Northern Michigan Head Coach Matt Majkrzak joins us for a deep dive into how structure can actually create freedom.
Coach Majkrzak walks through Northern Michigan’s unique approach to scripting games in four-minute segments, pairing substitution patterns with offensive play calls to give players clarity, confidence, and rhythm. Rather than scripting to control players, the goal is to simplify decisions early, allowing creativity, reads, and flow to emerge naturally as possessions unfold.
The conversation explores how layered offense evolves from simple foundations—like cross-screen/down-screen—into modern blends of Princeton concepts, ball screens, staggers, and motion, all while ending in familiar spacing that helps players play fast and free.
Majkrzak also shares insights on fixing flat starts, teaching lock-left defense, crashing the offensive glass with five, and why celebrating “play busts” accelerates player growth more than perfect execution ever could.
A practical, thought-provoking episode on teaching players how to think, not just where to stand.
What You’ll Learn
- How to script games in four-minute segments that align lineups, substitutions, and play calls
- Why scripting can reduce pressure on players while increasing confidence and decision-making
- How layered offense evolves from simple actions into flow, reads, and freedom
- Practical ways to fix flat starts without panic or over-adjusting
- Why celebrating “play busts” can accelerate offensive growth
Transcript
Matt Majkrzak 00:00
What kind of came next was it’s the Ben McCollum, Jim Crutchfield crossover. I think Ben McCollum and Jim Crutchfield, coach more similar than anyone wants to acknowledge or admit.
So McCollum plays and we’re talking Northwest Missouri McCollum plays five guys basically. The only time they sub is maybe one position and then tiredness or some foul trouble. Crutchfield always played 10, but the 10 sub five for five. And so they really were in either unit A or unit B and they’ve changed a little bit. And McCollum was never subbing. So they were only in unit A and it kind of hit me that both of them, despite being very different, are subbing where they’re keeping five core guys together and the continuity of playing together matters.
Dan 00:52
I’m Dan Krikorian and welcome to Slapping Glass, exploring basketball’s best ideas, strategies, and coaches from around the world. Today, we’re excited to welcome Division II Northern Michigan Head Coach, Matt Makarzak. Coach Majkrzak is here today to discuss scripting offensive play calls, layering sets, and thinking deep about sub patterns, and we talk the intricacies of lock left defense, and what to do when your team starts flat during an interesting start, sub, or sit.
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Join the thousands of coaches from around the world who have made the investment in SG Plus at SlappingGlass.com today. And now, please enjoy our conversation with Coach Matt Makarzak. Coach, really appreciate you coming on midseason. I know your middle of conference play, having a great year. Congrats on that. Thank you for making the time. We’re excited to talk to you today.
Matt Majkrzak 02:35
I am really excited to be here. I’ve joked around that my coaching philosophy is like the Slappin Glass all-stars because we just do one thing we stole from that show and one thing we stole from that show. So to get to be on the other end of it’s definitely pretty cool for me.
Dan 02:48
Appreciate that coach. Thank you coach coach. We wanted to start by diving into the theme of calling and scripting games from the offensive side and We’ve talked about it a little bit off-air and before the show of just you and your staff’s mindset and thoughts and philosophies on How you’re scripting and calling games offensively and what that looks like I guess from pregame to early in the game mid game all that kind of stuff So I’ll pause there to throw it to you on calling and scripting games offensively
Matt Majkrzak 03:17
Yeah, it’s probably the most unique thing that we do, you know, right now, offensively, we’re leading the country in offensive rating. It’s almost been validating because I wasn’t sure if what we’re doing is right. And we leaned into it heavier last year. We had four new transfer guards from different NAI and Division II schools. And then this year, we’re playing five freshmen in our top 10. And we started doing it really to just try to make it more simple for those guys and make sure our offense could function and flow in the way that it used to do. And we had more senior heavy, older guards. And obviously, in today’s day and age, I don’t know how often you can stay old. So it almost started with, all right, we’re going to try this for the preseason and see how it works. And we’ve just continued on with it and really dove into it deeper and deeper and leaned on it more and more.
The starting point for the scripted offense was scripted lines. And that was something I think I was on. I coached fourth grade YMCA when I was in high school. And every four minutes, they had to stop and you sub. In fourth grade, we had one kid that could dribble. So you started figuring out that with the one kid that could dribble, we need him in at the end of games. We probably want him in at the start. And then when he’s not in, we probably need to play a little different since we have one kid that can dribble and maybe one kid that can shoot or whatever. Then when I became college coach, I started out at junior college. I thought when we played the right guys together, we played better. It also took a little bit of the emotion out of subbing where you weren’t just, hey, that’s a bad play, get out. And then what kind of came next was it’s the Ben McCollum, Jim Crutchfield crossover.
And it’s funny because I’ve told this to a few different people in a first time. I was like, what do you mean? But I think Ben McCollum and Jim Crutchfield, coach more similar than anyone wants to acknowledge or admit. So McCollum plays, and we’re talking Northwest Missouri McCollum, plays five guys, basically. The only time they sub is maybe one position and then tiredness or some foul trouble. Crutchfield always played 10, but the 10 subbed five for five. And so they really were in either unit A or unit B, and they’ve changed a little bit. And McCollum was never subbing, so they were only in unit A. And it kind of hit me that both of them, despite being very different, are subbing where they’re keeping five core guys together. And the continuity of playing together matters. So this original question of scripted offense, it couldn’t start without the scripted subbing to me, because it kind of worked in that order where we’re like, we’re going to play these lineups together. Once we settled on that, each lineup had different strengths and weaknesses. And we’d always script maybe the first, I think it started the first three, four plays of the game. And in D2 with the media timeouts, maybe the first play coming out of a media timeout. And that was the starting point. And since then, it’s evolved to pretty much the whole game scripted. It’s six plays per four minutes. The first at least 16 minutes of the game. The last four minutes and a half, we have some more suggestions on my sheet that I might use, might not. And then the whole second half is probably more suggestions where we have to decide kind of what we’ve seen and how much we’re sticking with it. If the game goes perfect, I’m just reading down the list. And it’s that simple.
Very rarely does that happen, especially once you get in the conference.
Dan 06:42
OK, coach, so we got to dive in, I think, right there and keep going a little bit deeper. First, where did that philosophy develop from? Now we’ll get more into like what you do with it.
Matt Majkrzak 06:52
It started with, I would stat our offense differently maybe than others do. I would put it into four categories, which we can five, which was, how did we score on a set? How do we score on a set that went into our, let’s call it flow, for lack of a better term, just playing after the set? How do we score in transition? And then how do we score in transition when we played out of our transition? Later on, and I think this is really important and it’s about transition offense, which is the opposite of what we’re talking about.
We took runouts and we removed them from transition. Because if you get a steel layout, that really has very little to do with your actual transition offense. But in most buckets, that gets put into transition. And once we got through it, we figured out we were the best in transition. And then once runouts got taken, it was close. And then our sets were not second, our sets were third, but our sets in the flow was second. So we were best when we didn’t score on our sets and played after the set. And this is six, seven years ago now. And we started going, well, why don’t we do more of that? And then our most effective sets were layup plays. So when we called something, what we all want to call something to get us a layup that was cool. So then kind of by process of elimination, we tried to keep running the most effective things, which tended to be those layup plays. And then it became more important if we’re going to run more of those. Well, it can’t end if we don’t get the layup. So we started throwing on a layer at the end of every layup play to get into the flow naturally. And it was pre-UConn layered offense becoming kind of the thing. I didn’t know it was called layered offense, but I was like, well, what if we run our best stuff, which are layup plays? And if we don’t get the layup, we really spend our time teaching what to do afterwards. And that was kind of the early development of it.
Pat 08:48
First with your six plays per four minutes, is that then when you tie it into your substitution is every four minutes you’re playing a new lineup? And does that line up? You have six plays that you think suit them well.
Matt Majkrzak 09:02
Absolutely. If we can sub in my perfect world, we’d have line up one who plays the first four, line up two which plays the next four, line up three which plays the next four, and then for us, we like if we could go back to line up two maybe, and then back to line up one to finish it. So you’re really only in three lineups the whole time.
The Nova tuning stuff was two lineups. That would be ideal, but we don’t all have 10 players that are that talented. Then in practice, they’re never going to practice out of their normal lineups. So line up one is the starters, they’re going to practice together a bunch, line up two is that first sub, which we usually all coaches keep that consistent. So they’re going to practice together a bunch, and I think where we differ is after that, we start subbing maybe a little more intentional after that first eight minutes than others do, and so each group has their, maybe it’s 12 plays, maybe it’s 18 plays for the starters that they’re practicing all week. It’s not like every week we’re throwing out the 18 things they ran and putting new 18 in. Some weeks we don’t change anything, and maybe we just change order or how we run them a little bit. Some weeks we add five or six plays, maybe we add per week, and then we’ll just jostle around the order we run them in, and I think it’s easier to run the new stuff at the start of games while it’s still fresh, and some of the stuff we’ve ran for four years, we’re going to probably run deeper into the game because they know that, like the back of their hand. It’s adding and subtracting what you don’t like, and then you can also add stuff per opponents, which we do quite a bit of, or maybe re-bring out something we ran earlier in the year against a certain matchup or certain ball screen coverage. We’ve done it with five freshmen, we’ve done it with four transfer guards. We very rarely play bust, and if they do play bust, that’s usually when I stand and clap and cheer on whatever they try to do out of that play bust, because I think that’s the other key. We’re not running anything to run it right, we’re running everything to score, and hopefully if they can score on a way that isn’t the set, that’s when I know they’re starting to figure out our offense.
Pat 11:11
Just on your substitution, you’re not playing in platoons, correct? Are you at the four minute?
Are you getting two to three guys in and then like, so maybe a couple of guys will run eight minutes straight.
Matt Majkrzak 11:22
Yes. And I think that’s, you know, if we had straight 10 and could do it, we would think about it.
I liked the idea of the platooning. The reality is we have the best player in the region, one of the best players in the country. I need him playing 32 minutes, not, you know, 24 or it’s very NBA subbing in a lot of ways. Like we’ll leave our best guys in for eight minutes, get them a long run, you know, especially the guards, I think function better when they get an eight minute stretch and they know they have an eight minute stretch. So they’re not looking to jack up the first shot they get because they know they’re going to get to play longer and they also know if they miss, they’re not coming out. So I think there’s a lot of positives to that scripted subbing that naturally feed into the scripted place.
Dan 12:06
I’d love to dive in a little deeper on the process of putting together the scripted plays, the order, what you decide to run for who, I mean, I know it’s game dependent and player dependent, but is it just you and your staff? How do you come up with the order and why?
Matt Majkrzak 12:19
That’s the fun part to me is like, especially this time of year, we have kind of the group of plays ready for the most part. So the fun part is what order are you running them in?
What’s the thought process going into a game? So like our four man is an all American level player. So we know we need to get him touches. And part of why we’ve embraced this is he’s a 6’6″, 190 pound four that plays point guard about a third of the time, plays the wing about a third of the time, post up about a third. And for us, some of the fun with him is, all right, we’re going to get him at point guard early, or Thursday night, we play a team that pressures us a ton and not giving anything away here. We’ll have three different guys dribble the ball up in the first four minutes. So in those six sets, we’re going to have our four man dribble it up twice, we’re going to have our three dribble it up twice, and we’re going to have the point guard dribble it up twice, so they can’t sit in and really pressure our point guard. So we kind of know that as a start. And then, you know, if you’re going to run something where we use him as a ball handler to pass, we’ll probably run two of those plays to use him as the ball handler to pass. And I’ll tell him, hey, one of the times you should probably turn the corner and look to score on this, but not necessarily say, hey, we’re running this play for you to turn the corner and score. It’s just giving him the option where he knows he’s going to have maybe five ball screens in the first half. And he knows on one of them at minimum, he should turn the corner and go try to dunk it. But he knows he has five coming, he’s practiced it all week. He’s kind of felt out which ones within their coverage, give him the best chance. Because we’ve ran these same plays now against their coverage, two, three times throw practice. And we’ve watched him on film. And now he kind of has a feel of, hey, I think this one is the one I’m going to turn the corner on in this game. But he also can break any of them off if he’s hot. And there’s games where we don’t get to that second layer of him throwing back. If they want to switch ball screens, and they’re going to switch a little guard onto him, he might five straight times just dribble flip into the post. And we might never run any of the rest of the set, because that’s enough of an advantage that we’re happy to play out of that.
Dan 14:29
Yeah, and that was gonna be my follow-up question. What do you do as a staff if, you know, first four minutes, you only get to four of the six sets?
Do you save the other two for later in the game? Do you just cross them off? Like, what do you do when there’s miscellaneous possessions that either, or you get seven or eight possessions in the four minutes and, you know, where do you go for those extra plays?
Matt Majkrzak 14:48
Yeah, the nice part is with the rotations is that starting group has their first six, but then they have a second six and a third six. The starters do. So they have 18. So if we don’t get to play five, play five will definitely come up again, whether that’s in the second half or whether that’s in the second chunk of the first half.
Maybe we start with play five because we love it so much. I do try to get a little simpler as they progress. Play five and six tend to be easier things than play one and two per group. And then we can rerun stuff if we do get through all six. We’ll rerun stuff also all the time. If play two works, we’re probably going to run play two again, especially if we didn’t get to the second or the third layer. Maybe in play two, I love the third layer and that’s why I have it in. It’s not because of even the first two. So we run it, we score on one, we run it again, we score on two. But I know on that one, I really want to get to that third layer because maybe it’s a guard big ghost that I know the other team will struggle with. I’m more likely to kind of keep running that if the third layer is something that we value and unrelated but related. One of the fights is they can’t be running these plays to get through them. They have to try to score on each action or otherwise they really become bad if it’s, oh, we’re just running fake offense, fake offense, real offense. It needs to be real offense the whole way through. And we need to be really comfortable breaking off kind of whatever we’re doing within it.
Dan 16:16
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Pat 17:09
I’d love to sit down layering offensive sets early in the season, how do you fight that battle when installing layers or teaching layers as you’ve worked through this offense, you know, so every preseason like what are you aware of? What do you got to teach? What’s the important things to do? Right? So that the layered offense is effective and it’s weaponized.
Matt Majkrzak 17:30
That’s the hardest part probably is teaching it, and I think the degree we’re doing it right now, that’s the part when I talk to other coaches. I wouldn’t copy what we’re doing because it’s gotten so down the rabbit hole, but you can take chunks of what we’re doing.
It’s taken me a while to figure out how to explain this, but the easiest way to explain layered offense in general is the cross-screen down-screen. That’s been around forever. Well, the cross-screen down-screen, just any form of it, the cross-screen is to try to get a layup for your big guy. That’s the best shot you can probably get in basketball as a layup for a good big guy. Whenever someone came up with cross-screen down-screen, the first option is that, and you want the first option because it’s the best one. The second option is your best shooter coming off a down-screen and shooting a three. Of our many sets, I bet we run 20 forms of cross-screen down-screen. Now, they might be out of cyclone action or all these fancy things that we’ve all added to start it to make it a little different. But at the base of it, we are running cross-screen down-screen, 30 percent of the possessions. The first thing we’ll do the first day is teach cross-screen down-screen and tell them that you got to look in at the cross-screen because we want a layup.
If we don’t get it, you got to set that down-screen and you have to throw it to the guard and shoot it, or the big who’s setting the down-screen is going to slip in, and that’s a better look than this three-point shot. Now, they have option one cross-screen, option two slip, option three hit the down-screen guy. I think if you’re coaching youth basketball, you would explain cross-screen down-screen in that same way. Where I think we try to get better is after that, if you hit the down-screen guy and he doesn’t have a three. Now, what do you do? To me, you can ball-screen, that’s probably the most common and the easiest.
We’ll teach day one ball-screen and how to read that ball-screen, which is relatively simple, but there’s a big low, so it’s a little bit different than a traditional spread ball-screen. You’re going to set it, you’re going to roll. What does that guy low do? He’s got a couple options. Maybe day one, we start with cross-screen, down-screen, followed by a ball-screen, and that big is going to read it, and we’re going to shake on the backside, regardless of which way he goes, and the other guy has to fill that corner. Then maybe day two, we add, after that, why don’t you catch it and hit the big guy, and now we’re going to get into traditional Princeton split action. If we can just run the most basic cross-screen, down-screen with Princeton concepts and spread ball-screen concepts with the big low, we just ran a lot of offense that’s hard to guard. If we have, let’s say, 20 different cross-screen, down-screen options throughout the year, and we end them with just those two actions, that’s an awful lot. Then out of that, we’ll teach hit the big, now we’re going to fade-screen for that shooter, because generally your shooter set the cross-screen.
Matt Majkrzak 20:32
Instead of it being a pinned-down Princeton, it’s fade-screen Princeton. Well, now out of that fade-screen, we have a bunch of different options.
You can slip it, you can hit it, and then back-screen the big guy after you hit the fade-screen, you can go into a hand-off. It’s just teaching the same boring things over and over and over again. But I think where the teaching really comes in is how you play after, in this example, the cross-screen, down-screen.
Pat 20:59
The flow the after the play action how important is it? I know like that your guys are familiar I guess when you’re doing all the layered sets that it kind of always ends in a similar spacing So that like you said then they know they can get to the spread ball or the Princeton Learning rather than you have multiple sets But then maybe sometimes they’re ending on the 45 empty versus the middle with I guess the importance of putting them always in a familiar Spacing maybe to end however you want to do your actions cross-screen down screen, etc
Matt Majkrzak 21:31
I think it’s the most important part of our offense, is how we end. So whenever I see, like, let’s just take a Twitter clip of a cool play, I start with, okay, how do we end this in a way that, is it an end that we need to add? So if everything ended with the same boring cross-screen, down-screen, we wouldn’t be that hard to guard. But, you know, sometimes we need more spread ball screens. We need more empty side ball screens. This year we end a ton of them with staggers. So it ends in a stagger action. And then we have about four or five different things we do out of that stagger. So if we can run a cool play and it can end with a stagger, I love that now. So if we can find a way to have an end in that, we try to incorporate that as much as we can, because that stagger end has been really good for us.
We’ve tried to add more stuff where it ends in the middle. A lot of the teams in our league are pretty good at icing or hard hedging and keeping you on a side. So I’m trying to have more plays end in the middle third. So we can get in our ball screens more out of that middle third. But when I’m adding a play, and we probably add a normal amount or maybe even less plays than others do, we run so much, we don’t need to keep adding that much. So when we add something, it’s usually pretty intentionally thought out that the start is something worth adding, the middle is something worth adding, and it has to end in a way that’s comfortable for our guys. We can’t just add a random play where they’re in an uncomfortable end.
Dan 23:00
When you are adding or layering things in is the ability to give a really good defense fits by having them to guard these base actions that are hard to guard. So let me explain.So ending in dribble drive motion concepts, first ending in sort of Princeton-esque or pick and roll concepts, like there’s all these kinds of base concepts that you can end in or play out of. And when you go to play an opponent that maybe guards cross-screen, down-screen as well, or there’s just not as much of an advantage, having these abilities to then, well, we’re going to end or we’re going to have this last layer be more dribble drive base tonight versus spread pick and roll base versus Princeton base. I guess getting to those big bases that in those third layers or second layers attack different types of good defenses.
Matt Majkrzak 23:45
For sure. I think that’s where the fun part of that’s where we’re coaching the same way everyone else coaches the first, you know, 10, 12 seconds of the possession were probably a little different because we’re running stuff a lot.
But in practice, what we’re really working on is all right, they took that away, which most good teams do. And now we got to quickly flow into spread ball screen a little bit more dribble drive. Maybe we really want more possessions to end in post touches for our best player. And so it’s a little bit of that part can be played as I’m but a lot of that still just coaching old school basketball and, you know, well, one week we’ll work on. All right, they’re really aggressive and ball screens going over. So at the end, let’s get no ball screen every time, but let’s get into a razor action out of that ball screen. And that’s why as much as I love sets, I can’t stand sets that last 20 seconds. It’s got to be like 12 seconds of Hey, let’s get a bunch of movement. Let’s get a look at a layup, maybe a look at a three, and then let’s get into something where we can play. And, you know, we’ll probably have 10 possessions a game and in flex, like old school tight flex, because they know that that sets last layer is tight flex, you know, we’ll change it within reason. But at the same time, we might break that flex off on the first down screen for the point card and just get into a ball screen, if that’s kind of what the opponent’s weakness is. So there’s still a lot of traditional coaching, it just starts with something different.
Dan 25:15
When are you doing this in practice, right? Is it intro to practice? You’re gonna add a wrinkle or is it 5 on 0 every day to go through stuff? How are you continuing to add layers and add plays and script these things? Do you go through the script with the team in practice so they know what’s coming in the game? Like, how does that look in practice?
Matt Majkrzak 25:33
Thats probably the best question in the sense of I think that’s the most important thing and what I like about it the most. Mondays is try stuff. We’ll try more or clean up the previous weekend. So if one of our plays that we’ve ran for four years, today’s Monday, we’re not going to run it today.
Our guys got it. We’re fine. But we’ll try some creative things and then we’ll also run the stuff that we ran last week. Maybe see if we can read different things out of it or I might have a suggestion how to end it. But the real core of this is from day one, we don’t do hardly any 5 on 0. It’s all 5 on 5. And I am very passionately celebrating play busts. And if they can play bust and do something good, that’s when I get really, really excited. If they get a layup on the play, I’m bored. I want them to try to explore things that are not the play and to be players within it. I don’t think our guys play robotic at all. And I don’t think scouting wise, I could hand the opposing coach what we’re doing. And I don’t know how much it would help because we’re still reading all these motion actions within it. That staggers never a, all right, we’re curling the first and fading the set. They’re playing out of those actions. And then what we do is we’ll present the script on Tuesday and we have Tuesday, Wednesday practice where we’ll run through a Tuesday. We’ll run through a Wednesday. We film every practice. I watch every single film of our practice on both sides. If they run it right, we don’t show it, but we’ll show them the new stuff every time. We’ll talk about where they could have read it better within it. And now I’m not talking to random players. I’m talking to one guy who knows he’s going to run that play Thursday night. And he knows he’s going to run at the third play from minute 12 till eight. And he knows what they’re going to do against it. We talked about it and we’re telling him the exact right read on Tuesday. And then Wednesday, he’s going to go get that exact right read done. And by shoot around on Thursday, where’s the only time we do five on Oh, I have maybe three things. Cause I’ve watched practice on Wednesday and I’m like, Hey, you really should look to curl that first screen. Cause I think it’ll be there. And hopefully that’s not the one play. Hopefully he’s going to be in a stagger six times. And in those six times that our three men is in the corner curling, hopefully one time he can take advantage of the fact they’re switching off ball by setting it up and back cutting, but he’s looking for it all six times. And then all of a sudden we get in a game and he makes that read. And you’re like, awesome. Where I think it really, the end of the years we’ve won two of the last three conference tournaments. I think the difference between us and a lot of the set teams is I think we’re more of a motion team. Cause by the end of the year, we’re not talking about against switching back, cutting that cause we’ve talked about it all year. And now he’s just reading defense because we’ve taught them how to read defense out of set structure, but it really just becomes motion.
Matt Majkrzak 28:34
And they’re reading a stagger, just like all the old school motion guys, you know, used to teach. It’s just maybe a little bit more organized and a little less random.
Pat 28:43
Two follow ups for you. One, talking about the practice, and you try to avoid 5-on-0, if you’re going heavy 5-on-5, the install, I mean, I know it’s going to be ugly at first, but is it really just kind of giving them not everything, but these are the couple actions, here’s where it’s going to end up, let’s go, and teaching through. I guess, how do you think about installing it within 5-on-5?
Matt Majkrzak 29:05
Whenever we get new assistants, I think they look at me like I’m insane. So I’ll put in like this really deep layered set. I’ll be like, okay, we’re starting with this, and then we’re going to do this, then we’re going to do this, and then in the follow-up, I want you to read this, and I on purpose, early in the year especially, I’m going to say it that fast, and I’m going to try to almost have them confused, and then I’m going to say run it, and if they ask questions, I’m like, no, no, just run it, run it, run it, run it, go fast. I want them to realize that play-busting doesn’t matter, and doing something wrong within the play doesn’t matter, and I don’t think that we ever yell at kids for doing a play wrong, even now in season, because I don’t care.
I just want them to keep going fast, and then maybe they do something wrong, and then that stagger becomes a pin down instead of a stagger, because that guy went to the right corner instead of the left corner. So a lot of it is just letting it happen fast and seeing what it looks like, and then when we watch the film, that’s really when we’ll teach it. So most of the install is dried up, run it once or twice, fast, probably wrong, and then watch it, and half the time, something wrong they did, it becomes the new play, and I’m like, oh no, he went to the right corner instead of the left corner, so that stagger, I thought, becomes a pin, and he back-cut it for a layup because the guy wasn’t in help. All right, that’s the new play now, and I want them to think of this in terms of, I’m giving you something to try to get you a layup if it doesn’t work, just play basketball fast and free, and I used to try to teach it too, right? And now I almost want to teach it wrong, and then within that, we’ll clean up the areas that could lead to turnovers. One thing I’m really strict with is whatever the first pass is has to be right. I don’t care at all about the fourth pass, but if we’re gonna run a zipper entry, the play name starts with zip, so it’s gonna be a zipper entry, that zipper better be perfect. That one, there’s no negotiation, the point guard better get it up fast, and we better get the zipper entry right. If after that we do something wrong, it usually works out better than if we do something right.
Pat 31:09
If we go back to game management scripting games with taking in these four minute chunks, what is early foul trouble for you? I guess it’s like a guy gets two. Do you let them run out that four minutes? Maybe the second unit will be a different lineup. What is your risk tolerance with early foul trouble?
Matt Majkrzak 31:29
I am not a take guys out with two files at all. We’ve had a kid pick up his fourth in the first half. Part of it is, as much as we talk about scripting stuff, we like being the last eight minutes. We’d like playing or whoever’s playing the best. If a guy’s going to have, for the most part, most players, if they have four files, you probably don’t want to be in that last eight minutes anyways, because they’re going to be playing tentative.
Now, your best players, that’s different. Our stud picked up two in a game, we’re up 20 the other day. For maybe one of the first times in his career, I didn’t play him the rest of the first half. Just because we’re up 20, he’s got two. He was kind of in a mood. I’m like, you know what? Let’s just not put him in a spot to pick up his third when everything’s going right and give them any momentum. But for the most part, I’m going to let our guys play their normal rotation. I think that’s been really helpful. They don’t look over at me much. The last 10 games, I don’t remember if I’ve taken a kid out of their normal rotation. So they’re playing completely fearless and they know that they’re going to get their time regardless. And so they’re allowed to play aggressive. They’re allowed to keep screening hard, even if they have two files, because they know I’m not going to take them out that third file. The only thing we will do is leave a kid in if they’re flowing. And if a guy’s playing really well, then we’ll skip a rotation sometimes with someone and we’ll leave that kid out there for a little bit longer than maybe what the script called for.
Dan 33:25
Coach, this has been awesome so far. We could just keep going down this rabbit hole, but we do want to shift 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, and sit one of them speaking of rotations and lineups. And then we’ll discuss from there. So coach, if you’re set, we’ll dive into this first one. Perfect. Okay. First one has to do with flat starts, we’re calling it. Your team comes out no energy, game plan’s not going right. Your team just doesn’t have it that night for whatever reason. Walkthrough was great, practices were great, but then they come out and it’s just flat. It’s not good. And we’re going to take out right now the call quick timeout and sort of get them refocused. These are going to be three tactical adjustments you could try to make to sort of light the fire. So Start, Sub, or Sit to fix a flat start. Option one is on the defensive end, adding some defensive aggression, maybe trap a ball screen, press, whatever it would be. So defensive aggression. Option two is speaking of what we’re talking about in the first bucket, but is more joy sticking of the offense, or we’re going to give the ball to this player in the spot, we’re going to go to the free throw line, we’re going to get this player touch to hopefully get our team going. Or option three is going back to changing or mixing up a sub pattern. Certain guys aren’t playing well to start, we’re going to mix up the sub patterns and see if we can light a spark that way. So Start, Sub, Sit, getting rid of the flat start, defensive aggression, joy sticking the offense, or substitution pattern.
Matt Majkrzak 34:55
Well, I would have to sit substitution patterns based on everything I just said. Yeah. I do think it backfired sometimes. And it’s not like we’ve always played this way. I’ve done it. But then you’re blaming in a way a certain group of guys. And I don’t like them thinking in those terms. I want the blame to be the team.
And the worst thing that sometimes happens is you change your rotation pattern. The next group plays well. And now for the rest of the game, it’s in your mind and everyone’s mind. Wait, that group is good and this group’s bad. And I’ve seen that backfire later in game. I will start defensive aggression. I think it’s the easiest thing to change is to be more physical, fly around more. And we all get a little scared to do it because usually they’ve hit some threes or something’s gone the other team’s way that causes them to get that lead. And the natural tendency is to get conservative. And maybe once you get better and once more, you realize like, no, no, no, that’s when you got to crank it up and take even more chances and get them out of flow, whatever that means, zone press, just grabbing more, just be more physical, like kind of blindly physical. We’ve done that some. I think just changing the rhythm for the other team and then also offense. I like doing that going to someone, but you get in that same problem where if I go to our best player at 16 in the first half, how are we going to survive the next 36 minutes? My dream scenario is we don’t have to go to our best player at all. The real scenario is hopefully we go to our best player in the last eight minutes of the game after we’ve shared it and had energy and moved it. And what I do think you can do sometimes is change your offense to either be more ball movement just to get the ball popping more. Because sometimes when things are going bad, you tend to stick too much or play a little hero ball, which makes logical sense, but isn’t the right way. Or that’s where we’ll go faster. So we run some and that’s when we’ll turn the tempo up and go, all right, if we’re going to lose, let’s not go down kind of soft. Let’s go down aggressive. And so I would sub it, but I think if you do the offense, those are the better ways to early in a game, you come up flat, change the rhythm is to either go faster or to just get ball movement with pace and just kind of yell about violent cuts and violent screens, similar to the defensive adjustment.
Dan 37:23
Yeah, great answer. This question arises from Pat and I just both going through this ourselves as coaches. I think everybody at some point during the year goes through this a couple of times.
And for you, what are things that you’ve learned that you think help pregame that takes it so it’s you’re not starting flat? Because, you know, you’ve got sort of a structured approach to the game, the substitution patterns, the play calls. How are you making sure they’re revved up and ready to go so that start isn’t flat from the walk through the bus, the pregame speech, all that stuff before you get on the court.
Matt Majkrzak 37:55
I would have given you a completely different answer a year ago. It’s the one thing that we program wise changed the most this year. And I think it’s been the best thing we’ve done is we talked a little bit off air, like the culture football stuff. Every football coach who’s good, 100% of them only talk about process. And they talk in about this voice. They’re not super high or low. And I think a lot of the new school basketball coaches are the same. I’ll use the extremes again. Hurley is the same because he’s psycho 100% of the time. The column is the same. He’s calm 100% of the time. Church is the same guy every time. So I think with that, the flaw to me of arts, two highs and two lows, wasn’t games were low, it was the games were high. So if you start letting your team think that the shooter out where they’re all yelling and like, let’s go. And then you go on and you give the big pregame speech and they come up with their hair on fire. And you start that game 20 to four, naturally you and every player on the team is going to think, well, that’s what we have to do every game. And that’s not replicatable. You can’t do it. So to us, it’s been kind of that slow, 80% burn, 100% of the games is better than these kind of high, low, because if you want to be high every game, I think it fails more times than not. And if it’s the best way to coach NFL football players at Georgia or Alabama or Indiana, it’s probably the best way to coach D2 basketball players in Northern Michigan. And it’s not my natural personality. I’m fiery. I’m high energy. I love the pregame. I love the, this is our rival. I hate them. Let’s go. And I’ve had to fight that in me big time. Because again, if you just look at the best coaches, they’re not that way. They’re
Pat 39:46
We’re talking about flat starts, but if we kind of look at going back to your offense and these four minute windows, we talked about early fouls. You’re going to write it out. What do opponents do or what takes you out of maybe these kind of scripted four minute segments, whether you think like, all right, we got to strip down plays, we got to maybe add a seventh player, take out a six, change the six. What is that will affect your scripted philosophy the most?
Matt Majkrzak 40:12
Again, it’s the right question because everybody has a plan now for taking us out of it. Everybody we play in our league and we’re going the second time around it. I don’t know what everyone’s going to try, but no one guards us normal anymore. Everybody has something, whether that’s really aggressive pressing or zone or hard hedging, which they haven’t done before or switching five, or we get switching off ball all the time now, because most of our sets are off ball related. And the biggest thing we have to do is we have to be ready to attack anything that is they’re not normal.
So if we get pressed, I don’t want to run a play. I want to score a layup or shoot a three in the first eight seconds of the possession and just go as fast as we can, right down their throats and shoot. And then crash. If they’re in zone, we don’t run any sets. We just pass around and I say, shoot a three every possession and crash. If they’re trying to hard hedge, we try to kind of mock it all year and be like, if you aren’t hedges, we’re going to go flat. We’re going to set up all streaming. We’re going to hit the slip and we’re going to play four on three or screen and roll and play four on three. And if anyone wants to play us four on three, we will never run a set. We’ll just run that every possession. We try to, whatever it is, that’s kind of that adjustment pre-plan and almost go the opposite of what we’re normally doing, saying that that’s hard because you don’t always know what’s coming. And that’s where sometimes it takes, you know, you get to that media and you’re like, Oh, thank God we got to the first media is I can calm everyone down and go out all they’re doing is are hedging us and rotating out guys. We’re going to come out of this time out. We’re not going to run our set that we have planned. We’re going to run this and I’m getting rid of these two sets. Cause I just added two simple ball screens to attack whatever they’re doing. But these four will still work. Just know at the end of them, this is kind of what we’re looking to pick on. And if people do something that I would call extreme, we’ll just play out of their extreme and not worry about the script or whatever else. It’s almost like counter what we always do.
Pat 42:11
You mentioned crashing offensive rebounding, and in preparation, we know you guys like to send five, and we can’t resist a tagging up or sending all five conversation. So offensive rebounding philosophy, sending five, what’s the discipline you demand with sending five and building kind of your transition defense off of it?
Matt Majkrzak 42:32
it’s new this year. I’ve wanted to try it forever. We’ve tried it in the preseason and this year we stuck with it. We crashed five every shot. Last I checked, we’re leading synergy and transition defense points per possession, like first in the whole country in D2.
And we’re also getting 38% of our offensive rebounds back, which last year I think it was in the twenties. So our transition defense got way better and our offensive rebounding got way better. I think those things go hand in hand now that I’ve seen it for a year. We’re just going, there’s some bad crashes. We’re not trying to go under. We’re not tagging up to like, it’s not like the air and fern system tag up stuff, but it definitely is like that. It’s crash, fill the wall, put pressure on them. We’ll let our point guard pick up full court, some out of that, not every time, but we definitely do it. Like, I know you had Sundance on earlier. I’m a Green Bay alum. So I know him pretty well and their numbers have done the same thing. Ours have their transition defense has gotten way better. Their offensive rebounding percentages have gotten way better. I really hope everyone doesn’t do it. And if people do do it, we’re going to have to make another adjustment and start running more. And whenever we play the crash five teams, part of the script accounts for we’re going to run exit scripted running. Hey, we’re putting this group in, they’re going to crash five and we’re going to have our best group in to run. And we’re going to run for four minutes because if they want to crash five, we got to make them pay on the other end. So I went different ways with that, but it’s been probably the best thing we’ve done. And you know, it’s been something that I think more and more coaches are doing. I do think you have to be good and you have to be deep. You know, obviously we have really good players and we’re playing 10 guys. It allows us to do that. I don’t know if every team could just say, Hey, we’re going to start crashing five. But if you have the athletes and the talent and the depth, it’s been pretty good for us.
Pat 44:21
How do you the accountability piece of it to get guys to go every time and then what do you think that four-minute? Substitution pattern like how does that benefit you think in your ability to continually or consistently read crash 5
Matt Majkrzak 44:35
I think it obviously helps because you’re playing more depth. I think it helps because no one’s out there for longer than eight, and the eight guys know that they’re in there for eight, but they’re also going to be held accountable to go hard for eight. It’s something we talk about. If you’re going to play eight minutes in a row, 16 to eight, you better not let up from 10 to eight, or I won’t trust you to play eight in a row anymore. That’s a real conversation we have.
The rebounding thing, it’s been really easy. We play a ton of the live, half-court, full-court, but a lot of half-court live. We don’t do many drills. We very rarely drill anything. We just change the rules of five on five in the half-court. If you don’t go, you get yelled at. We’ve been a top 10 defensive rebounding team, I think, for the last four or five years, and we’ve been really, really small. We’ve still been top 10 in it because we send five to the defensive glass with relentless pursuit. For us, it was just now letting them do it on offense as well. In our practice, you don’t get yelled at for a lot. You can play bust, you can do whatever you want, but if you turn it over or you don’t crash in now on offense or defense, it is stop practice, crash. Early in the preseason, some of our scrimmages, we did a lot of inter-squad scrimmages to try to teach the crashing and to try to teach the pace in the sets. It was not only I would stop the inter-squad, I’d sub you out, even though we don’t do that anymore, but we did it early. I’d show it on film three times. By the end, if you were the one guy who had three missed crashes, it became such a big deal that you had to change. We have a lot of negotiables on both sides of the ball. The crashing every time on both sides and the turning it over are not in that mix of negotiable things.
Dan 46:22
When you say crash a defensive glass, box out versus crash and go get it philosophy. Like, could you go a little deeper on that?
Matt Majkrzak 46:29
I personally don’t like boxing out. I think it started with, we switched five for two years in a row, every ball screen. And so we constantly ended up cross-matched with our guards on bigs because everybody tried to pick on it. And that was the first year we were, I think we finished sixth in the country in defensive rebounding percentage. Because we were so worried about it. Everyone said, if you switch, you’re not going to defensive rebound.
And we started teaching basically, guards hold the big off and bigs run in there and grab it. Like, go take it. And, you know, there’s some subtleties to it. You got to stop at 15 feet. You can’t run in every time. But every time our five are going towards the rim 100% of the time, if you challenge a shot, that’s the hardest one to teach. They don’t always get back into play. But again, we’ll show that every single time on film, if you don’t do it. And we get good at that stuff. And just by having five in the fight, having tough kids, you know, preaching toughness over and over again, we just tend to win a lot of those balls. And I always feel like every half time I go in, I’m like, our defense rebounding sucks. And then I look at the stat sheet. I’m like, well, they got three, but all three hurt our soul. And it’s definitely one of those things. I think it has to become part of your culture. And that was why this offensive rebounding thing, I think transitioned so well for us. Because now it’s, I mean, if the other team gets a ball, you would think the world has ended by looking at the faces of not me, like, I’m actually better at our staff. Those two guys are convinced every time we give up a rebound on either side, that we’re the softest team in the country and have no effort. And I’m like, guys, we out rebounded by 16 today. And they’re like, yeah, but we could add another 12 if we just would have grabbed it or if we would run a little harder. And now the players are there, which is the key. And it’s like every time another team gets a rebound, we think we got fouled and it’s the rest fall. They made a bad call on the out of bounds, because certainly it’s our ball or an active God happened to allow him to get rebounded. That’s the mindset that I think has helped more than anything else. Because we are not big by traditional standards and we’re not bouncy by traditional standards, but we do a heck of a job at rebounding.
Pat 48:45
All right, coach, our last start subset for you has to do with the lock left defense, and we’re going to call this one our tough to teach. So tough to teach with the lock left defense.
So option one is just the on the ball angles of the on-ball defender. There are angles within the lock left defense, the actual ball screen coverage within the lock left defense, or your help side rotation within the lock left defense. Tough to teach.
Matt Majkrzak 49:16
to teach. Start the help side rotation. That’s why we’ve done it every year as part of what we do and that we change how extreme we’re lock left. This is the least lock left principle we’d ever been.
And a big part of it is that it’s hard to get them to be in gaps perfectly on the right side of the floor so that you’re running a traditional no baseline gapping defense on that side. And then if you’re on the left side of the floor, loading up to the ball and being ready for baseline drives, I think that’s been really hard to teach because in a way they’re kind of opposite things. Ball positioning, really easy. So I’ll sit that because you’re just staying on right hand. How old guys always play each other when they play pickup. It’s pretty easy to be right to left. So staying on the right, I don’t think that was a problem for us at all and never really is. The ball screen coverage sub, I think that’s hard, but in a way it’s similar. So depending what you do, but for the most part of your pure lock left, you’re jumping right on any ball screen so you’re icing the left side, the right side, you’re in drop or hedging. I think you can go either way and the middle you’re weakening. So in a way you’re doing the same thing as the on-ball guard either way. And if you’re in drop coverage, you’re doing the same thing as the big either way. So if you do it that way, I think it’s easy, maybe even easier. However, the problem is it limits you almost having to do it that way, which is the other reason that we’re not doing it because I didn’t think we were a great ice team this year and I didn’t want to ice the left side of the floor. And once you go to not icing the left side of the floor, the whole thing kind of falls apart. I know there’s ways to do it. I know other people that do it a little bit, but to me, if you’re going to really do it, you got to kind of be all in on all the facets of it. And if you’re not willing to do that, I think it’s hard to do parts of it in that way. Saying that, I’ll never have a year where we won’t teach it the first month because I think the first month of the season, you just learn so many good habits about how good players are right-handed versus left-handed, how bad the passing is with the left. All the principles that make it good, I think, are worth knowing and teaching. I just don’t know if you can do the full system if you’re not fully
Pat 51:40
committed. I’d like to follow up on the help side rotations.
It feels like it can be two different coverages off the ball. When I’m teaching, whether it’s forcing baseline now, that rotation versus now we’re forcing left because the left hand’s taking middle, what have you learned about trying to work through that rotation with your team? I’ve learned that it’s hard.
Matt Majkrzak 52:00
Because traditionally, balls on the right wing, you’re taking away baseline and you want that middle defender to be locked in at the elbow, and your whole defense is set up to drive middle, bluff, get back, or whatever, everyone runs it a little different, but where if you’re on that left wing, what I really wanted to do out of it, and this one I feel easy talking about because we’re not doing it, what I really want to do is ball this left wing, put it over there and not let it out, so deny the reversals and force those left baseline drives into double teams, and see if players can make those passes with their left hand, and just constantly shove everyone to that baseline. I coached Junior College for one year, I went back 100%, we would work on it every day, and even though it’s hard, we’d get good at it, we’d probably have a call on that side, whatever, blue, whatever you want, and then once it’s on that side, we would just go to denials, force it, go baseline, and make those guys make decisions while driving baseline on the left hand side of the floor.
In our league, the guards are too good, going baseline, making plays left or right, and that’s the number one reason we went away from it. I think you can do the full thing, but it is going to take a bunch of work because you are in two different defenses at the same time, and I think it’s difficult, I don’t think it’s something you can just do randomly. I do think there is a time and place to run the whole system, and one of these years I’m going to do it. One of these years we’ll have the right personnel, I’ll be in the right mindset, but if you did it, I think it would work really well, force baseline on the left side and be more conservative on the right side.
Pat 53:37
When on the right side and forcing left is the help really heavily dependent on. Bluffing and being able to basically square off the penetration.
I guess when would you have the help actually come at the rim or what do you think at all about like peel switching, trying to like level off the ball.
Matt Majkrzak 53:55
Yeah, the Dave Smart stuff, Dave Smart didn’t and won all those championships in Canada. They would peel. So they would run at the ball, and then they would have the guy guarding the ball, go to the weak side, and they would fly and rotate. I don’t know if I’d ever have enough courage to do that.
So for us, it was a lot of like bluff, get back, try to get him to the left side and go vertical on wallops. One thing I will say when we studied it and thought about doing it, if you log how well teams shoot the ball from the left side, outside of like uncontested layups, you will be horrified how bad teams are. Our team, other teams, I mean, it is like, it gets pretty scary, like 28% on like four foot shots, I think was what I counted if you could get them outside the charge circle. And then the right hand shots there, teams shoot really well. So there’s something to be said for just get them left, and then make them finish over a late wall up going to their left. Also, I did it with our guys, whatever we teach it, how many right handed players can dribble to their left and throw that hook pass back to the right corner, our guys zero, they all threw it out of bounds the first time I had them do it. So you can take the right corner guy and run all the way over to challenge the shot at the rim. If they do drive left middle, where going right, our guys pretty good, they can throw that hook pass that corner pretty effortlessly. So that’s the concept of it. I think it’s the right concept. I think that I’ve said this, the best way to play defense to me is obvious. It’s the force baseline, old school, Texas tech, drive baseline, trap it, rotate out of it. Houston, I was like, that’s the best way to play defense if you can do it. But it’s the hardest. I think the lock left might be the second best way because you’re getting enough of that without fully going down that pathway. We don’t do any of it, partly because I don’t think we have good enough defenders to obviously pull it off.
Dan 55:55
One of the reasons we wanted to ask you this question is, you know, talking before the show and prepping, you’ve done this and then you’ve gone away from doing it and just sort of like, why? And you said something interesting earlier, it’s that it’s worth teaching and you’ll teach a lot of these concepts early the first month to your team, because it’s good for them to know.
What then are you doing after the first month to say, okay, these are the concepts, but we’re going to actually do this and we’re going to keep these things? Like, are you communicating to your team that you’re keeping versus not keeping?
Matt Majkrzak 56:26
Yeah, we’ll use the lock left example, but I think you could go everything this way. It could be a little, you could do that with crashing five. You can do it for a month and then be like, nope, we’re crashing three, but I want you three to crash that way or whatever. And that’s why we love trying stuff, which is part of why we like to show so much because I like anything, the weirder, the better for me, and then we’re going to try it. And then at the end of it, we’re going to go, yeah, no, that didn’t work or yes, we’re doing it.
So the lock left stuff, we’re teaching it all. And then all of a sudden we go, the ball screens, we’re not going to ice the left side anymore. And we have to be no baseline on both sides. That was this year how we got out of it. We just said, hey, we’re not going to ice. We’re still weak in the middle. We’re still in drop coverage on the right side. But on the left side, we’re no longer icing. We’re going to stay no base side and we’re going to drop on that side as well. And also no longer do you guys need to, I forgot even what our call was early in the year. We’re not calling that anymore. So you don’t need to load up to the ball. You guys can stay in your normal gaps and then we got to get to the elbows more. So about a month in, we made that change. I don’t think you can change often in the middle of the season. You get one or two major shifts, I think, but you can’t do a thousand of them. But for us, that was a pretty easy theory. And then we said, hey, but all the stuff we talked about with rim verticality and trying to stay down when they’re driving to their left, you want to stay on the floor and get to a vertical wall up. If they’re driving right, you want to cut them off and force the spin back. All that stuff’s still real and we still believe in all that. We’re just not going to do all of the ball screen coverages and all of the load up stuff. But I think we still got a lot out of it.
Pat 58:05
For sure. With weakening in the middle third, have you found, or is it maybe just straight big man dependent, the level of aggression in terms of if they’re going left, you talked about percentages of passing or being able to make passes, is it better like we’re gonna weak, but we’re gonna be aggressive, it’s hard for them to like hedge it, it’s hard for them to make that pass, or we’re gonna lateral hedge, or we’re gonna drop because the deeper they go, the harder the left-hand pass becomes.
I guess, have you found the level of your big within the weakening defense to have any impact on the left, or was it more just if your big’s capable or not?
Matt Majkrzak 58:41
Yes. And the biggest thing, so traditionally those middle third ball screens are set for the other team’s best player. I mean, that’s a lot of those flats. They’re not setting flats as much for random guards. It’s usually the other team’s best guard.
And in our league, maybe more so than other leagues, but I think this is true, the best players shoot going to their left, best right-handed players shoot pull-ups going to their left a lot better. And they pass and get to the rim going left worse. So I think with that weakening in the middle third, we’ve definitely had to get higher on those whatever you’re going to drop or show or whatever you’re calling it, because it’s kind of an ice, but it’s not. We’ve had to get higher on those, maybe then have to get on the wing ball screens. Because I think in the middle, if that guy can get to his left downhill and walk into a three, they shoot it pretty well. And even though it’s a pull-up shot, I don’t know if we’re as happy with them shooting that pull-up shot as we are others. And we got crushed two years ago on pull-up shots in general. We force all these off the dribble jumpers, but they’d make them all the time. And we’ve definitely gotten higher in our coverage, particularly in the middle third, because you almost want to be higher left because they’re going to shoot it more, and you can be lower right because they’re going to drive it more. And it’s definitely been a change in something that I think we’ve actively noticed that I didn’t anticipate at all, but something we’ve definitely learned.
Dan 01:00:11
Coach, you’re off the start-sub-sit hot seat. Thank you for going through those with us. That was a ton of fun. We’ve got a final question to close the show. Before we do, congrats again on the great start and all the success so far this season. We wish you guys best luck the rest of the way, but thank you very much for coming on today and being so open. This was awesome.
Matt Majkrzak 01:00:29
Thank you. Yeah, no, it’s so I mean, like I said, it’s so cool for me.
And when college basketball, we can all get a little negative about the day in and day out. So you get tired, you get whatever. So whenever I get to do like things that are just cool and awesome. And, you know, picturing me seven years ago, it’s you’re like, okay, this is pretty cool. And try to enjoy those moments. So there’s been a lot of fun.
Dan 01:00:48
Thank you, Coach. Coach, our final question to close the show is what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career as a coach?
Matt Majkrzak 01:00:56
Yeah, fortunately, by listening to this a lot, I’ve thought about this probably more than I should have. It probably occupies a weird space in my head and I think the answers, you know, changed every now and then.
The real answer, because there’s a lot of, you know, you’d love to say people and think people and that’s probably the real answer, but I think the more relevant answer is COVID happened after my first year as a head coach here, second year as a head coach and the world shut down and during that time, we couldn’t recruit or do whatever. So all I did was listen to podcasts, watched a bunch of virtual coaching clinics, took notes and coming out of that, all these kind of wild ideas, you learn them all, lock, laugh, crash five, you know, all these different things. The Northwest Missouri play in slow, the Nova play in fast, subbing patterns, basically all the things you guys cover in your show and out of all that, I decided to try more and the first COVID year was like a modified year for us. We only played 16 games like it was for a lot of people and we ran all continuity ball screen. We were full lock left. We just tried things and I think the best investment, you know, I’ve made for our program was learning that year and using that as like a pretend I know nothing and out of that, we’ve tried probably everything, everything that’s kind of one of those like trendy weird basketball things. We’ve at least tried it. We’ve maybe gotten rid of it. We’ve tried playing fast like Nova, even though we’re doing the opposite now, like, and I think having the courage and confidence to try things and also spend the time learning kind of all these different unique ways to look at basketball. I think that’s where our program is taken off because we are hard to play against because we do do so many weird, different things and we do a lot of the unique, trendy things now and looking back, I think if I don’t have that, I don’t know if we ever would have tried all the different things we’ve tried and gotten to the point where I love our comprehensive system and it’s now ours, but it’s really just stealing from all these different coaches and learning for people a heck of a lot smarter than I am.
Dan 01:03:14
Pat, hey, let’s dive into this recap that was highly enjoyable. My brain is thinking a lot right now.
I’m sure a lot of coaches who just got done listening to it. Coach Makarzak is doing an unbelievable job, obviously, at Northern Michigan. And just the way he explained stuff was really good podcast today. His philosophy is flow. He explained things really well, so really enjoyed it. Yeah.
Pat 01:03:37
I think in our research, talking to coach, talking to his assistants. I mean, everything kept coming back. How they game plan, how they script their offense is really interesting. So I was excited to dive into it today.
He did not disappoint. I love the perspective he has on it. And I know we’ll get into it, but a really invigorating conversation. Yeah, absolutely. So Dan, I will throw it to you to kick it off here with your first takeaway.
Dan 01:04:01
Yeah, I’m going to try to stay narrow in scope here to start because I know we’ll probably go back and forth on a ton of things in that first bucket, but I’m just going to give two things that really stood out to me. One is I know we’re going to get into the layering and the scripting, and that’s sort of my first takeaway is just how interesting that is and how intricate it is. But I think the thing that I would like to just add some commentary on top of that here is probably the underlying thing that really helps on top of them, scripting and knowing all that is what it gives is players. The fact that the confidence it could give that these guys know they’re going to play a certain amount of time. They have these certain sets and reads are going to the game and just the confidence that can give to, I mean, he’s playing with a lot of freshmen sophomores right now, giving them that ease of, I know I’m going to play this stretch, so I’m not coming out after a mistake unless I do something just totally crazy like he mentioned, but he’s not taking guys out for mistakes. So as a player, you know, here’s my minutes, here’s my stretch, here’s the cadence of the sets we’re trying to do, so I kind of am comfortable going into the game. I think there’s a lot of underlying psychology I think to that that I’m sure he’s found super helpful that we didn’t talk about a ton, but I would just say, from my perspective, that must be something that’s an added bonus benefit to his group that builds throughout the years. These guys just have a confidence and a freedom and a flow to play because they know what their minutes are going to be, they know the sets, they know the reads, it’s just easier to get in flow as a team.
So that was my first takeaway and number two, within the layering and the sets, I liked how he just came back to two things. One was getting layups. We’re trying to like make it, there’s rim pressure within all this stuff. The best sets that they found are like ones like you have to guard the rim. If you mess up a communication on the backside, it’s going to be a layup, like that being at the root of a lot of stuff. And then most of his teaching and all that being the play after the play or having them have the freedom to what he said, you know, play bus, I think was good. So it’s like probably on the surface, they can feel very like, well, here’s a structured set and here’s all these plays and here’s the cadence of all that. But like within it, there’s a ton of freedom that I think is the secret sauce from a mental side, one, and then two, just like understanding how to play side. I agree.
Pat 01:06:23
and he mentioned multiple times that he’s always going to celebrate the play bust because, you know, he talked about it and I know it was kind of in the back of our heads when preparing for this conversation is like, how does it not become robotic when your layering sets? It’s like, yeah, we just went through A to B to C and now we’re at D with no advantage and we’ve just wasted 15, 20 seconds, you know? Yeah. I thought he spoke really well on that.
The part I did like within the layering and, you know, at least I came away with like, is a key concept to this is, however the play ends or when the flow begins, like it’s always putting guys in familiar spacings. And I think that’s been like the one big thing for me over the last year talking, you know, watching these teams in Europe, I go back to Francesco Tabolini, Thiago Splitter, like they’re playing, you know, it’s like two sides of the same coin. Maybe they’re playing with, you know, hey, we do a set, it’s always going to be Iverson or they have like this one kind of base offense that they’re comfortable with the familiarity and they get the reads out of it. And I like this approach where they have some really layered sets to test the defense. Get, like you said, get a thread at the rim, get some shooters off the screen, but then it’s always going to end up in like what he said this year, they’re doing a lot of staggers and they’re getting comfortable just playing out of it. And he said, you know, if they can add a play that puts them in a stagger ending, you know, for clarity and simplicity of our conversation, then they’re probably not going to put it. But like, that’s the key thing is when it goes through their checklist, and we couldn’t, you know, we did at the right speed, the right intensity, made the reads, but couldn’t finish like, well, we’re going to get to our staggers, we’re going to end in a set spacing we’re really comfortable with, and we’ll continue to hunt solutions from there.
Dan 01:08:01
Yeah, he was really good at talking about that, the play after the play, how things end. I think he even mentioned it.
That’s one of his biggest questions and the biggest teaching point is like, how does everything end? And when he watches something on, you know, he finds a great set. He’s mentioned, you know, a theme throughout this whole thing was he’s curious, he’s going to try stuff, he’s going to be creative, but always going back, well, how could this end for our team? I think the other added interesting benefit to what they do and how they do it is he actually said it in the start subset, which was sometimes it forces opponents to play uniquely on the other side defensively and the added benefit to like, when they’re trying stuff, they’re doing all these things that are kind of on the fringe or, you know, whatnot, that it’s forcing teams to either press or trap or zone or do something maybe outside of what their base is. And I think, you’d say that’s an advantage for them because you’re getting a team to kind of get out of their normal stuff. And so I thought that was another added interesting point. Like I said, set it in the start subset, but could be kind of added into this first bucket for sure.
Pat 01:09:03
Yeah, he talked about you having them ready to attack non normal. Yeah, when he sees teams do something outside of their base, encouraging his guys almost turn up the aggression.
Yeah, you know, I got the impression like even then kind of going, even simplifying maybe less layers and like we’re just going to attack it because that’s not what they normally do. So let’s stress test it immediately.
Dan 01:09:23
Correct. I’ll just throw a quick miss of mine, not of coach Makrazaks, of course, but I mean, we could have kept going on this first bucket for a long time.
So there was a lot of other avenues we could have went down. One thing I had a question on is just the sort of cadence of the play calls. Who’s calling it? Is he calling it? Is an assistant in charge of it? Because, you know, if he’s head coach in the game and he’s dealing with a lot of stuff, you know, you lose, are we gonna play three versus play seven or, you know, where are we at? So who’s calling the plays? Do the guys have it half memorized the first, you know, like, group? Do they know, like, or do you need to keep calling it? I mean, I guess just more even insight on the actual progression of the whole thing would be interesting.
Pat 01:10:02
I agree. I think super interesting conversation. I believe we only like scratched the surface. I think you and me could have just kept going.
I liked when he started getting like teaching it, installing it. And he talked about, he almost at times rather teach it wrong, quote unquote, wrong, let him do it wrong, discover, and then they’ll use the film. But I think too, as he was going through it, and he mentioned several times like the pace, the speed, but also like when you’re so layered, what level of execution do you need? And the one point I really like that the first pass has to be perfect, or the entry in the offense has to be perfect, use the zipper example. And then from there, it’s just kind of about pace, trying to make the reads like everything and any offense you run is like, you can read it better, you’re going to be better. But yeah, I thought that was a really good point, just like, demanding that like that entry be perfect, kind of really stressing execution there. But then throughout, it’s like getting to pace, kind of I’m sure that like next action mentality. you
Dan 01:10:57
Yeah, a ton in that first one of course, but let’s keep blowing here so Pat, for takeaway number two, I will throw it back to you.
Pat 01:11:04
The second takeaway, I’ll go to my Start Sub Sit when we discussed the lock left. I really enjoyed the conversation around what I think in our prep, we were the most curious about the help side rotations and kind of the conundrum of when you’re forcing left to the baseline versus when you’re forcing left to the middle. And hearing his thoughts on that, just trying to let the thought experiment of what’s important. I mean, I think we all understand their ability to pass and finish out of the left. It is two defenses in one when you start to think about it. And I like hearing his thoughts on the importance of course, those stunts, the bluffs and hearing his thoughts on the peel switch, or if we’re going to send help at the rim. It’s really interesting in general, just how you think about trying to solve these rotations or trying to teach it in simplistic terms. So your defense is an overthinking and just playing with speed and intensity. And I always think there’s like an interesting conversation of peels. I think you and me have talked about it, maybe not necessarily about with lock left, but if it is getting middle, are you trying to peel right away as soon as possible or peel at the rim? Or one question I wish I followed up with if these bluffs like the technique or the position of the bluff, so you’re not giving up strong side kick out threes. I drive with my left, but if we’re stuck too much or bluffing too low, stuck in the bluff, one pass catch and shoot three, I think is also like where my mind goes with the difficulty of this defense. So I just like hearing his honest thoughts on like how he tried to work through it and teach these rotations and think about it and why he went away from it. And I’ll leave it there.
I’ll throw it back to you. But I really liked your follow up question on when he introduces it for the first month. And then, okay, well, where like the parts he keeps in the parts, he scraps and how that then he builds his defense from there.
Dan 01:12:48
Yeah. And I’ll just pick up there because my favorite part of this conversation, it’s honestly my favorite part of the show is I just really like hearing coaches talk about their trade-offs and why they do or don’t do something. And then like in this case, why a historically really good, interesting style of defense, like why he went away from it, what he kept and like what the trade-offs were that made him get to that decision. Because I think that’s obviously where the gold is in coaching is understanding the nuances of the lock left defense and how you stunt or how you play this ball screen is one thing, but then like, okay, but why did you stop doing it? It’s super interesting, especially from someone like him who he thinks everything through to the nth degree. So I actually really enjoyed that part of the conversation as far as just some of the things that they couldn’t solve or even just like, of course, who your players are and some of those things and what they ended up going to. I thought that was really good.
And just really like hearing it. And then I did like also the very end of the conversation when we got a little bit into like weakening or forcing left in the middle third ball screen. And it’s so true that really good right-handed players going to their left are historically pretty good at pulling up for that mid-range jumper. And like he mentioned, they kept giving up that shot and things were making them. And so like just getting to the level of where you need to be in a middle third ball screen, if you’re weakening it and sort of the angles. And he talked about differences of people finishing with their left hand versus the right hand. So just the last few minutes of I thought was really good too.
Pat 01:14:18
You raised the point, even when I was asking the question, I wasn’t really thinking of, I mean, I’ve been seeing a lot lately of, I mean, teams have been weeking middle thirds for a while, but the week in the middle third with the bigs kind of lateral hedging. And it just got me curious, you know, why the lateral hedge versus the deep drop versus just full on hedging. And I think that point I wasn’t thinking about, and I think it’s totally valid and completely true.
You know, if you deep drop, maybe then you’re going to give up comfortable step into threes with the rise of skill and off the dribble shooting by the guards and, you know, and then kind of thought experiment or thinking on it more and hearing them talk, you know, maybe like, they don’t want a lateral hedge because they think, okay, they can still, you’re giving up that short roll, which is dangerous, but their lateral hedging, maybe they still think it’s tough for a guard to hit that pocket pass off the dribble with their left hand. And so it’s kind of the best of both worlds or being aggressive without really too fearful, maybe of guards being able to hit that pocket pass, but also discouraging those pull up threes, the dribble into shots for sure. All right, Dan, I’ll throw it back to you now. Bring us home with the last takeaway. Yes.
Dan 01:15:23
So I do want to go to the last Start Sub Sit, which was the flat starts. And you and I have been talking last week or so and just in varying degrees. We all go through it, but your team doesn’t have it.
That night, I think we were talking earlier and we had Josh Loeffler on the show for the second time. He had mentioned one of the harder things in coaching is when your team just doesn’t have it. And what do you do? And we wanted to take out the call the timeout, get them fired up, get them going from that standpoint. Because I think, okay, that is a tool, but what was a more tactical way to help your team out when they’re just starting flat? And so it made sense as we got through the first bucket that he was probably going to sit the sub pattern. So that made sense there. But I think he started with the start and the sub, I think were two areas that you and I were thinking a lot about before the show, which is just forcing your team into some kind of trap or a different type of thing that just, you know, maybe you just get a tip ball or steel that leads to a run out layup or dunk and just kind of can turn the momentum a little bit. And so I liked hearing him kind of talk his way through that as well as the offensive side gave some more insight too of like, if a team, maybe they go simpler if a team’s pressing or trapping or they need something where they’re not going to do their cadence. So overall, I liked the defensive aggression. I think you and I both thought that was one of the ones we might think about too, just to fire our team up.
Pat 01:16:47
I think too, you know, as they talked about the offensive side and trying to, okay, then usually the ball’s getting sticky, trying to put more ball movement into stuff, trying to play with more pace, I think in crafting this question too, and thinking about, you know, unfortunately the occasions when our teams are flat, how offense has really become the catalyst for a lot of stuff. Like better defense, more commitment to defense, better energy, and yeah, just trying to breathe life in your offense.
I mean, of course it all comes down to knowing your teams. Maybe for some teams it is like, all right, we’re just going to get it to our best player in their best spot, you know, cause we just got to manufacture points. I think that’s probably another theme we’ve hit on a lot, probably within the last six months to a year. Yeah. It’s kind of flipped. Like the offense really is the fuel for a lot of your energy, your effort, your defense, guys want to score. Guys want to feel involved. His credit, like he said, you know, preaching more ball movement, getting guys more active and hoping that kind of lights the fire or is the spark to get things going on both sides of the ball.
Dan 01:17:52
Yeah, I like this point about sometimes coming down and running a longer like getting a set or something where it’s just makes them guard the ball moves a little bit. Maybe they’re having to guard some of that, you know, screen to screen or back screen action, like just making it so the defense if the other team’s kind of on a roll or they’ve got the momentum and you come down and let’s say you do just get to your best player, but you know, he or she rocks and shoots a tough one and then boom there they go out and transition again versus come down. No, we’re going to move the ball. We’re going to make them guard some tough screen action. Like we’re going to try to get downhill into the paint hopefully can suck the energy out of the other team a little bit. So I like this point there.
And then I don’t know if it was in this one, but just going back to the offensive part, you mentioned he didn’t like sets that were too long as well. Like you said like 12 seconds was about where he liked him to be. So that way there’s enough time at the end of it to really play. I don’t know if it was in this part there, but I just kind of had it circled as far as the length of a set for him.
Pat 01:18:49
Yeah, we didn’t hit on it like directly on those but pace and but he mentioned it several times with the 12 seconds getting through these actions. I think it’s really interesting you hear like layering set scripting plays, they’re going to be a slow walk it up team. I mean, he talked about McCollum being an influence, but also crutchfield who plays super fast. So, you know, maybe conversation for a different day or maybe a miss as well on our end.
But I think he plays with a very unique cadence to the game and like how he views pace and where he really values the pace. Within the offense, I thought was kind of sprinkled in throughout the whole conversation today. And also, I think what makes them unique and probably difficult to guard.
Dan 01:19:28
Absolutely. Well, Pat, we’ve gone through a ton here, but are there any other areas we wish went deeper on?
Pat 01:19:34
I would have loved to have asked, he mentioned when we were talking about five rebounding or five crashing the glass that he’ll get the lineups work. This is the line that’s going to push pace. They’re going to play fast. They’re going to crash. It’s like they’re aggressive crashing lineup.
And I’m sure he’s thought about a, I mean, just the way he thinks about offense and his lineups, but where’s the next progression for this? Or could this be for his team? And I’m thinking more now on the defensive end, like, can you have different styles? Like this is a lineup or we’re really great hedging team, or we’re not going to be a five, we’re going to crash three, or this is his own team. Like, I guess, can you vary within your lineups? Not only because you have your six sets, but also how you play defense. And maybe this is the aggressive list, the more conservative, everything’s obviously a time trade-off. He can’t practice three hours a day for six straight months on all this stuff. But I guess I would have loved to have maybe followed up with where he thinks maybe defensively, he can start to stretch this, if any, in terms of yeah, stylistically, tactically with kind of learning his team and the different lineups he’s going to get to.
Dan 01:20:34
Yeah, good point. I also felt like it’d be interesting to keep talking to him about the crashing all five and all the nuances of that. He mentioned it, it wasn’t the straight up tagging up system. Yeah. And I just find that conversation to be maybe going into the next year.
I know we’ve talked about tagging up every year because it just keeps coming up. But like, I think what was starting to happen is you have sort of like the full tagging up system, but then I think you’re starting to see coaches figure out variances of that system that worked for their personnel or their philosophy where you’re setting all five, but maybe it’s not quite a strict tagging up system. I just think that’s interesting because obviously it’s worked for him, their rebound percentage. Anybody mentioned defensively in transition, they’ve been really good as well.
Pat 01:21:19
It’s interesting I’m with you and is the value and the consistency and being able to do it every time over the technique and properly doing it, probably getting the high side properly, trying to scrum it, but it’s just like go with aggression every time. And if we can get that, we’ll solve everything versus kind of getting bogged down and like, did he go high side? Did you connect? I think it all matters.
It’s just where you put your emphasis, but I think too, we’re here, you know, talking to coaches too, it’s just, I just want them to go and I want them to go aggressive and we saw from there. Yeah.
Dan 01:21:49
When he mentioned their rebounding philosophy is like they should get everyone defensive and offensive and talked about how it like kills them as a staff. Yeah. When they look and you know, that’s what they show on film. And like, so I think just the mentality is the overall driver.