a decision on or off the ball, but it was one of the more enjoyable conversations we’ve had of the year so far. So I’ll let you kick it off this recap, Dan, with the first takeaway.
Dan 57:37
So the first bucket with randomizing through your five man was just complete kind of master class on how he thinks about using that five man and I think That there’s probably a lot of coaches listening right now who have run Princeton esque offense where it’s not maybe Straight Princeton but has a lot of those elements and certainly watching Chattanooga play I mean, they certainly have those Princeton elements and then you know Find their flow and their their uniqueness from that and so I think a lot of people will probably listen and really enjoy hearing His thoughts on how to utilize that five man and it’s a fun offense to teach and to play But sometimes it comes with more questions and answers when you really start letting them play and flow and randomize And I think that was what I guess I’ll get to my main point or takeaway is it’s fun But it’s difficult to coach this you’ve got to have a little bit of an ability to give up some control and then also let them flow and play and give them answers to All these random situations that can happen So as much fun as it is on a podcast to say let’s run the five out Let’s have the five men be here and then here you start putting this stuff in and your team’s gonna have a million questions on How do we get back to spacing? How do we re-trigger? What do we do here? What do we do there and there is that figuring out process and I think it’s very team specific Of course, like he mentioned he had a great pick and pop big and they can pass and I enjoy hearing that because I think that’s the Nuance that’s needed when thinking about this stuff. So I think that it’s not lost on me how Unbelievably difficult it is to teach a team to play this way and they were so good last year so efficient Like you look at their numbers. It’s like geez, they were fun to watch
Pat 59:21
Holding off of your first point, we’ve had a lot of conversations lately with Cal Poly slow and coach DeGeorge on four out kind of randomized offense. We had a round table discussion on randomized screening. And then now today with coach Earl on randomizing the five man and coach Earl spoke excellent on it. And of course, like I was fighting the urge to, when you hear a randomization, then you just want to like pepper him like, okay, what if he’s the year? What if the five man’s there? And a bunch of like, what ifs, but to your point and to coach Earl’s point, the commitment to teaching this is that you got to play a lot of five on five. So these situations are organically happening because you can’t dictate. Otherwise it goes against what random is. Yeah, I mean, of course you help them up but you can put them in the situations, but it’s the commitment to play five on five. And then it’s also the commitment to coach. And I wish maybe this was an early miss just to follow up when he started to go towards this, your willingness to concede that it’s going to be probably super ugly in the first two weeks. You got to let guys play through it. You got to let them kind of sit in this. So ultimately get the growth, the development to where the offense truly can be random. And like you said, they can start to get familiar with or we know we can always get to these actions. To your point,
Dan 01:00:34
To your point about letting them play. I mean, I really loved how he said they really emphasize they want them to throw the back door cut early in the season to get used to the guys cutting one because if you don’t ever throw that pass and you’re getting on your guys to set up cuts and go back door and you never throw it, they’re going to stop cutting as hard. And then if you never try to throw it, you’ll never know if that guy can actually make the pass or the timing of it. That’s going to be ugly early.
It’s going to be turnover city the first week or two of practice when you have these big guys trying to make backdoor passes early and you got to live with that. So I liked hearing him talk about that because I think that’s an important point when you were going to try to really flow through this stuff. I also liked, now we talked about the five man, but then also the randomizing of the screening action. And I think my follow up about flares versus zooms and pins and all that because just a personal question for me of, Hey, we want to randomize this a little bit more teams are like he mentioned later in the show when teams are kind of point switching or zoning up those zoom actions and all of a sudden all your nice cuts are kind of being taken away. One of the nice things to do is now let’s flare it on the backside. Let’s flare slip. And you know, how do you just get to a point where guys are doing that naturally versus you need to call it.
Pat 01:01:47
But yeah, I think the other thing that comes out through the coaches we’ve had the opportunity to talk to about playing random is the heavy emphasis on a role clarification. Now it’s not from like day one, you know, the guys know their role and then they know what they should be doing with interactions with other players. But I think that’s the heavy emphasis on just working on that role clarification being clear and you know what you’re going to ask of each player goes a long way.
And then, you know, how they kind of keep the offense flowing, get the different screening action. He had a great example of the best shooter being involved in an action, but it can go both ways where you would think, okay, we always screen for him versus though if he’s the screen or the threat and he talked about, you know, maybe those that aren’t so self explanatory just the way you want the better shooter to screen becomes the play call.
Dan 01:02:29
Going back, we had a film room session with now St. Louis head coach Josh Shirts at the time. He was Indiana State and there’s a lot of similarities between that offense and Coach Earls today and kind of how they run through their stuff. Coach Shirts talked about the role clarification within the split cuts and who are you, who are you screening for. And that’s where it really gets good where you can randomize stuff based off role clarification. So, really good stuff there.
Pat, we could over talk the first bucket to death because of how much there was in there, but let’s move on to point number two and for that I will kick it back to you.
Pat 01:03:05
Yeah, so point number two, I’m gonna go to our last start subset, my start subset on the late game conundrums. And basically just walk away with how stupid this game is at times and just that speaking of randomness, the randomness of it of why things work and don’t work and where you’ve been scarred in the past and how you dictate what you do in the future.
Yes. But was just like a fun coaching conversation on these are the situations, the gut versus the feel versus time and how one second here or there can influence if you’re gonna have a guy on the ball or off the ball, or as I said, if they can run the baseline or not. And never is one right decision in these three scenarios we gave. You can win with all of them, you can lose with all of them. But was fun to just kind of get in the head of coach Earl and his staff as we kept referencing the UCI game. And you know what the considerations, I thought you asked like two great follow-ups on, okay, if you’re gonna go off the ball, like what to do with them. And then also like the sliding scale of when you kind of recap or look back, is it personnel decisions? Is it scheme decisions? Or is it, we gotta teach it better, technique decisions there. So tremendous insight all around on what keeps us up at night. What am I willing to get beat with? Yeah. I think it’s almost how you have to approach it.
Dan 01:04:19
As you mentioned, whether or not we get to a definitive answer, I think is besides the point of the… What was interesting about the conversation is the questions I think that… I think the conversation we had is probably a similar conversation that a staff is having amongst themselves and you got to go back to your own personnel. And then I do think a lot of the on-off stuff, of course, there’s a preference based off of, did you get burned in the past or do we still have Christian Leitner in our head? You hear someone say, always put someone on the ball, but I think that you might have that base, but then I think it was worth discussing. We talked a little bit about, well, how much time is left? How much are you up or down? What’s the personnel of the other team? This isn’t like a black or white decision all the time. Like he mentioned, maybe another team, they would have had someone on the ball if they didn’t have a seven footer that they kind of knew they’re probably going to get a catch because that guy’s… They don’t have anybody that can jump with him to get the catch. And so they wanted to have more coverage. They also only had 2.4 seconds. So they’re probably not going to throw it in the back court. So those are the considerations I think that were fun to kind of go through. And I think it was Josh Loeffler on the show. The second time he was on, we were talking late game stuff and you can’t do it all. You can’t practice every single thing, but can you discuss enough of these things to where you have an approximate answer? So when this does hit, and we talked a little bit after with coach Earl, it does hit and you’ve got a 30 second time out and you’ve got two assistant coaches, one saying on, one saying off, you’ve got to make that pressure decision. You at least have talked about something similar beforehand so that you can hopefully sleep at night based off how it goes, good or bad.
Pat 01:05:58
I have to imagine too, as we were going through it, it’s probably one of the rare times where it’s probably better we have a 30 second timeout because it forces us to make a decision because any longer, you’re just going to start contradicting yourself on what you should do.
Dan 01:06:12
Yeah. And we got to remember too, you’re under pressure to make a call here and you don’t really know how it’s going to turn out. You just got to make the best decision on what you think. But you forget too, our players also panic too a little bit in these situations. Like how many times have in a late game, we just think they’re going to do exactly what we said and drop on the whiteboard. And then all of a sudden they go out there in the last four seconds and somebody just blows a coverage because there’s pressure on them too. That’s part of this unpredictability as well.
Pat 01:06:39
Well, yeah, coach really mentioned you put the big off the ball or you put someone off the ball and then they dive at someone’s legs trying to intercept it and no times run off and now they’re shooting free throws to win the game.
Dan 01:06:50
crazy stuff under pressure. So there’s that element to all this too. And, you know, you put thousands of people in the stands and 20 year olds on the court, like it’s not gonna just be exactly how you drew it up.
Pat 01:07:02
Yeah, and you know, you’re never going to be able to replicate these situations one to one. But I think there is something to be said about what he mentioned. They go through these late game situations and practice and like empowering the players to try to just talk through situations. And then the coach is really only coming in to recap and ask questions about their decisions, but putting them in where they have to make the decision to decide what to do. Dan. All right. Well, another conversation that we’ll continue to have, but we’ll keep it moving here. I’ll throw it back to you for the last takeaway.
Dan 01:07:31
Yeah, well, I’ll go to the stats that matter and another interesting insight into Coach Earl’s head space today. And his sub was of a lot of interest to me, the assist percentage. And he talked about they had a really high assist percentage last year. We looked up something like it was in the 60s, 60% of their made baskets were assisted, which is incredibly high amount. And as related to shot selection and the chemistry of your team, I think you asked some good follow-ups about what you talk about to them and how that relates to everything. And I do think there’s probably a very high correlation between that stat, like your assist percentage and offensive efficiency. And so how do you get to it sounds nice, but how do you get to it? And of course, in that first bucket, you heard all the different variations of things that they do and why it’s so important to them. So I just like talking about that and why it’s so important and kind of getting under the hood to where, okay, we talked a lot of like actions and things like that in the first bucket. And then this was a little bit of like stats to back up why those actions work.
Pat 01:08:38
Yeah, I liked your follow-up question when we briefly hit on the defense. But I was thinking the same thing. It’s always fun to look at it from a different angle. So if these are the stats that matter, how do you think about taking away these stats or making it harder for a team to live off of assists and generate offense through their assists, which are usually yielding high efficient field goals. So I liked your follow-up there. The one takeaway I enjoyed at the end of the start subs that when we got into the conversation just about pivots, he had mentioned too, the emphasis they place on pivots and the information coach was nice enough to share with us before he talked about really valuing pivots. And I thought his point was really well taken that yes, you know, they do the line drills, they talk about it. They don’t try to over-complicate it. Just keep it simple. He talked to about the post-finishing, but the biggest component is getting the guys to care and who are the best pivoters. It’s not like who’s your best athlete or most gifted. It’s the guy who just cares the most and just wants to protect the ball, wants to, you know, help his teammates out.
Dan 01:09:38
Yeah. I liked that part of the conversation when he kind of joked about a little bit of his old school mentality. And it reminded me, we had a great conversation on pivoting and turnovers with Nazareth head coach Kevin Broderick and their attention to detail in everything they do to playing off of two and pivoting and not turning the ball over. And coach Broderick even joked in our podcast about it’s not the sexiest thing that their guys want to do, which is every day work on the pivoting, but you know what? They’ve led lowest turnovers a couple of years in a row in NCAA division three. So you have that stat in your back pocket that’s going to keep you in every game and things like that. And so the coach’s point here today, that stuff really does matter. And how do you make your players care when you’re doing pivoting drills for every day of practice is of course the challenge too.
Pat 01:10:29
Yeah.
Dan 01:10:30
It’s the art.
Pat 01:10:30
I wouldn’t suggest just walking in the gym day one and just telling your players how much we’re going to care about pivoting and then not practice it, you know? But yeah, so you got to model the behavior in the sense that, yeah, you’ve got to, you know, take time and we’re going to do some line drills and we’re not idiots. We know it’s not the player’s favorite drill, but again, it’s just, hey, this matters to us. And that’s like, I think the key takeaway from these drills is that just demonstrating that it matters and we’re going to value the guys that care about it.
Dan 01:10:57
Yeah, we had Radford head coach Zach Chuon recently and he talked about the benefit of playing off of two. And I think also on top of that, that’s where the analytics and the data can be your friend where it can back up. Listen, when you play off two in these areas of the floor, look at how efficient our offense is, look at how much less you turn it over. So that’s where the data is good to kind of tell the story and help give evidence to the things that a player doesn’t love. You never walk into an open gym in the summertime and see a bunch of guys pivoting as they warm up to get a run in. You just don’t. Trying to get better for next season. Yeah. And if there is a guy doing that, you should pick them or maybe not.
Pat 01:11:39
I don’t know. He definitely has high socks on.
Dan 01:11:43
No doubt. Well, Pat, we should probably land this plane here. We kind of gave a couple of misses throughout, but was there any other thing we could have gone deeper on or wish we would have gone deeper on?
Pat 01:11:54
Yeah, I gave a couple. The other thing going back to the late game stuff is continuing to try to go score and foul versus when to start shooting threes. I thought we had a really good conversation with Coach Crean on that subject. Again, I mean, all three of those situations we could have probably dedicated a podcast to.
Dan 01:12:11
Yeah.
Pat 01:12:12
Hard to say it was really a miss when we were already had a great conversation based around on versus off the ball, but would have loved to have had the time to explore that scenario as well with Boturl.
Dan 01:12:23
Yeah, this was a terrific conversation. So once again, we thank coach Earl for coming on. Thanks for being so thorough. Thank you everybody for listening and we will see you next time.
Pat 01:12:39
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please make sure to visit slappinglass.com for more information on the free newsletter, Slappin’ Glass Plus, and much more. Have a great week coaching, and we’ll see you next time on Slapping Glass.