This week on the Slappin’ Glass Podcast, we sit down with Marquette Men’s Basketball Head Coach Shaka Smart for a wide-ranging conversation on coaching, leadership, and building winning programs. Coach Smart shares his unique framework of awareness, acceptance, and action, detailing how these principles shape both his players’ development and Marquette’s culture.
We dive into:
- Consciousness in Coaching – how young players can build self-awareness, manage fear, and harness ego in healthy ways.
- Team vs. Player Coaching – balancing the needs of the collective with the growth of individual athletes, including lessons learned from Coach Izzo and UConn’s player development model.
- Defensive Identity – the art of generating steals, teaching “appropriate help,” and building resilience through failure defense.
- Pick-and-Roll Geometry – screening angles, reads, and how Smart empowers players to create synergy in two-man actions.
- Personal Growth – why journaling and learning from other sports, especially football, continue to shape his evolution as a leader.
From handling fear like Matthew McConaughey to breaking down advanced defensive concepts, this conversation blends basketball strategy, leadership philosophy, and life lessons. Whether you’re a coach, player, or lifelong learner of the game, Shaka Smart offers insights that go far beyond X’s and O’s.
Transcript
Shaka Smart 00:00
I had the chance to be around Matthew McConaughey when I was at Texas, because he was a big Texas sports fan, and he told me this great story about one time he was on the set, and he’s the star. He’s the Academy Award-winning actor, and he was feeling nervous. And he said, all of a sudden, he blurted out, oh, I’m nervous, front of everybody. And everyone just kind of looked at him, but it was just his way of acknowledging it, and then he was able to go on and do what he did.
And I think the same is true for our guys. So I hear your mind. And then the next step being, I’m going to do it anyway. And that applies to the Versa Climber program, that applies to sprinting the floor, that applies to defending in his stance or calling out to pick and roll, whatever it is that we’re trying to get these guys to do.
Dan 02:13
And now please enjoy our conversation with coach Shaka Smart. Coach, thank you very much for taking the time. I know the guys are just getting back to school and got a lot going on so we appreciate your time today. We’re excited to dive in with you.
Shaka Smart 02:31
Great to be here with you guys. I listen to almost every one of your shows appreciate that coach
Dan 02:35
Coach, we want to start with this today, something we were talking about the last week before we recorded, and that’s consciousness and coaching and helping yourself and your players just be more conscious. And broadly, we’ll start with what that means to you, what that topic is, and why it’s important.
Shaka Smart 02:52
Well, first of all, I think it’s important in life, so most of the stuff that makes you great at basketball are also the things that make you successful in life. And that’s one of the privileges of the job that we get to do as coaches is that we get to teach these guys life lessons through the sport that we love. So if we can help these guys build their awareness, I mean, a lot of times it’s helpful for us to take ourselves back when we were 18 to 22 years old and think about what we didn’t know or what we didn’t notice, what we weren’t conscious of. And so if we can help them be a little bit more conscious, both on and off the court, what’s happening, what’s going to lead to their success, what’s going to get in the way of their success, what’s going to lead to their contributing to winning for the team.
I think it was Bill Belichick that said, awareness is a fundamental. When I heard that, it was like, yeah, if you want to hear Bill Belichick get excited about a play, which he’s tough to impress, Google the Ed Reed interception of Peyton Manning when Bill Belichick says that’s the best play I’ve ever seen a free safety make. And the reason he was so excited is because of the awareness, the consciousness that Ed Reed had of what was happening both before the play, during the play, the way that he was able to fake Peyton Manning out pretty cool, too high, high level guys out there playing chess against each other. So I just think with college guys, we’re trying to help them go from a level where most of these guys were very, very dominant before they got to college. Most of them did not necessarily need to be particularly aware to play well. And then for the vast majority of them, they’re now at a level where they do. And for us, especially those of us that feel like there’s a small margin for error, which pretty much everyone, we’re trying to help them be a little bit more ready, a little bit more conscious, a little bit more able to make a read. Been spending a lot of time with football lately just because we’ve been in the off season and football has been ramping up at a couple of different spots. And one of the places I went, they said, say it in the least words. So they think about it in the least thoughts. And I thought that was really powerful because we want these guys out there on the court playing with a mind, but we also don’t want them overthinking.
Dan 05:17
One of the things I think about with being aware of yourself in the awareness factor is a player’s awareness of their own ego and the healthy ego versus unhealthy stuff. And when you’re getting the great players you are and you’re trying to build them into a team, what the conversations and things are like around a player’s ego and how it can be helpful, of course, but also hurtful in this awareness piece.
Shaka Smart 05:40
We can talk about that for hours, man. Sometimes the ego gets a bad rap. People accuse it of getting in the way of a lot of things that teams are trying to do, but I would challenge you guys to find me a championship team that didn’t have some guys with some pretty big, healthy egos. Now, Coach K used to talk about the team ego, and the three of us around a team coming together and combining our egos into one strong collective team ego. But certainly you need those individual egos to come together. I think that, let’s be honest, the guys that get really, really, really good have a curiosity and a passion, that intersection of those two things, for improvement and what’s gonna allow them to succeed. And a lot of time that does come from individual drive or desire, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The key is, as you said, Dan, helping the guys understand when ego is getting in the way of whether it’s awareness, whether it’s connectivity with their teammates, whether it’s responding to what happened in the last game or the last play.
We talk a lot at Marquette about updating our relationships with fear, heart, and mistakes. And so your ego can help you with that, or your ego can really, really work against you. I got to coach a guy my first three years here at Marquette named Tyler Kolick. And Tyler has a healthy ego. Tyler also dealt with as much fear, much anxiety, much doubt as any player that I’ve ever been around. But he got really good at using his ego in a positive way, having something to prove. Tyler was able to say certain things that other guys couldn’t say. We were picked ninth going into his junior year, and he had a two word response to that. And that was his ego. But it was his ego joining with his teammates to say, hey, let’s go prove these guys wrong, let’s go show these guys what we’re all about. And that really drove him to play really well and be the Big East Player of the Year.
Pat 07:53
In your effort to build awareness on the court, where do you start? When you get a recruit in, where are you beginning with them to teach them about awareness?
Shaka Smart 08:04
One of the things where we really changed over the years I Got this from the Marines. The Marines have a program called the Marine readiness program they may call it something else, but that’s what I remember it as and basically it gives you up to 365 days To get ready for the Marines and they do a lot of training and preparation before you even get there To get ready for that life You know when I heard about that, you know, we need to do a better job With that for our incoming guys and we’re fortunate we get a pretty decent amount of guys at the side They’re gonna come to Marquette Well before they actually get to Marquette and so that gives us an opportunity to do what we call our freshman readiness program And that’s where we start the awareness work.
It’s a wide variety of things. It starts in the morning I have a pretty extensive morning routine that I do to keep myself from going crazy Part of my morning routine is from my reading I’ll take a picture of an excerpt from a book and I send it to our guys and I send it to our staff and I Send it to a bunch of friends and family and also our incoming guys So if you’re coming to Marquette in nine months, you’re also getting this what I call spiritual excerpt although it’s not particularly religious most of the time and Most of the time it has to deal with the three most important A’s in life, which are awareness Acceptance and then action the Buddhists call it right action And so that’s the first step for these guys and some of the times I’ll send them things and they’ll be like hey coach Can you tell me what that means other times? It’s really really Self-explanatory for example a couple weeks ago. One of the excerpts was very simple It was a one-line quote think a Chinese proverb that says beyond the mountains. There’s more mountains pretty powerful But it just to help us understand. Yeah, we accomplished one thing we go overcome something. All right. Now, there’s more and we love it that’s why we do this starting a some type of practice of journaling and Meditation is helpful for young guys again before they even get here and then increased by the time they get here That’s really powerful guys and helping build Awareness whether it’s awareness of your thoughts Whether it’s awareness of what’s going on in your body whether it’s awareness of what’s going on outside of you The journaling is particularly powerful because there’s something about writing down how you’re feeling what your thoughts are that it’s almost like there’s two of you and The one of you is writing it down and then the other of you is noticing That emotion or that thought and I think that’s very helpful for young players
Pat 10:57
Hearing you talk about these things, I’m sure it was like everything, a journey for you to get to hear to where you believe in this and how you kind of got here to where you value this and think it has staying power and contributes to the success of your program.
Shaka Smart 11:12
It’s been an evolution and I think one of the great things about coaching is we get to utilize our personal journey and you know particularly some of the painful moments and challenges that we’ve been through personally to try to help our players and our staff in their own journeys and our teams and coaching a team is not the same as coaching the player. Those are two different things obviously there’s an overlap but for me I’ve learned that the better my awareness the better my acceptance that’s going to lead to me taking better action and that’s as a coach that’s as a father that’s as a person the same applies to our players so make no mistake about it this is a component of us helping the guys with personal growth but there’s no question it’s also we believe it goes into winning that we’re not just doing this because we’re doing this because we believe the more aware player the player that’s more able to accept whatever just occurred in the moment is going to be more successful.
Dan 12:14
Going back to, you talked about fear, hard, and mistakes, zero in on the fear for a second. What’s the work that you do with players, coaches, and their relationship with fear? Because I feel like that specific thing, fear, drives a lot of unhealthy negative emotions and actions in people in general, what do you do with that?
Shaka Smart 12:37
It’s a great question Dan and this has been an evolution for me because I used to think it was about getting rid of fear and being fearless and Now I think it’s more about utilizing fear and almost making it your friend. You know, I mentioned Tyler earlier He was really able to use fear and its cousin emotions to drive him to be a great player So, how do we help guys with that?
I think first of all again awareness of it Because sometimes people don’t know that Fear is actually Crippling them as a player they can feel it, but they can’t necessarily verbalize it They don’t know why they’re not necessarily as good in the game as they are in practice They don’t know why in pressure situations they have certain reactions So again, I think it comes back to awareness, but we’ve talked about that. So now it comes to the next day, which is acceptance Can you accept the fear that you’re feeling and can you? Embrace it instead of pushing it away and understand This is an emotion that my mind is creating to try to help me, but actually at times it can be counterproductive So how can I reframe my relationship with it? I’ll give you a very very simple two-step affirmation that I gave one of our players This summer when we were meeting we were talking about fear and this is the guy on our team that probably Has the biggest gap between how he plays When he’s crippled by fear and how he plays when he in the moment at least has a healthy relationship with fear And so this is this real short affirmation. I told him to utilize Actually this summer while he was doing a Versa climber program, which is really really hard, but absolutely on the court as well Step one. I hear you mind step two. I’m gonna do it anyway So step one an acknowledgement even an affirmation that I feel some fear. It’s okay I had the chance to be around Matthew McConaughey’s son when I was at Texas because he was a big Texas Sports fan and he told me this great story about one time He was on the set and he’s the star is the Academy Award-winning actor and he was feeling nervous Yes, even Academy Award-winning actors feel nervous going into a scene and he said all of a sudden he blurted out Oh, I’m nervous run of everybody and everyone just kind of looked at him but it was just his way of acknowledging it and then he was able to go on and do what he did and I think the Same is true for our guys So I hear your mind and then the next step being I’m going to do it anyway and that applies to the Versa climber program that applies to sprinting the floor that applies to Defending in his stance or calling out to pick and roll or whatever it is that we’re trying to get these guys to do
Pat 15:27
What are the key distinctions between coaching the team and coaching the players that you think coaches should be aware of or that you’re aware of?
Shaka Smart 15:34
Patrick, it is a fascinating give and take, and I think what’s most exciting about it is every team and group of players is different. The thing that we do all have in common on our team is, think about this, it’s a group of people that come together and combine to form a whole. So we’ve all heard the saying, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, but we’ve all probably coached teams where the whole was less than the sum of the parts.
And so what makes the whole greater or lesser than the sum of the parts? And then I think the next thing is understanding that whatever the whole becomes at the end of the season or during the season or 50 years later, Marquette, we’re not too far away from the 50th anniversary of the one national championship that’s been won here. What are the consequences of the whole becoming what it becomes? And the consequences are it reflects back on the parts. So, for example, I mentioned Tyler Kolick his junior year, we’re picked ninth in the Big East. We ended up winning the Big East regular season conference tournament. And that team, instead of finished ninth, finished first, reflects back on the parts.
Well, four guys that were part of that team are now in the NBA. So when you think about the team and individuals, what’s the biggest individual goal that most players at the division one level have? And that is to eventually play in the NBA. Now, I try to get these guys to amend their goal because there’s a big difference between having a long, sustainable career versus having a cup of coffee up there.
So when you’re coaching the team, for example, we all coach teams and we stand up in front of the team and we say, hey, we’re going to do this on defense. Well, this is how we’re going to play on offense. Well, this is how we’re going to organize ourselves in transition defense. This is how we’re going to guard the pick and roll. This is what we’re going to do on out of bounds place. This is how we’re going to be culturally. We break everything down at Marquette into three categories, culturally, defensively, and offensively. So we’re going to stand up in front of our team, all of us, and we’re going to talk to our team about how we are going to be in each of those areas and a million subsets within each of those areas. However, if I tell the team we’re going to play motion offense, now it’s incumbent upon me and our staff to follow up by coaching a bunch of the individuals on our team and how they can be the best they can be in motion offense. And if you look at any successful team, whether it’s a team that’s successful culturally, team that’s successful defensively, it’s a team that’s successful offensively, a team that wins the national championship. What you’re going to see is a group of individuals that their individual styles of play fit really, really nicely into the team style of play. And again, that’s culturally, defensively, and offensively.
Shaka Smart 18:33
So Florida won it last year. I guarantee if you look back and you watch tape on Florida, you’d say, look at the way those guys fit in with how they were playing. Now, again, it’s a give and take, the coaching staff is also adjusting the style of play to some extent to who they have, but also trying to win the players over every single day in truly fitting in and buying in to that team style of play.
And then of course, in this era we live in of quote unquote player value, everyone wants to talk about the value of guys. Well, you add more value and you take on more value, the more that your individual style of play enhances the team style of play. I’ll give you guys one other thing with that. That same team that I was talking about with Tyler Kolek, his junior year, we lost to Michigan State in the NCAA tournament. They were a seven seed, we were a two seed. So on paper, they upset us. On that day, they felt like a lot better team than a seven seed. But after we lost, as you guys know, as coaches, we go through a mini depression when the season ends, particularly when the season ends so abruptly, which is pretty much all the time.
And so that year in my mini depression, I decided to take a deep dive into Coach Izzo and how he does things with his team. I’ve known Coach Izzo for a long time. He’s been very, very kind and sharing with his time. Coach Izzo of all the coaches at this level of basketball is America’s coach because he’s willing to get on the phone and talk to anyone and share. But I said, let me on my own take a deep dive. And one of the things that I learned was in the 48 hours before they played us, Coach Izzo spent an extensive amount of time with all of his key players individually. Now he was also talking to the team, I’m sure about the way they were going to defend us or what they were going to do against us on the offensive end, all the tactical parts of the game, but he was spending time with those individuals and he was getting them ready to play their best. And when I learned about that, you know, during my mini depression in that spring, one, it helped me come back up for air, but two, I learned from that, I need to do a better job with that because it’s very, very easy, guys, it’s very easy for us coaches to sit in our office or in coaches meetings and just want all day long to coach the team. I just want to coach my team, I want to tell the team what to do, I want to tell the team where we’re going to be, I want to show them tape of what we need to do, give them feedback. It’s only going to take you so far, you better get good at coaching your players too.
Pat 21:43
How do you walk that line when it comes like decision making, you know, as a coach in the micro, the day to day decisions we have to make good for the team, good for the player, you went through a couple of, but when you’re having to make decisions, what is the criteria where it’s like, okay, non-negotiables is always team first, or we can, you know, let’s help this guy out, even if maybe the team has to take a backseat here.
Shaka Smart 22:04
Well, I think Patrick, that’s an art and not a science, because it would be very easy for any of us to say, our first filter is the team and the team winning. Makes sense? I think we all believe that in order to be successful, you have to win and you have to put the team first. At the same time, there’s nuances.
And there’s times where I think pretty much any coach can relate to having a guy that doesn’t quite have it figured out yet, but you know that when he does, it’s really gonna pay dividends for you down the road. So that’s a specific example, Patrick, of maybe you are spending more time with that guy than his current contribution in games, merits. Maybe you’re even playing him more time than his current contribution to winning merits. Now, not at the detriment of winning that game, for sure, but I’ll use Yukon as an example, because they have been as good as any program in the country. So a few years ago, they had a young big kid named Clingan. They had an older big kid that was terrific named Sanogo. And eventually, those of us on the outside of their program realized, Clingan is gonna be better than Sanogo. I’m sure the coaches there and people there probably realized that sooner than those of us did outside the program, what was really cool to watch and following their program was the way that coach Danny Hurley managed that, because he had literally an all-conference level player, I think he was preseason player of the year, Sanogo, at the position. And then he had this young emerging guy, I think that ended up being, I don’t know, six or eighth pick in a draft, and probably didn’t wanna play him together. So just trying to figure out, okay, those are two players that he was coaching in the midst of coaching the team. And again, it’d be easy for any of us to say, ah, we can do the best thing for the team, but he’s also managing past, present, future. That’s the fun part of being a coach.
Pat 24:12
And coach, if we can kind of riff on that example, how do you think about in that kind of scenario, either communicating it to the team or what needs to be placed from a culture standpoint, basically to allow that to happen and because you’re going to be taking minutes away from someone?
Yes. And that this team still can thrive or go on.
Shaka Smart 24:32
Well, I think that that’s different depending on where you are, depending on how you’ve recruited guys, depending on the cultural makeup of your team that year. For example, there are some teams with guys that are a little bit more sensitive where maybe you can’t smack them across the face every single time with exactly 1000% of why you’re doing something. There are other teams and there are other cultures where it is stone cold. This is what it is. This is why it is. This is who we are. You don’t like it. Get the hell out.
And so, you know, most of us are somewhere probably in between. One of the things I’m excited about with our team coming into this year is I think the leaders on our team are very, very authentic. There’s no bullshit to them. So now we’re in peacetime right now. We’ll see if this is the case when we get into wartime.
But I think what that allows you to do is, man, you better as a coaching staff be on their level of authenticity. And so with this particular group, it is like, I’ll give you one from our team. We got three guys that are better at dribbling than everyone else. So I guess what, guys, those guys are going to dribble more. And if you have a problem with that, I’m sorry.
Work on your ball handling. Let’s get you better. We really want to commit to a plan to keep getting better. But these three guys are pretty special when they dribble the ball. So we’re going to give them a little bit more leeway. You other guys have advantages in other areas. One of the things that we do is we have every player make an extensive list with the coaches of their individual advantages. You know, talk about positive psychology. This is a way to help them understand these are the things I do well as a player on the court. And then again, if you can get them to apply their individual advantages to the team style of play culturally, how we act, interact and respond, that’s what culture is defensively and offensively.
So if one of my advantages is I’m a great communicator and I hold teammates accountable, that’s a cultural advantage. OK, you need to press that advantage and that makes you more valuable to our team. If one of my advantages is I can defeat pick and rolls as a guard defending a ball handler, then man, I need to press that advantage as it makes our defensive style of play better and it adds value for you.
Dan 27:08
You as a leader, I know you’re someone that’s constantly curious and you’ve said that before. When you’re seeking out to improve yourself, how do you go about doing that? What do you like about other leaders that attracts you to them, especially like, as you know, we’re in this kind of off season, trying to improve for next season. How do you go about that personally?
Shaka Smart 27:27
Well, I think it’s a two-pronged approach, Dan. We all have to continue to work on personal growth, as a person, as a husband, as a father. And then it’s about improving as a coach. And in a lot of ways, I know a lot of coaches can relate to this. Sometimes it feels like what we need to do as people maybe even goes against what we need to do as coaches.
And I’ll give you an example of that. What I need to do as a person sometimes is settle down, relax, get more rest, practice acceptance, spend more time with my family, just be more like a person. And as a coach, it’s like, no, more, harder, tougher, learn, be better. What are these guys doing that I can learn from that I need to be better? So it’s kind of striking that balance between those two things. I don’t know if I’m doing either one of those things very well, but I try. Lately, I’ve been really, really big on learning from football. I’ve spent five entire days in five different football buildings in the last 15 months. And I have learned so much. Two of them, NFL, three of them, college. I’ve learned so much from those guys. I think they’re much more organized than us. They obviously manage almost 10 times as many people as us. You talk about alignment. Alignment for them is a Rubik’s cube. And so there’s so much to take from those guys. And you talk about margin for error. I mean, that’s the ultimate game of inches and even literally championship caliber programs and teams have a small margin for error. So that’s one thing as a coach I’ve been doing is trying to learn from those guys.
Dan 29:20
Coach, this has been awesome so far. Thanks for all your thoughts. At this point, we do want to 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 then sit one, and then we’ll discuss from there. So Coach, if you’re set, we’ll dive into this first one. Absolutely. Okay, so historically, your defenses have been terrific at generating steals. You’ve always been the top percentage of visual on basketball and generating steals. And so we’re gonna give you three different areas where you can increase, I guess, your steal percentage in a low-risk way. So you would be comfortable having your team being aggressive in these three scenarios. And these are three scenarios where we’re quoting, saying that the offense is kind of like blind. I’ll explain it as we go. But option one is trying to generate steals against blind ball handlers, whether it’s in a gap, up full court, whatever it is, a ball handler is blind. You’re gonna go for that steal there. Option two is blind posts players. Start operating back to the basket, try to get a steal dig or whatever there. Or option three is what we’re just turning blind outlet passes or passes where players rebound it and they’re blindly kind of throwing it up the court and you’re okay being aggressive there. So generating steals on blind ball handlers, posts, or outlet passes.
Shaka Smart 30:41
Guys, I can’t tell you how many of your podcasts I’ve listened to and struggled with the answer to start sub and sit, I’ll do my best. I definitely sit the outlet passes. That one’s actually pretty easy for me because if we’re in transition defense, then I want to be really good in transition defense and run the heck back. If we’re pressing, then yeah, we’ll steal the ball, but I don’t know if it’ll be as blind if we’re pressing. The other two go together. So the post player is a ball handler, but if I had to start one, I would say the ball handler and then sub the post player, I think the biggest evolution for this one, guys. And when I was at VCU, we pressed on every single possession. Now people ask me all the time, why don’t you do that anymore? Well, it’s a long answer. There’s a variety of reasons. One of them is the game is officiated differently. It really is than it was 15 years ago, particularly out on the floor. Another one is the higher level you go and the better teams that you play, the more ball handlers and decision makers they have. And so we really want to game plan and focus on being the very best teams on our schedule. Well, the very best teams on our schedule are the best teams in the country. The biggest evolution with pressure defense, which we still utilize some is being less rigid and allowing guys to make more reads. So what I would really, really start to your point, Dan, is guys being able to make the read, to go get the ball or even go put two on the ball when it makes sense. And that’s a long, long explanation that we don’t have time to get into in terms of when it makes sense. It’s definitely an art. Some guys are really good at it. We’ve got a guy on our team, Chase Ross. That’s almost like a free safety playing basketball. He’s really good at just knowing I’m going to leave my guy and I’m going to go get the ball. Most of the time it works out every once in a while it doesn’t. So it’s certainly a risk, but I would say that read and that, you know, nuance of not necessarily we’re planning to always go this time, not necessarily we’re planning to always go with this player or on that offensive player, but factoring in all that stuff.
Dan 33:02
I want to start with sort of more philosophical on all of these. And you just talk nicely about your change as a coach a little bit and the reasons, but what’s the balance of in teaching to be aggressive and potentially go for steals or make the read and the decisions and then if it’s wrong, so like you don’t want players just fake hustle flying around, going for steals versus actually going. And I guess especially early on here in the first month or two, as you’re instilling this stuff with your team, what does that look like? So that they’re compact as a group, but also they have the aggressiveness.
Shaka Smart 33:37
Well, it’s a very timely question, Dan, because we just started school yesterday and on the first day of school, we put in one of our full court defenses. And so to your exact point, we told our guys we want to be extremely aggressive, but never reckless. And again, it’s a nuance. The more aggressive you are, the more you ramp up that dial, there is going to be a level of risk on the back end. I mean, even just thinking about extending your defense beyond the three point line, you know, you’re stretching the floor out and giving the other team more space, so it better be worth it. I think the Indiana Pacers this past year were a very, very good example of a team that played with great aggressiveness and great physicality. Some people would even say, I know you had Jeff Van Gundy on recently and some people would even say, ah, it’s too much. But I don’t think they particularly put themselves at a lot of risk on most possessions with the way that they played. And so obviously it worked in their favor and they were able to win some playoff series against some teams that maybe on paper folks thought were better than them and they just wore them down.
Dan 34:51
And then also, the teams on your schedule, like you mentioned, are the best in the country. When you’re talking about being aggressive and generating steals, extra opportunities, how much do you and your staff think about blowing up or being aggressive on actions versus great players? You could try to take them out of their stuff or you could try to take a player out of their stuff like just the balance between scheme versus personal aggression defensively.
Shaka Smart 35:14
Well, I think first of all, understanding that no matter how good you are at stealing the ball, the majority of the possessions on defense, the other team is going to get a shot. So I think it’s really important not to lose sight of the fact that there are certain type of shots that we want to force. And then there are certain type of shots that we do not want to allow. And then, of course, there’s a rebounding side. And absolutely, the more you extend yourself, the more you switch, the more you fly around and you’re in a rotation. You can put yourself in some tricky situations as it relates to rebounding. But I definitely, to answer your question, would err on a side of personnel over actions. Actions are obviously important. When you play UConn, for instance, you’re going to see 17 actions in one offensive possession. So you better strap on your seatbelt and find a way to continue to guard multiple actions. But the personnel is what matters. And if I could get our guys to internalize one really, really advanced, tricky concept, it would be what we call appropriate help, which is based on our personnel, based on their personnel, based on where they are on the floor, based on the time, based on the score, based on everything, how much should I help my teammate versus how much should I stay relatively close to my man? And that includes a random time of, you know, running off my guy to go trap. That includes what the Pacers were really, really good at, which is when a team sets a pick and roll in the back court against a full court man-to-man press. They were really good at turning that into an advantage for them, putting two on the ball and saying, hey, go ahead and throw it to the screener at 80 feet. We’re not as worried about him bringing it up the floor. That’s appropriate help as opposed to the point guard bringing it. That’s a concept that I would say the vast majority of teams on the defensive end come up short in, and I need to do a better job coaching it because the teams that are really good at that, they have a major leg up.
Pat 37:17
Empowering your defenders to make reads and trying to teach appropriate helps. Maybe it can be aided when you are doing a press segment and you’re going to try to speed up your offense and you’re going to encourage aggression. But when you get in like the half court, how are you currently trying to train like this appropriate help or knowing when like the right read can be applied? Like that was a blind ball handler.
Shaka Smart 37:40
Absolutely. If the three of us sat down and we watched film together, it could be of anyone could be our team your teams It could be an NBA game every defensive possession. There’s a ton of examples of appropriate help I’ll give you guys a couple and this drives all of us crazy as coach right ball is on the left wing a Player he could even be a great shooter. But let’s just say he’s a lesser shooter is standing at 35 feet above the top of the key The ball is driven from the left wing with the ball handlers right hand into the paint deep paint Gets fouled or scores a layup or kicks it out for an open shot. Why are we holding hands with that guy at 35 feet? That’s appropriate help.
That’s one example, you know, you mentioned putting two guys on the ball teams like to run ISO Situations maybe at the left elbow driving right where they’ve cleared all but one player on the offensive end Through to the left side so that there’s a huge gap to drive into Well appropriate help means one of those defenders of the guys that’s cleared through to the left side You got to go get the ball man We can’t just let this guy rip it from the left elbow with his right hand and go down to Boulevard and lay the ball Up or draw the third foul on a guy with 18 minutes left in the game So those are just a couple examples of appropriate help. I think any time a team traps the post It’s either what they do every single time or they feel like it’s appropriate help and we got to get the ball out of there Like this guy’s bothering us. It’s a problem Same thing on pick and roll any time a team decides like hey, we’re gonna trap this guy and pick and roll we had a really good player last year Cam Jones who plays for the Pacers now and If I was playing against him, I would have trapped him and pick and roll every time now most of the time people switched against him and In some cases it was pretty effective But Cam was so much better on offense than everyone else on our team Then it’s like men get the ball out of his hands. That’s appropriate help
Pat 39:42
Looking at help, when you’re building your defensive identity, building your rotations, how much do you and a staff think about practicing failure defense? So like, for example, if you’re no middle, how much do you talk about, well, what happens when they break middle? You know, I guess how much do you guys think about repping it or when to introduce it or when to talk or not talk about it?
Shaka Smart 40:02
We work on that every day. Once we get into practice, we work on it in two different ways. We work on it where literally the defense just has less guys. So five on four, four on three, two on one. When I was a young, young coach, I went to a clinic and heard Bob Huggins talk about working on outnumbered situations and he explained why. And from that moment on, I was sold on. If I ever get to coach a team, we’re going to do outnumbered situation. So we do a lot of that. But then we also do situations where the guy defending the ball handler got beat. And so we’re not outnumbered, but we are going to be in a rotation. And I’ll tell you, St. John’s won our league last year. They did a phenomenal job. And if anyone wants to watch teams rotate and switch onto the ball handler and then help each other, watch St. John’s coach Pitino’s team from last year, they were terrific. And then watch the NBA champions. They were phenomenal. People have different terminology for it, but you know, let’s say you’re guarding Dan and Dan goes by you and I’m guarding someone else and I step up and take Dan and then you take mine or someone else takes mine and you take theirs. Oklahoma city at the pro level. And then St. John’s last year at the college level, two great teams to study for working out. So we work on that every day. Obviously need to be better at it because we’re not as good as those teams.
Pat 41:28
And when you’re working on those situations that maybe you’re introducing more gray in terms of what the defense has to try to solve, what is it that you’re keeping an eye or really trying to coach to because again, it’s like the failure, maybe it’s not, we haven’t, it’s out of our normal set of rotations, but every play is going to now be different. I guess where are you putting your attention on to try to help your guys work through that?
Shaka Smart 41:52
It comes back to appropriate help and then an understanding of what are we okay giving up because I think a lot of times we fall into this trap of we want to take everything away, particularly when you’re in a disadvantaged situation. So whether it’s outnumbered or whether a guy is beat, man, like if we press pause on the video and the three of us said, hey, not going to be perfect, but we’re going to end up forcing them to take a contested jumper. Yeah, we’ll take that we’ll live with that.
And so, for example, when we do two on one, man, we just no layups or dunks. Okay, if we can not give up a layup or dunk, you pretty much want now they might make a five foot floater. They might make a pull up. But in a two on one situation, you can’t take that away. You can’t take everything away. If you come up to take away the pull up, he’s going to pass the ball. And then it’s gonna be a layup or dunk. And so I think understanding what you’re trying to take away or what you’re trying to force that informs the appropriate help.
Pat 44:07
All right, coach, keeping a move in here. Our last start subset for you going to the offensive side of the ball and looking at, we’ll call it like pick and roll geometry. So to frame it, if your ball screen is struggling or ball screen offense, we’re putting our focus now on the angle of the big and how they screen. Your start would be like the fix that you think could help improve your ball screen or you would prioritize. So the first option is looking at the approach angle of the big or the screener, are they coming north, south, east, west, like how you would maybe think about adjusting that option two would be the actual screening angle of being set, trying to fight for the right angle or the angles you want to set screens or option three within just be how they, we call it the exit angle, how they either the bigs rolling out or popping out to help stress the defense and improve your ball screen.
Shaka Smart 45:02
Ball screen offense I knew you guys were gonna stump me on one of these obviously all those things are important and what’s more important is what the defense is doing to inform who you start sub and sit on that one but just generally I guess I’ll start with the approach because if you can approach the pick and roll or the action we talk a lot about pick and roll but there’s four five six seven different things you can do in that two-man action if you win the approach then that’s gonna put you in a really good position to win the rest for example on defense we tell our guys you got to be Velcro which means you got to be attached to that big as he’s running up to the action so if we can win the approach by being anti Velcro that gives us a good start so I’ll start that you know I’ll just go into order you know we say before during and after so you pretty much gave us that I’ll stop the during which is the angle of the actual action and then I will sit the what happens afterwards but in this case guys I’m playing a deep bench so I’m playing everybody they all matter you know a couple things with that I think the actual screening angle is a way to mess with their ability to be Velcro so just like teams I think you guys called it on a recent podcast RAM screens which is a testament to my predecessor Anthony Grant at VCU who popularized the RAM screen with a great player named Eric Maynor he would screen for the screener and then that guy was not Velcro and and Eric did the rest and so all of us in the Billy Donovan coaching tree stole that for years and years and years and now it really should be the credit should be given ability because now it’s been popularized everywhere well that’s a way to be anti Velcro but also the angle and what you do with your hips or whether you rescreen is a chance to confuse or mess up the big defender or the help defender then again nowadays there’s more and more switching particularly against teams like the team we had last year that didn’t have great team quickness we have a much different team this year but last year it really made sense to switch our team because you know the difference in quickness between our one and our five wasn’t a huge difference and so how you impact switching how you counteract it you know we have a whole edit that we watch religiously with our guys on called switch attack because you know there’s a lot of different nuances you can do to try to confuse the switch and if there’s anything you can do to make it unclean then you have a chance to get downhill but as you guys know defenses have gotten really really good at being able to switch cleanly so it’s like I learned back in college run away social intelligence was one one group invented something and came up with a way of doing things and then the other group across the world learned about it and they came up with something better and then the first group had to come up with something better and that’s what’s going on with all these two-man actions so we’re in a process of trying to figure out how to do something better against switching but then this year I bet less people switch us so that’s one of the fun things about coaching is you better have an attack against whatever it is that they might do
Pat 48:28
Looking at the screening angle, are there different angles you’re actually fighting for based on the coverage, or are you really just trying to fight for one flatter angle that if you’re switching, keep the guard on the high side? If they’re dropping, get your guard down low, or if they’re hedging, you know, then we’re just going to roll out because they’re giving us the advantage.
Shaka Smart 48:48
You guys ask such good questions because there is a simple answer. And then there’s a complicated answer. The simple answer is yes. We want a back pocket angle. Remember those shorts that the gym teachers used to wear with the pockets in the back want to screen that pocket. All right. That’s the simple answer, but absolutely.
There’s times where you want to adjust. I remember one year when I was at Texas, we played against Baylor and Scott Drew’s a phenomenal coach. And at that time with our team, it was come hell or high water. We were going over the screen. We were getting over the top of that screen. What did Scott Drew do? He’s a great coach, man. He set that screen, had his guys set in that screen at an angle that makes no sense in the world to go over. But you know what, if you’re playing against a stubborn coach or a stubborn team, and they say, this is the way we’re going to do it, then you can adjust and counteract what you do with that.
I’ll give you another example. Jackson Hayes is the best pick and roll big I’ve ever coached. He was so good at it that he only could stay at Texas for like eight months because he played so well. He was out of there. He screened guys about one out of every 10 times the other nine times he was gone. So it wasn’t so much about what his angle was or, you know, hit in the back pocket. It was, man, if you can get the defender to go over the top, you are out of there. And he got so good at it. I remember there was a play. We were in Vegas playing against North Carolina. And there was a play where he sprinted out of that screen. He dropped his hips and he sprinted out of that screen so fast. And we had a guy named Kerwin Roach. He threw the ball up so high and Jackson went and got it and dunked the ball. And I just happened to catch the eyes of an NBA scout that was sitting across the court and it registered in my mind. This guy’s not going to be around very long. Because that’s what they like to do up.
Pat 50:43
There too. Again talking about angles and you mentioned the hips but when you’re looking at like flipping screens or if you want to play re-screens, are these something that are more like called or can you coordinate where it is a random flip or a re-screen and that the guard and the big are working on the same page or is it more stuff like it’s a coordinated action to try to beat a specific coverage or scout?
Shaka Smart 51:09
the above. If you watch the very, very best players in the NBA, it ain’t a call. Like those guys are just doing it, you know, for years and years. All of us that do any type of split game or pinch post or five out, I’ve tried to emulate the Denver Nuggets and Nicole Jokic. Well, there’s a reason there’s only one of him and he’s maybe the best to ever do that specific thing in basketball.
This is why guys, I think one thing that’s really, really underrated that we all can do a better job coaching is getting our players to spend time in the gym without us together, either walking through, jogging through, or playing live the exact actions that you’re talking about. Patrick, I knew we were going to be really, really good three years ago when we had Cam Jones and Oso Iguodaro, who would constantly go in a gym and they would just play around with action and they’d play around with the flip and they’d play around with twisting their hips. They’d play around with the re-screen. They would play around with slipping out of it early and then going to something else. They’d like have a manager video them doing something and they’d send it to me. Coach, what do you think about this? Is this something that we could do? And they would want it to be a play call. Absolutely. They’d want to put it in as a play call, but I would also say to them, hey, you guys can do that. Anytime we’re in an empty by yourself over there, the two of you, you guys can do that. That’s completely up to you and Oso was good at handling the ball. So sometimes the action could get inverted where Cam was a screener and Oso was a ball handler and that’s when you can really do fun stuff. But that’s when you’re really onto something. I think that in this day and age, we’re so used to telling the players exactly what to do, but then we go out there and we watch the very best teams and the players tell us what to do. And so if we can cultivate and guys, this goes back to the original conversation about consciousness. If we can cultivate a mindset of curiosity and passion, that just the intersection between those two things for how do we score a basket? You know what I mean? Like one basket. And how do we do all the things that lead to that great shot that lead to that basket? And how do we do all the things that lead to that paint touch that lead to that great shot that lead to that basket? And the more curious our guys are for that, the better our teams are going to be.
Dan 53:42
I’ve always appreciated how good your teams are in empty pick and rolls. And a lot of the things I see that are interesting is what you do around that empty either before it or on the backside of it with your spacing. And I guess just asking more about the efficiency of getting to an empty ball screen and putting the other players in tough situations to guard before it. So for example, go screening from the corner before an empty or having that really high slot spacing on the backside.
But I guess the question is thinking really about, we’re talking right now about the two players together and their synergy. But obviously there’s a lot of stuff you can do before and around it to help that efficiency and how you’ve thought about the complexity and simplicity of that to help your ball screen stuff.
Shaka Smart 54:29
Well, everything you do before is simply to put you in a better position in that empty. And so in other words, if Dan, you took five guys out there and you put them in an empty and Patrick, you took five guys out there and you put them in a defense, Patrick would be at an advantage if he knew you’re going to be an empty. He knew exactly where your guys are going to be. They were standing still and he could load up. He could do exactly what he wants to do. Obviously, the flip side of that is Patrick seems running back in transition. That’s a good example. They’re not all the way matched up. They got the wrong guys on different guys and you sprint into that empty and you’re going to be a lot more successful than in that situation. So yeah, I was lucky.
I worked for Billy Donovan and I was hoping to be there for like 10 years and the AD from VCU called me and I literally almost didn’t take that job because I didn’t know that I was ready to be a head coach and I wanted to learn more from Billy. One of the things that he brought to college basketball, I think before anyone else was the action before the action and particularly with pick and roll. So multiple pick and rolls. You know, it used to be that most of us just, hey, we’re going to set a spread pick and roll and we’re going to set an empty. We’re going to set the flat one and then we’re just going to try to score off of that. Well, Billy understood if that first one puts a defense in any type of compromise situation, even if we don’t score off of it now on the next one, they’re not going to guard it as well. And so to your point, Dan, that’s some of the stuff that we try to do before we get to the empty. Tyler Kolek was the best at that and he did a really good job of attacking on the initial action so that you better not just wait for the empty. Like he might get you on that first part, too. And I think a good way to understand it is if you’re going to put the three other guys on the court on the other side of the floor, then the empty can pretty much be whatever you want. I mean, the angle could be as extreme as completely downhill or it could be something that Bill Self has done forever. And it’s really, really tough to deal with. Literally, the ball handlers got the ball almost on the baseline at like the short corner almost. And now you’re setting an empty going uphill towards the middle of the floor with all kinds of space. I mean, you’re empty could be anything between those two things and it doesn’t have to be we call them hits, doesn’t have to be ball screens. It could be a get where you’re catching the ball. It could be think you called it, Dan, a ghost. It could be your twist in your hips. So there’s a lot of different ways you can go about it. But yeah, we absolutely have tried to be a threat on whatever we’re doing before so that it leads to us being in a good situation when the empty occurs.
Shaka Smart 57:22
There’s also the manipulation of the guys on the backside. That’s a whole nother podcast, I’m sure. I used to say, hey, air on being in the perfect spots.But now, man, with the way that teams load up and one year we were in a big 12 and I think we had five of the top 10 defenses in our league and these guys were loaded up and they were playing man to man, but they were damn near in a zone off the ball every time. And it’s like, yeah, you can be in the perfect spot. But if they’re not looking at you, you better cut.
Dan 57:54
Coach, you’re off the start,sub and sit hot seat, thanks for playing that game with us. Kind of fun there. We got a final question to close the show. Before we do, again, thank you very much for your time, all your thoughts. This was a really fantastic conversation today, so thank you.
Shaka Smart 58:07
Absolutely. Really appreciate you guys having me on and I look forward to listening to the next episode after mine. I’m sure my staff is probably going to give me a hard time about mine.
Dan 58:17
That’s good. Well, coach, the final question that we ask all the guests is what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career as a coach?
Shaka Smart 58:25
I’ve heard you guys ask a lot of people this, I think it’s a great question and I’ve stolen from their investment. So thank you for asking everybody the question. I’ll give you a simple one. I would just say my journals. I’ve been fortunate to have a journaling practice ever since I started my freshman year in college. So I started it as a player. I wish I would have written more when I played. It wasn’t something that I did daily or even a few times a week. It was pretty sporadic, but it is really, really fascinating to look back at the perspective that I had when I was 18, 19, 20 years old on the game. But as a coach, I’ve written so many things down in my journals and it’s been a good investment largely because I do take the time to look back. And I think that that’s the other half of having a journaling practices. Unless you have a photographic memory, you have to have a willingness to carve out a half hour or 45 minutes to look back at what you wrote the year before 10 years ago or five years ago. What’s particularly helpful for me is looking back at what I wrote at the same time of year in previous years. So in other words, we just started school looking back at what I wrote in late August in previous years. When we get ready to start practice, when we get into games, when we get into the dog days, typically our teams, and I really believe this to be the case, the longer guys coach, typically our teams go through similar challenges. There’s similar things that come up and there tends to be a rhythm to our seasons. And I think a lot of the blind spots that we have as coaches, we have them one year and then we have them again the next year. And so sometimes looking back at what you wrote in your journal can maybe even if it’s 5% help you correct for that.
Dan 01:00:18
Pat, let’s jump into this recap here. Coach Smart has long been on our list of coaches we’d love to have on the show. Was just a fun conversation today. Very insightful and in depth on a lot of things that don’t always get covered. You always appreciate when a coach is willing to go there with those kinds of things about fear and consciousness and all that kind of stuff that we’ll get into here in a second. I just loved talking to him today. I felt like we could have kept recording for another couple hours. But it felt like a breeze.
Pat 01:00:50
Yeah, I echo that sentiment. I think today was like a real complete coaching conversation in the sense that I mean, even talked about culturally, defensively, offensively, I think we try to hit as much as we could.
Dan 01:01:02
For sure. Well, let’s dive into our takeaways and for number one, I’ll kick it to you.
Pat 01:01:07
Yeah, so I’ll start with a big bucket. Again, having the opportunity to kind of prep and go back and forth with Coach Smart. He was talking about, he was thinking a lot about consciousness and I think right away both you and me gravitated towards it. I think it’s such an interesting conversation we haven’t had and what that means to him.
And just kind of the conversation that grew out of that, I wrote down like the awareness, the acceptance and action, going about trying to build awareness, the complete person on the court often, accepting actions like the acceptance piece and then trying to put that into action. I mean, he’s so intentional in what he does. I know we discussed a little bit of his morning routine, journaling his meditation, sending out quotes.
Dan 01:01:44
Yeah, I gotta get on that list somehow.
Pat 01:01:45
Yeah, yeah, I know. Yeah, that text thread. But I mean, I think that was like another part we kind of dove completely into, like, you know, his freshman readiness program. The part I did really enjoy too is at the end when talking about the balance of coaching the team versus coaching the player, I thought it was fun when we kind of got into the example of maybe I have a young kid, you know, it’s going to be good for the program and trying to drip him in some minutes, weighing that what’s good for the whole versus what’s maybe good for the player.
And, you know, how you think about going about that, like, that’s a delicate situation and very tricky. And you know, players aren’t dumb, they’re going to see what’s going on. I know you and me have. And making sure the culture is in place, the relationships are in place. I thought his thoughts on like, if you have a sensitive team, versus a less sensitive team, like the decisions that then go into that, like, make this minute decision for maybe a player who could be a bright spot for your future. But in general, like that whole conversation of coaching the team versus coaching players, such an interesting dichotomy. And I thought he spoke extremely well on it and sharing his thoughts on how he thinks about in ways that
Dan 01:02:51
The other couple of thoughts within there that I think were really great. You know, I asked him about ego. I really liked his thoughts on healthy ego and, you know, so true on just what a healthy ego looks like and how it can really help. And he even brought the point, show me a championship level team that didn’t have some healthy egos on that team. And just, I think that’s a lot of work as coaches we do is you want them to not give up their ego, but understand how to fit that into a group while maintaining what makes them great as players. And so I thought that was an interesting point.
You know, he also said the fear, hard, and mistakes are things that they lean into. And it’s both a bright spot in the first part and also a little bit of a miss for me, not from Coach Smart, of course, but, you know, I almost could have went through each one of those three things with him and just drilled down a little bit more on how do they attack those. I asked him about fear, because I think that’s just a big, big one that we all live with as coaches and people and players. And we recently had Kobe Karl on, who talked about kind of being fearful-ish as a player, wanting to please. And when he got to play for Phil Jackson, who kind of unleashed, don’t worry about the mistakes as much, play through it, like how that unlocked him. And so I think that’s a really interesting point.
So it was both a highlight for me and also a little bit of a, more of a time miss that we didn’t go through the hard and the mistakes of what that might look like for him and his staff on a day-to-day basis, because I think that’s really interesting as well.
Pat 01:04:19
I like that you referenced coach Karl, because I think at certain points, it kind of echoed the same sentiment that he had in our conversation, the importance of the relationship with the player and how they fit into the whole and maybe your offensive identity or defensive identity. And I think he talked to about learning the player and then also they talked about like a player list as well, that they’d sit down and evaluating their awareness of their skill set and like leaning into what they do to benefit the whole.
Dan 01:04:49
Just to add to your point, there’s two other podcasts that I wanted to point to that circle around what you just talked about where they sit down with each player and they go through their individual advantages with them. How do you create advantages? One, recently this summer, Brook Cups from Centerville High School, they talked about how as a team, they go through and the guys tell the other guys what their advantages are. So coaches and the teammates are doubling down on what their advantages are, super powerful.
And then it was the last year, a couple of years ago, if I remember, but we had Idaho head coach, Alex Pribble on. Coach Pribble talked about how as a staff, they come up with an advantage, basically list for each player and role clarification. And like, here’s what we see as a whole staff that you do great and that are going to help us win and impact winning. And I think those are like such powerful things for a player to like hear and see from coaches and staff how they create advantages and how they can help a team win. So I want to just kind of point to those two as well. I thought we’re good. Yeah.
Pat 01:05:46
Thought coach cups talked really well to him the acceptance piece like coach smart Yes, you know coach smart talked about the two-step mantra he was given this player when he was referencing the Versa climber or anything but Brooke cups as well as they had the little reset button on their Jersey talked about and like just accepting some defeat some failure and being or a bad call Yeah, I call it the effort button the effort button. Yeah one thing before we move on a quote I really liked I think coach smart and he got it from a football program But say it in the least amount of words so they think it in the least amount of thoughts I thought was a really good quote for sure. All right, Dan. We’ll keep it moving here I’ll throw it to you for our second takeaway
Dan 01:06:26
So two fun, one offensive, one defensive side of the ball here for start-sub-sit. I’m going to steal yours. Fair enough. You know, go to your pick and roll angle stuff. I love the question because it’s, you know, you and I were talking about this beforehand and we’re both, you know, preseason trying to think about how we’re going to teach our guys and it’s always, okay, how do we make this pick and roll better? You have the system, you have what you’re trying to do, but all of a sudden guys get out there and there’s whiffing on screens or it’s just like mush. It’s like nothing happens on the ball screen. So how do you really make that better?
And so we’re thinking, you know, the approach, the actual angle and the exit. And as he mentioned, all so important. I love some of the follow-ups with you on just the actual screening was good, some details on what they’re looking at, the back pocket, like those things being super important. And then later on, him getting into the spacing and what you’re doing around it, I think was really impactful as well. We did a breakdown on their offense a couple of years ago with how they spaced off the ball, which made it, they’re empty. So effective. So it was kind of fun to hear him talk about that as well as Texas and they’ve done it Marquette with a ghost that player out of the corner. And as he mentioned, Tyler Colic, if you messed up on that first action on that first ghost, he was at the rim, he’s scoring or he’s spraying it out for shots backside. So I kind of liked the whole conversation, but then hearing some insight from him on the pre-screen action was cool, too.
Pat 01:07:51
Yeah, I think as we were putting this question together too, I was really interested in like the screening angle. And we’ve talked about before, and maybe it’s just like over time, just getting misconstrued by like screening angles and like, well, how many angles really are there? And I think for smart rates, the good point, maybe the angles really change on the scout specific, but otherwise just trying to get that back pocket we’re hearing a lot or fall over like that hot stove screen. And is it really just angles or is it just teaching an angle?
And then from there, we just kind of build out scout specific. But I think at the very end, when we talked about flipping and rescreening, I think what makes the pick and roll so devastating at times, but also so like you said, turn into mush, striking that balance between building the connection between two people. So how much are we maybe going to scheme like always this angle, always this flip versus the players building the synergy between each other and knowing what your guard wants, what your big needs. And when I asked the follow up on flipping versus screening, we had a good conversation with Coach Tabolini. Now we were talking about the hedge and attacking the hedge. And I thought he had a good point that the rescreen is of course very effective against the hedge, but to like constantly kill it requires so much coordination to constantly rescreen that you find itself being more of like a set design or a set call and then like the flow, they’re still just going to try to set it and roll out. That’s where kind of my follow up was again, like how you build the synergy and work on the hips of your bigs and flipping angles, rescreening. And how he thinks about, yeah, just of course, one, teaching and developing and where it lies between it being a set call or empowering your players to just try to solve that on the fly.
Dan 01:09:30
Yet three other shout outs here on podcasts, because we’re just doing it here. But I think there’s a few other things, people we’ve talked to that have spoken well on like the angles of these screens. And I think that’s, you know, what this centered around, but T.J. Saint a year ago was fantastic at talking about that hot stove screen and getting underneath and Dylan Murphy, OCL magic head coach also talked about the volume of screens that they’ll use and trying to just create that first advantage.
And then, you know, we’ve talked about Mike DeGeorge this summer, a decent amount, but also like we had their assistant coach Kyle Beaucher on for a film room session for us for Slapping Glass Plus. And he talked a lot about in that film room, just looking at hips and flipping hips and trying to open it, really like giving their players what they’re looking at is like, look at their hips and if you need to set it for slip, hot stove, re-screen, their hips are going to tell you. And they really talked about the angle that you’re approaching it, as well as, you know, east, west, first, north, south, getting underneath it. So Coach Smart was great. I thought that was a really fun start subset with him overall. Let’s keep this moving, though. And for our third takeaway, I will throw that back to you.
Pat 01:10:42
Yeah, so the third takeaway, I’ll move to your start subset where we talked about pressure defense and generating steals. When we got into the appropriate helps. And then I know, Dan, you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about failure defense. So I kind of took the conversation there.
So I’ll start with my takeaway, which isn’t maybe not necessarily the start subset we talked about. But I thought his thoughts on appropriate help. And you saw it with like, especially the OKC Thunder, how good that rim help was and reading if and when they needed to slide over and help. Versus staying home. And thinking with Coach Van Gundy, we talked about like, the gap helps and kind of reading it is appeal switch. And as there’s a stunt and goes into the level of maybe how badly beat or not beat your on ball defenders, but also the knowing kind of who you’re guarding and their skill set or capabilities. One, it’s always interesting to talk about, but then how these coaches are thinking about it. And how do you go about like trying to drill this or teach this or put your maximizing your guys and reps, we always think about maximizing offensive reps. So they just, again, build this synergy, they know how to play in these two man actions, three man actions. And, you know, how you think about trying to put your defense and failure situations or these appropriate help situations and teaching through this. This is what I’m really curious about, like the failure defense, especially and what you’re really stressed because I think, again, as coaches, we can then try to not rule everything, but try to have an answer for every rotation. And it’s just like, Gray, you’re in failure. And hearing what Coach Smart is really preaching to in these situations, which was just like, you know, kind of fighting for the shot distribution you want.
Dan 01:12:22
Yeah. So the backstory on this, people have watched Marquette play. They’ve been fantastic defensively. Coach Smart historically has had great defenses like from VCU all the way to Marquette. And they’re one of the higher steel generating teams like last year and years in the past. And it’s always interesting to just dive in a little bit to that because it’s conscious stuff. Like you’re teaching that in some level. And so we were thinking of how can you generate steels in these certain ways, blah, blah, blah.
What I liked was when it did get to the appropriate help and that being like the ultimate key thing. And all summer we’ve talked about coaches are wanting great decision makers on offense. That’s like the new fundamental as Luca Bonke talked about on our podcast. Now I think you see a lot too with defensive decision-making being a huge fundamental and appropriate help. Can you decide whether or not you need to go? Like the Thunder, things like that that he brought up. I kind of wrote a note that when you listen to him talk, if you’re just preaching and teaching appropriate help, then a lot of times the steals find you. If you’re in the appropriate help gap, then you’re going to be there for that blind dig behind. You’re going to be there on the XL rotation more likely than not. So I think to his point, you’re thinking from, I guess like first principles, like before you can get a steel, you’ve got to be in the right gap. You’ve got to be in the right spot. And so that appropriate help I thought was so true and important. I liked hearing him talk about it.
Pat 01:13:50
Of course, you have your presses, your aggressive schemes, but yeah, just by improving defensive decision-making, it’s not necessarily going to be scheme-reliant on generating these deals. A lot of times, you can assess the situation appropriately.
I think going back to his reference of Peyton Manning and Ed Reed, there we go. So the point that you just made there too, if you can invest time in these defensive decision-makers and talking and stressing my appropriate help, making them understand scout, driving angles, line drive versus flat drive, all these nuances that go into it, where it’s not scheme-based. It’s not pressing-based or trapping-based in the pick and roll, but these moments that you can capitalize on without forfeiting your defensive identity or your base defense. I think it does boil down to, it’s all situational. It’s not, it’s always this spot or it’s always this movement or this action. It’s more so empowering your players and again going back to building their awareness on the court.
Dan 01:14:51
Yeah. And this would be my last point on this. The topic that I think is interesting within this that we didn’t get to, so it’s not really a miss. It’s just for future podcasts, but recently I’ve heard the term, you know, and coaches talk about on the defensive side, but eye discipline. I think this is something that Jeff Van Gundy is big on. Defensive coaches is the discipline of where your eyes are and how that relates to obviously steals, but being in gaps. And we get players that are positionally pre-season, like, Hey, you should be here. You should be here and talk about, you know, kind of where you’re looking. But I think that’s really interesting when it comes to all this.
Where are you looking? Where are your eyes, you know, help side on the ball in the gap? Are you looking at your defender? You’re looking at the ball. Are you splitting too? I know a lot of coaches talk about the eye discipline being a big part of great help side defenders, really. Pat, we both gave some misses. I know I gave a miss. Is there anything else that you felt we could have went deep around with Coach Smart?
Pat 01:15:44
You know, he talked about he suppressed every possession was at VCU and I got curious about if you’re gonna press on misses Maybe then how he thought about offensive rebounding, you know I know like always this tagging up conversation we can have it every day every night but just if you’re gonna try to press on on misses what he thought about how he offensive rebounded and You know how you establish a press on a miss would have been a follow-up.
I would like to a vast
Dan 01:16:11
Yeah, for sure. I’m sure a lot of good thoughts there. They were terrific at that in those days. Well, this was once again, a fantastic conversation.
We really appreciate coach Smart coming on and for his time today. Wish him the best of luck this season. Thanks everybody for listening and we will see you next time.
Pat 01:16:33
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please make sure to visit Slappin’Glass.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.