8 Lessons from Charles Klask
There was a lot to pull from in this conversation with current University of Washington Assistant, and former NBA Champion Coach with the Denver Nuggets, Charles Klask, but what stood out most was how often he came back to a central idea: freedom only works when players understand what matters.
Whether discussing flow offense, matchup hunting, coverage solutions, or switching, Klask consistently connected scheme back to personnel, decision-making, and the ability to recognize what the possession is asking for. Here are eight ideas that shown through:
- Random offense still needs a hierarchy.
The offense can be unpredictable without being equal-opportunity. Klask identifies the “rulers,” limits the decision menus of lesser decision-makers, and continually organizes possessions back toward the players who can solve the most problems. - Scale freedom to the player’s ability to process.
Better decision-makers get more options. Limited processors get fewer. Development can continue without asking players to solve problems they cannot yet solve in games. - Define possession quality before judging the result.
Klask’s “rich possession” gives the staff better markers: rim pressure, reversal, ruler involvement, and attacking a rusty defender. A make can come from a bad possession; a miss can come from exactly what you want. - Mismatch hunting can become a player skill.
The value of identifying “rusty defenders” is not just in scouting them. It is teaching players to naturally bring them into actions with your best players without needing a play call. - Advantage recognition comes before the next action.
After an action, the other players must first decide whether an advantage actually exists. If it does, give it space. If it doesn’t, retrigger. That keeps flow from becoming movement for movement’s sake. - Build coverage solutions backward from personnel.
Klask adjusts screen location, roll type, passing angle, and even the roller’s attacking hand based on who is involved. The coverage presents the problem; personnel determines the best solution. - Physicality changes the offense’s available options.
“Physicality reduces slippage” is more than a switching technique. Early contact can remove slips, alter screening angles, slow ghosts, and disrupt the action before the defense has to solve it. - Switching can dictate the possession, not just survive it.
Klask distinguishes between switching as a fix and switching as disruption. When the offense becomes predictable, the defense can deny the trigger, pin the action, or force a weaker player to make the next decision.
Transcript
Dan 02:01
Coach, we’re really excited to have you on today. It’s been a blast getting to know you over the last four, five years, however long it’s been, so thank you for making the time for us today.
Charles Klask 02:09
No, I really appreciate it. I feel like you guys are relatives. My friends on the road, at the airports, in my, my downtime and workouts, so we are much closer than you think.
Dan 02:20
Thanks, Charles, appreciate that. So Charles, we wanted to start with this, and it’s on the offensive side of the ball.
You know, Pat and I, you talk to coaches all the time about the types of offense and flow, random, conceptual, more structured, all these things that we think about when it comes to the sliding scale of how you can run offense. And we wanted to start with your thoughts on how teams can play random with flow, but what are the base structures that need to be in place to do that underneath it when it comes from, like, a personnel standpoint, spacings, triggers, all these things that it sounds nice on the periphery to say we’re playing flow and random, but, like, what needs to be deeply in place before that so it all works and sticks together?
Charles Klask 03:03
I think it starts with evaluating your players and identifying what everyone’s strengths are, you know, current date, and then what they can possibly do in the future. And then once you identify that, you have to know who your high level decision-makers are, who can read the defense, who can make all the right plays, no matter what the position is, and then try to center your flow or your conceptual offense around those players predominantly more than the other guys or girls. And then so that would be one framework, and then one thing I would do is you always wanna get to your strengths and play to your greatness. So if I’m a really good right-hand driver, I wanna do that nine out of 10 times, and then the other four guys should know that I like to go right as much as possible, and whether you’re Clyde cutting or wheeling or whatever you’re doing off dribble penetration, whatever your system is, they all know how to react to me.
If I’m great in the short pocket and every time I set a ball screen, you know nine out of 10 times I’m rolling. So you might say, “Well, you’re not reading the defense. You’re just doing these pre-programmed things.” Yes, that’s true, but it’s relative to what my strengths are. And then what I like to do is you have to have systems for everything you’re doing, your spacing system, your driving system, your crashing system, how you wanna retrigger your offense when things dry up or get neutral, who retriggers in what types of ways. We had Jason Kent last year. He was really good at just as soon as he would pass, he would go split away, and he was great at slipping. So now whoever he’s passing to knows most likely he’s looking for the slip. And then the next thing you do, I think you list your priorities of what you wanna try to accomplish on offense, every team. If you have a great three-point shooting team, you might play outside in first and make those teams really close out, run you off the line, and then you get down the floor. You could have a great driving team, and you wanna play inside out first. So once you set your priorities and what you’re looking for, that can kinda guide them and structure them what to do offensively.
After that, I would say having some sets that are featuring four out, one in spacing. If you start five out, how do you get to four out, one in? Who can take what places on the floor? Are you five’s always a dunker ’cause he’s 7’2″ and he’s a great vertical threat, or is your five undersized and a great shooter, and you’re gonna space him to take their five away from the basket? So just, you know, interweaving those types of things throughout your game plans. The other thing I would try to do as much as possible in my flow and conceptual offense is try to get as many things to the player’s strong hands as possible. Dave Smart did the whole left hand lock, force weak defense, whatever it is, just flip it offensively. If I’m coming up the left side of the floor, I want a screen to come to my right hand. If he’s starting in the left corner, I’m gonna have him flip the screen, so I still get to my right hand.
Charles Klask 05:51
Just different things like that, and then what I would do in your training is you have to underpin all the things you wanna do in the game in your individual training and your player development system.
Pat 06:00
I’d like to go back to when you talked about identifying your best decision-makers, making sure the ball’s in their hands, and then kinda melding it with playing to players’ strengths. I think a lot of this then becomes rooted in, like, role clarification, and I think what me and Dan also talked in preparing for this conversation, how do you solve when we wanna play random, we wanna play with pace, but the ball is gonna go through the hands of the guys that are not your strongest decision-makers?
So I guess, how do you solve kinda that potential problem when the ball may get stuck with guys that aren’t your best decision-makers and not having it stuck so much that your best decision-makers are just off-ball too often?
Charles Klask 06:38
If your skills in evaluating you, if you don’t have a lot of skills, I need to reduce your number of options to choose from, so, like, your menu that you can select from. The more skills you have, the more opportunities I’m gonna put you in to different situations, various options we can include you in.
So the ultimate example is the Mountain Goat, obviously, Nikola Jokic. You can put him in any situation, post, iso, pick and roll, handler, setter, doesn’t matter. But there’s some guys that you really need to, like, simplify ’cause their game just hasn’t progressed to that level yet. So, you know, when you’re doing your breakdown drills, whether it’s three on three, four on four, advantage games, whatever, give all those players a necessary allotment or affordance to see what they can do versus the various coverages. Film it, evaluate it, and if one out of 10 times is his success rate, “Hey, Jacob, I can’t put you in these situations in the game. We’re gonna continue to work on it. We’re not putting you in a box, but here’s your roles and responsibilities to get the job done in the next game.” Those may change. Those are flexible. One thing I like to do is I try to quantify what a rich possession is. So a rich possession to me is are we attacking the rim? Are we getting some sort of reversal, whether it’s through the dribble or a pass across the midline? That distorts weak side defense as you go from strong to weak, weak to strong. Who’s the low man? No, I’m not the low man. There’s a lot of confusion with that. And then the ruler of the game is usually your best player or the ace. He’s the one that kinda sets all the rules for your team. Best offensive player. And then the rusty guys. Who are the rusty defenders where I wanna involve them in as many actions as possible to break them down?
Pat 08:15
On the rusty defenders attacking rusty defenders, is that something just strictly in scouting you’ll prepare the team for what you wanna do? I guess, how do you go about, again, let’s say we’re trying to play more random and more conceptual to identify or put your offense in a place where it’s constantly the rusty defender and you’re not going too many possessions without really attacking any advantages that the opponent is giving you?
Charles Klask 08:37
So sometimes what we would do is say we’re playing four on four, and it’s, like, black versus white. We would have one jersey of red, and we would identify him as the weakest link, the rusty defender. And hey, in the flow it’s your job to get him involved. We don’t have to necessarily wait for a set call or anything else.
And then what we’ll say too is that we’ll have healthy combos. So rusty defender is usually they put him on a bad offensive player, right? They try to hide him, so that player’s gotta get involved somehow with your best players. So it could be like, let’s say we’ve identified Pat as a bad defender. I know it’s completely unrealistic here. But just imagine with me. So it’s gonna be, “Hey, we wanna involve Nikola, Jamal, and Pat.” So whoever Pat is guarding, you’re in the action, you know? Just to make sure Pat switches on Jamal or Pat switches on Nikola, and now we have dominoes from there. And then what we try to do is just, like, charting kills defensively, three straight stops or droughts offensively, three no scores in a row. It could be, hey, the ball hasn’t touched one of our rulers yet. We haven’t attacked one of their rusty defenders yet. So hey, one of the coaches on the bench charting it, say, “Coach, hey, we gotta get Pat involved. We gotta get Pat involved. Make him work.” So it’s just something you have to chart and be mindful of and then put the onus on the players, too, to involve themselves.
Dan 09:59
Charles, going back a little bit to, you said systems in place. One of the things about, let’s say the second layer of offense, you come down, you have your initial trigger, whatever the million things you wanna do to initially trigger the offense. But then once you’ve either created a slight advantage or created a mismatch or y- getting now to the middle to end of a possession, what have you found is really beneficial to teach there? Spacing, cutting.
What’s the next layer that helps your team thrive deeper into a shot clock? Mismatch hunting, whatever it is that you’ve found over the years is really good in the middle to late half of a possession.
Charles Klask 10:34
I mean, a lot of teams will just do small, small pick and rolls, whether you’re gonna ghost it, ghost up or ghost down, either one. And then what we always say is it’s the responsibility of the other three guys to read the advantage. The whole team has to be reading the advantage. If the advantage is gained and earned, we wanna give as much space to the advantage as possible until it’s acted upon by a third force, a third defender, whatever it is.
And then if they do help, then we’re, you know, whether it’s a Clyde cut, 2 v. 1 on the rim or 2 v. 1 on the weak side with shooters, whatever it is. But we all have to read the quality of the coverage by the defense to see if there’s an advantage. If not, now if there’s no advantage, you gotta ignite the next action. The one thing I like to say is, like, “Hey, if we don’t get any traction, think next action.” And that would be the responsibility of, it could be anybody on the floor. Again, hopefully you’re going back to the rulers and rusty guys.
Dan 11:25
For years, obviously, you, you’ve coached Nikola Jokic, who’s a, a different player than most of us have. But, like, when you have a player who can pop, short roll, long roll, they’re so unpredictable.
How does that play into how you’re teaching the other three guys not in the pick and roll to read someone like him where, like you said earlier, you can have a guy that’s, hey, 90% of the time he’s rolling, or 90% he’s popping. But when you have someone that can be more unpredictable, how does that affect the teaching of the other three guys to read off of that one person?
Charles Klask 11:55
That gets really hard because, again, the more you make it robotic, pre-planned, pre-programmed, the defense can pick up on those patterns. So you do wanna have an element of randomness where they don’t know what’s happening. It’s unpredictable, but we still can feel and read each other. And then really with that, it comes over time.
You just need the reps. It’s not always gonna be black and white. A lot of teams would cross-match and let’s say they put Rudy Gobert on our fours, and then they would have a smaller guy, a smaller power forward on Nikola. So, like, if we hit him in the pocket and now you baseline cut, you’re just cutting into a seven-footer in Gobert. So now you think there’s an advantage, but it’s really not an advantage ’cause he’s 7’4″ and you’re just trying to finish on the baseline. So that one you’d have to read and stay spaced. We try to really break it down on the cues of when to do what. So if they’re gonna high tag with the low man to the short roll pocket pass, if he’s early, we cut early. If he’s late, we wait. If you’re unsure, just stand still if you’re unsure, ’cause sometimes if you’re unsure and you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re just causing more confusion and fewer options. And then again, patterns will emerge, and we pull those out on film, and we show them to guys, or, like, when we draft a guy, we’ll put him through the same scenarios. “Hey, here’s your archetype. Follow the path that Aaron Gordon has already paved, and you can be just as good.” So it takes a lot of reps. Sometimes if guys don’t have that nuance and know the contextual layers of some things, we’ll tell them, “Hey, if they’re in a deep drop, you’re gonna short roll every time.” So it could be say our pick and roll call is fist. Well, we’re gonna call fist short, so now the ball handler knows you’re short rolling. The two weak side guys know that you’re short rolling as well. Maybe you’re not a short roll pocket pass play make floater type guy, and hey, your best advantage is just long rolling or gore tat, you know, highway screen action. So hey, we’re running fist long. We know, hey, this guy’s sprinting, getting his head on the rim. If he doesn’t have it off the first dribble, he’s sealing for the gore tat. Everybody’s job is to read the advantage on the floor and the quality of the coverage by the defense. If he didn’t set a great screen or they were able to get under, I know there’s a twist happening, so I might start filling behind from the right slot on a left slot step up, let’s say. But as soon as they got under, I know they’re twisting. I know to be ready to flow and drift away ’cause the ball’s coming back towards me. We’re all on a string. Just like defense is on a string, offense is on a string.
Pat 14:24
If I can quickly drill down on the short roll, and if you have a player where they’re not a ruler, but you’ve identified that their strength is their ability to play in the short roll, and now kinda asking from experience and looking back at our season, what changes with if you wanna try to get this guy in the short roll as a screener if it’s an aggressive coverage to if it’s a complete drop at the rim, working with your big and how he screens to get to the short roll and your guard to get the pass to the short roll? I guess maybe again, the structures, the teaching points from most aggressive coverage to least aggressive, how you’re working to get a short roll catch.
Charles Klask 15:00
Yeah. When you have a great short roll player and you wanna play through that pocket as, like, a secondary quarterback, what I like to do, if you took the elbow lane lines and drew them up the floor to the half-court line, I call it just the pro lane. A little plug for you guys.
Pat 15:13
Yeah.
Charles Klask 15:14
That way when the ball handler’s coming up the left pro lane, there’s a full lane or f- you know, the full paint for the short roll pocket player to attack and play out of. There’s less room. There’s a narrow side of the floor for the guard. Now, if I had a really good guard and I really wanna get him off and get him going, then right at the pro lane I’m gonna set it more towards going towards the middle, so now the ball handler has a full lane to navigate, euro, whatever it is. You’re kinda tailoring it to the strengths of the two involved.
Like again, when it was Jamal and Nikola, it really didn’t matter ’cause they had such good feel with each other. As far as the passing goes, what we try to say is you wanna be as efficient as possible in everything you do. The fewest dribbles you need to get that ball to the pocket as possible. If you’re coming left, you know, most guys left, they like to throw the low pocket with their right hand, their inside hand, but defenses know that, so they’re gonna have low pocket hands on the pocket pass. They’re gonna try to make you throw it over the top, and then the defender has high hands. Can you use fakes as you’re taking the ball to the basket where, hey, I’m faking a high layup pass, and then I’m doing a late drop-off, or vice versa? You know, I’m hesiing. I’m staring at that pocket, but I’m actually gonna throw a high lob over the top for the short roll. And then we also try to have counters where, hey, they guard it well, but we don’t want the ball to get out of these two guys’ hands. It can be a bounce out dribble or a pivot, and now the big’s gonna roll and seal, and it’s just like a single two-man high-low without the pass back to throw in, and he just wraps it around and gets him on a late seal. So you try to have, like, at least three solutions to every type of coverage as much as possible. Sometimes, too, you wanna design the play where if it’s for the roller and he’s good at going to his right hand, I’m actually gonna set it at the left pro lane, the left slot area as a step up, so now he’s rolling to his dominant hand. You know, so it’s just some small little, like, tips and tricks to tailor into your offense. And the guys, over time, they should know those things anyway.
Dan 17:15
Charles, one of the things I’m always interested in is when you’re with Denver, when you’re high level college basketball, when you have access to all the analytics to try to understand the health of your offense, what really matters at the end of the day? What are the things that, say, NBA offenses are really concerned about game to game to attack and try to be as efficient as possible? Because, you know, you look on TV, and there’s tons of people on the bench and all sorts of stats you can have, but when it gets filtered down, what most of the time makes the difference?
Charles Klask 17:48
A lot of times you start the season, and you just do, like, a correlation analysis of what leads to winning the most. You know, is it rim attempts? Is it rim field goal percentage? Ability to get to the free throw line? Your rate of threes. How many long twos or non-paint twos are you taking? But it really comes down to more times than not, your solutions are your players’ skills.
The more skills they have, the more solutions your offense should have against the defense Or you’re just getting to so many actions and options to manipulate the defense. So some things we’ll try to keep track of offensively. We had one with how many times is Nicola involved with the ball, so our goal was 100 touches a game, and usually good things always happened if it touched his hands. There’s two types of turnovers in my mind. One that you’re trying to make, I call it a good turnover. You’re trying to make the right play, but maybe just the read wasn’t there, or slightly off target, or a slight miscommunication on the timing of the cut, whatever it was. Those are good. We’re being aggressive. The types of turnovers we never wanted to have were like the habitual I’m just swinging it from side to side, you know, going wing, top wing. Those are just like entry-type passes to move the def- You should never have turnovers in those situations. Most of those are just lazy or haphazard.
Knowing what kills your offense and kills your defense, to be honest, live ball turnovers, that’s a big one. How are the ways that you’re gonna negate those? There’s really no defense to most of those. Shot selection is a big one, making sure you prioritize the shots you wanna take, especially early in the clock. One thing we always say was, I just call it RLAB. So RLAB is rim, line, which means free throw line, arc, A, and then B, best available. That’s kinda like our hierarchy of what we’re looking for offensively.
Other things you wanna chart, how many easy baskets? That’s a big one. That’s like the grease of your offense. So I call them chess points and checker points. So chess points are gonna be like, hey, we had to run a play. We had to get a specific player a specific touch at a specific spot for him to go to work and do his thing, and then the checker points are, hey, fast break, cutting baskets, offensive rebound put backs. So you wanna try to win the checker points.
Charles Klask 21:03
Yeah, most times coaches are gonna always look at personnel and then their strengths and go from there. Last year we crashed all four players on every three except the shooter. You know, his responsibility was stay in his shot, hold his follow through, and be ready to get back if they leak out on the contest. Our rules, obviously like most teams doing the tagging up, we wanted to go high side, stay above your guy, never go low side. Start with defense in mind, and then the next thing we did is we always wanted to box in. We had a Zoom call with Aaron Fern, and he broke it all down for us. We wanted to box those guys in. So defensively, again, inversion principle, defensively we always wanna expand our defensive radius. When we’re tagging up and crashing, we actually wanna compress their defensive rebounding radius, push them towards the baseline as much as possible, and then I called it bagging. But like as you’re pushing on that guy’s back and pushing him in, if there is a chance you can make a break and go get the ball, I think you have to let the players every once in a while do that. What we found is when we installed it and they heard we’re just kinda like pushing on their back, we’re just kinda leaning, it’s not like a muck in rugby, they kinda didn’t do it full-heartedly. It didn’t get the intended response we wanted.
We would ask the players, “Why aren’t you going harder?” He’s like, “Well, I’m not trying to get the ball.” We told them every once in a while you can make a break for it, but again, more times than not, you better be able to get it, just like going for steals, right? And then the next part of it is as soon as we don’t get the offensive rebound, your job’s not done. A lot of times they just look at it, they track the ball a little bit, “I didn’t get it,” and then they just turn their head and run backwards. So we wanted to continue, I called it a two-second press. You wanna get in that guy’s face, don’t let him turn up the floor easily, try to force him to his left hand. Most guys are right-handed passers. We didn’t want them turning, pivoting, make that long football pass, right? We wanted them to have to put their head down, dribble down to their weak hand as much as possible. I really liked it in a lot of ways. First and foremost, I think it helps identifying who your matchup is early. Basically, the guy you’re boxing in is your man. You should be right there. Some downsides, what we found was it’s something you have to preach almost every day, every game, every possession. As soon as guys get tired or maybe they thought they should’ve received a pass and the guy shot it instead, their energy just drops, and then they don’t wanna do the next thing. So it’s something you have to continually harp on. When we did emphasize it, show it in film, you know, make it mandatory, we were really, really good at it. A lot of times what happens is the defense is so concerned with getting the defensive rebound, they’re not thinking about the next layer of pushing out and getting on the break.
Charles Klask 23:57
It was also hard for us. We had two really, really small guards who they thought it was a complete just waste of their time, like why am I wasting my energy?
So that’s where it comes down to like how long are you playing guys on the floor for? What are their stints? Is it three minutes? Is it four minutes? Let’s go back to Pat as the example. What I like to tell guys is I’ll ask Pat, “How many minutes do you think you could play tonight in a 48-minute game?” And Pat’s a high level athlete, well-conditioned. Pat, what would you say?
Pat 24:26
As long as possible, but probably 30 plus.
Charles Klask 24:29
30 plus. Okay, let’s say 32. Well, Pat, you’re coming off the bench tonight. I only have you, you know, penciled in for 16, so I need you to play 32 minutes worth of effort in your 16 minutes.
So go even harder, you know, push even harder, raise your hand. Old school, raise your hand, come out. The whole relentless basketball, you know, the whole concept of that. Because what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to win the margins and win the math as best you can. So more opportunities, more possessions. You know what it does too? The psychological part of it is coaches lose their minds when they give up too many offensive rebounds, and then so you look on the bench, and now the coach is losing it. Now the players are getting discouraged. We’re just getting beat on these effort hustle points. So you can really, uh, affect their mentality with the game like that.
Pat 25:19
I really like the rule for tag up and the shooter, you just finish your shot and be mindful of a guy leaking out, and I think it favors how the game is obviously trending with shooting more threes. I think tagging up really fits nicely.
But then of course there are gonna be post-ups or a guard’s gonna drive, a wing’s gonna drive. What did you guys emphasize when it was a two-point field goal, an at-rim shot, and how did that then change? Did you emphasize tagging how you built then your transition defense off of non-threes?
Charles Klask 25:48
Yeah. So for all the twos it was basically you had to be in the paint or on your way to the paint, and you had the license or right to crash. And again, there’s gray areas with all this stuff, but we didn’t want somebody on a layup from the three-point line trying to like crash or tail in late. We just thought it was kind of a waste.
I know some teams will try to do it, especially like on mid-range shots, but we didn’t necessarily do that. The other thing too is you always have rules and you always have exceptions. So if I ever have a clear path to the basket, maybe the defense is scrambling, we’re at an advantage. It’s a four on three somewhere, and there’s nobody in line to block me out, I have the right to take that advantage and be opportunistic on the two-point shot.
Dan 26:33
Sticking with the margins and sort of the things that are really important margin wise, is it the offensive rebounding percentage? Is it assist percentage? What are some of the things that the health of an offense you’d look at with the margins?
Charles Klask 26:46
Offensive rebound percentage is a big one. There’s some things I think at the start of the season in your very first introductory meeting, you wanna lay out like the rules of engagement, how you’re gonna conduct business, standard operating procedures, and I think you need to educate the guys sometimes on some of the advanced analytics that they might not be aware of. So one of them is definitely offensive rebound percentage, ’cause you wanna be able to reference that throughout the whole season.
Out of the number available, how many did we get from three? We would sort it out by three. And then so like our goal was we wanted to get 40% of our missed threes back for a second chance opportunity. So then you have it set by goals. Another one big time is, you know, effective field goal percentage, just weighting the value of threes. Our goal last year was to shoot 50 threes a game. We had a lot of shooting on the floor, and we led the G League in three-point attempts. And then when we didn’t play with a center, there was a stretch of games all of our centers were hurt. We said, “Hey, we wanna try to get 60 threes up a game.” We thought that was our biggest advantage, and that’s where we made the defense the most nervous. I think like things like free throw rate, how many times out of 100 possessions are we getting to the free throw line? Coach Van Gundy was great. He had goals for everything offensively and defensively, and then the way w- we would start to break it down is he would always start with like what the league average was, and then he wanted to know what the top five or six teams in the league were doing, and that usually set our goal. And then the next level of that, which was great, is everything was divisible by four. So if our goal for points in the paint was 48, and during the game you get that first quarter box score, and you can automatically know if we’re on pace to reach our goals. Well, hey, it was only 10 points in the paint. This is gonna be a good number if you pro-rate it out for four quarters. You gotta definitely have goals, and hopefully that shapes some of your behavior on the floor. Other analytics when it comes to like the offensive rebound percentage, we also wanted to look at the number of times we sent guys. My philosophy with that is, you know the old adage of the more you go, the more you get? We said the more guys you send, the more you get. It’s more impactful when all four guys go. Sometimes when you only have one or two and they don’t get it, and now they break your first line of defense, it is a mad scramble jailbreak, and you wanna avoid those. So we will tie it into, okay, we crashed four on this possession, and then did we give up a fast break opportunity going the other way, or were we able to get back where they were in neutral and they had to set up an offense? And then we would just kill the charting right after that. If they did score in transition, you know, we would actually, you know, put that into points per possession.
Charles Klask 29:29
So and then you evaluate your points, your net differential with points per possession on an offensive rebound possession compared to your defensive transition points per possession.
Pat 29:40
With the goal setting, with the analytics, with even at the top we mentioned like the priorities of what you wanna do on offense, how much of these goals are you giving to the team? You know, you’ve talked about how many touches you want Jokic, how many threes you want, how many you wanna send to the rim, these rates. What is realistic as a staff that you should be presenting to the team and the goals you should be giving them game in, game out, versus when it’s just like it’s just way too many, and what’s the sense of tracking all this or trying to overwhelm the guys with all these goals?
Charles Klask 30:11
With a lot of this stuff, I always think there’s like two layers, right? There’s one the player level, and you’re only gonna give them exactly what they need to be successful on the court, nothing else. So it’s like a tool belt. If I give you a wrench, you can still move really well on the court. I give you a wrench and a hammer, okay, maybe that slows you down. Now it’s a wrench, a drill, a hammer, and another drill, whatever it is. Now you’re weighted down. You’re thinking too much. We don’t want you to overthink on the floor. We want you to be able to just react to your instincts as much as possible with our rules and guidelines helping you as much as possible navigating some of the nuances.
At the start of the season, we’ll, we’ll have macro goals for the whole year. We wanna be top five defensive rating, and we’ll tell the guys, “Hey, here’s our goal. We wanna be 1.1 points per possession times 100 for the year. That’s our goal.” And so that’s like a base default goal. And then there could be a time I call mac- micro goals. So just for that opponent or that team, based on the style of play, here’s our goal. Well, it’s actually gonna be 1.12 ’cause they’re the number one offensive team in the league. They have a ton of possessions. You know, this is just how they play. They want a, kind of a rat race type game. So you have micro goals just for tonight’s game and macro for the whole season.
And then a lot of times those are all tied to whatever you think drives winning based on your correlation analysis, and then you always point back to those things. If you deem it important, then I think that you should share it with the team if you think it helps drive performance and drive winning. There’s a saying, coaches only have so many bullets. You know, we talked a lot off air about myths, and I don’t necessarily agree with that. I think you need to have a few targets, but unlimited ammunition. If a non-negotiable is we do not give up open layups, no matter what, that’s it. If I have to preach that 100 times a day to get that point across, I have to preach it. Now, I can’t always say, “Hey, we’re gonna take away layups at the rim, open threes, and we’re never gonna foul, and we’re never gonna give up an offensive rebound.” Well, it’s really, really hard to do, and last time I checked, all these teams are scoring 120 a night.
Dan 32:20
The Practice Lab is now live inside SG+. It’s a new space we’re building with Drew Dunlap around practice design, player development, and helping coaches bring ideas from film and workouts onto the floor. Think of it as a workshop for coaches, a place to study practice ideas, tinker with the constraints, and take something back to your next session. Drew walks through each idea with voiceover breakdowns, looking at what the drill is teaching, what cues players are learning to read, and how coaches can shape the task for their own players and system. It’s another major addition to SG+, alongside our film breakdowns, newsletters, podcast extras, clinic presentations, and growing coaching archive.
You can explore the Practice Lab now on SGTV. We wanna transition now to a segment on the show we call Start, Sub, or Sit. We’re gonna give you three different options around a topic, ask you to start one, sub one, and sit one, and then we’ll discuss from there. So Charles, if you’re ready, we’ll dive into this first one.
Charles Klask 33:21
Let’s go.
Dan 33:22
Okay. So this first one has to do with being a learner and growing within the game and within the profession. One of the things that Pat and I have always really thought that you do at the highest of levels is you’re just a constant learner. Any time we’ve been around you, you’re in a learning environment or you’re trying to create a learning environment.
And so these are three different skills that you think a coach can have that will help with their learning wherever they’re at within their career. So option one is your note-taking ability. Whenever you’re in a room meeting, how you are actually taking notes and what you’re taking notes on. So option one is note taking. Option two is your film organization, how you watch and clip film. And then option three is your ability to ask good follow-up questions, so whatever environment you’re in, knowing how to dig deeper, how to ask for further clarification on stuff. So start, sub, sit, growth, and learning as a coach. Notes, film organization, follow-up questions.
Charles Klask 34:22
Mm, mm, mm. You’ve outdone yourself. They’re all very, very important. I would probably start with questions as the number one thing. I think as you’re watching something, you’re trying to ask yourself as many questions as possible, and then that helps you get a clearer and clearer picture of what you’re actually seeing or what you’re actually learning. ‘Cause the clearer it is, you know, hopefully you have more certainty and you understand and comprehend, and then that leads to consistency in your ability to coach it or teach it to other people. Sometimes if you don’t ask those questions, and if you’re just under the assumption, like you already know everything, or you know exactly what Pat and Dan mean by saying that, you could be really misinterpreting something. We don’t all have the same definitions in our mind. If I said the word pace, I might mean that always means fast, and Dan might mean that means, hey, being able to change pace, and then Pat wants it to be, you know, 10 paces, turn, draw, fire. You wanna be on the same page as much as possible on the same book, and I think you do that through really, really thoughtful questions.
And the other reason why I say that is I love questioning the players as much as possible, quizzing them, putting them on the spot. That moment where their stomach sinks a little bit, it stings a little, their breath, their heart rate, you know, increases a little bit. I think that’s like the crux of learning is in those moments, and then you get to understand if they know it or not and how clear are they. Because once they get on the court, you’re gonna expect them to know these things. So by asking questions, you’re checking for understanding. It’s the whole Doug Liman, you know, teach like a champion type philosophy. Second would be, this one’s hard because everybody’s different. So I take a lot of notes because I have a lot of ideas that go through my head, and I wanna be able to get them out and touch on them later. But if you don’t need to take notes, and you can retain everything, and you’re fast processing and photographic memory and stuff, then you don’t need to take notes. It’s really based on Your ability to learn and retain information. So I would probably put that third. And then the second one I would put is the film. Being able to organize your film, getting through a lot of film in a fast and efficient way, where it’s not just keeping you up all night long. That comes through you having clearly defined sorters, uh, terminology, columns, labels, coding, whatever it is, just to make it simple, where when you go back and have to review the film or find a clip, it’s not another, you know, dive into the deep sea. You know exactly where it is. And then with the film, you have to have a method of grading and evaluating the clips. I’ve seen everything. I’ve seen a coach, you go into his notes column, and he’s got 16 plus signs and four minus signs. I can’t keep track of that. That’s not necessarily how I do it. I just usually do it like a teacher would. An educator gives you A, B, Cs, and Ds, and you have a method of what an A looks like.
Charles Klask 37:31
You know, hey, we did everything right on this possession, and we were able to score. That’s an A+ possession.
A B would be 80% of the possession went right, and maybe it wasn’t quite the result we wanted, but most of the possession, we did the right things. You can even use the number system with that if you want. You just have to have some sort of method so it’s easy for you to find your clips. One phrase, if I can just throw in here, I really like the acronym RISE. So when you’re teaching guys, and it stands for right idea, sharper execution. You know, where, hey, I know your intentions were right. Maybe the pass was just slightly too low or too high, or here’s what to look for, here’s what to read. So yeah, there you go.
So it’d be questions, film grading, evaluation, and then note-taking.
Dan 38:20
I actually would like to follow up on what was your sit. And just because with the note-taking, I’ve been around you when you’re at a clinic or whatnot, and you are taking what looks like to me copious amount of notes.
What stands out to you when you’re gonna take a note or you’re learning from someone? Is it terminology? Is it a teaching point? What gets your attention from that standpoint to where like, “Oh, I need to write this down to dive in deeper.” What do you find yourself mostly gravitating towards?
Charles Klask 38:45
It’s both of those. It’s, hey, this was a really good teaching point. So whether I’m listening to one of the unbelievable Slapping Glass podcasts, and it’s an idea or a quote from a former coach or, um, scientist, whoever you have on there, I like that idea. I want to revisit it or investigate deeper.
And then I always think about how is it relative to me and how I can apply it to my team. Take, for example, like handling adversity or a mistake response, and you have a Navy SEAL on there. I can do the same scenario training and have this guy get scored on three straight times or purposely shoot an air ball and be able to just sprint back with no recollection and just try to make the next play. That is definitely one area how I can apply it. And then the other one, if something really stands out to me that I don’t have a clear understanding whatsoever, I’ll always wanna ask a follow-up question. I’m not afraid of not knowing. I’m not afraid of hearing no whatsoever. If it can lead me to thoroughly understanding something, I’m addicted to it.
Like, I love learning. I don’t mind asking ques- it can get annoying, I’m sure, as you guys know that. And here’s my thing with all that. The better I can understand something, the better I can teach it. And then what happens is the more you teach it, you’re even more familiar at a deep, deep nuance level of the materials. And physically writing the notes to me is great. There’s something where it wires your brain to your thoughts. It’s a great mental exercise. I used to do this thing, like after my first couple years of advanced scouting, where I would write down all my notes. I had one page for offense, one page for defense, and one page for personnel. And then when it would be time to go write my report, I would set all those things aside, and then I would try to write the report all off my mind. And then I would go back and look at my notes to make sure I’m touching on all the points.
And you would be surprised sometimes the things… When you wrote it down, you thought this was the most important thing in the world. Well, why didn’t it stick in my head when I was testing myself and just typing it into the report? So you go back, and then you come up with like a star system or a circle system, you know, make sure you’re adding those points to the scouting report. I thought that was a really good exercise, just ’cause the more locked in you are at that first layer of encoding, the better you can retain it and apply it to the game or to drill or practice coaching.
Pat 41:10
You talked about asking questions, and you mentioned that you like to ask the players questions, and this is something I’m super curious about and always trying to get better at myself. What needs to be in place or how you approach a question when questioning a player so that the answer you get is not a defensive response?
Charles Klask 41:30
Yeah, you definitely have to get their guards down, you know, so they have to disarm themselves, ’cause we all have egos, and we all wanna look good. So sometimes in those situations, I’ll tell the guys ahead of time, “Hey, I might call on you to answer this question when it gets to the film session tonight.” I’m not gonna tell them the question. I’m not gonna tell them the answer, you know, just so they can think through things again.
‘Cause sometimes when you catch people off guard and they don’t know, they do get very defensive, rightfully so. You know, hey, their mind is so locked in the game, they don’t wanna answer questions. They just wanna be told exactly what to do right before we go out and then, you know, go to war. So sometimes you have to prep them. What do you guys think the number one reason is why coaches don’t ask more questions?
Pat 42:13
Yeah, or they don’t know how to respond, maybe react to the answer.
Charles Klask 42:16
I would definitely agree. Sometimes I think they’re also two things.
They’re afraid that the player’s answer will lessen the overall trust in the room if they get it wrong. And then the second one is, what I found, coaches don’t plan to ask the questions. It’s just something that like pops into their conscious, and then they just throw it out there, and they’re not really ready for the possible responses. So just like when you’re prepping your pregame presentation, you have to prepare for what questions you wanna ask at what moments. And it can’t be Jeopardy where there’s a question on every clip and there’s a follow-up question and a, you know, double Jeopardy and all that other stuff. No, it’s gotta be, you probably get to do it once or twice. And you also have to feed off what your head coach like. Some head coaches, “Hey, get right to it. I wanna get through this.” You know, their minds are on the game. So you have to read your head coaches. But plan for the questions ahead of time and then, like, you never wanna ask a question you don’t know the possible answers of. So put in your mind when you’re preparing, what are their possible responses? Well, th- he’s gonna say this. He’s not gonna say that. And then what you do is as soon as they answer, you try to tease out as much of what was correct as you can, make that bubble to the top. You might be able to get one follow-up question for them to add a little bit more detail or context, nuance, so everybody in the room understands it. The one question coaches always ask is what? “Does anybody have any questions?” It’s so vague, and half of the time the guys wanna get out of the gym by that point, and they’re not gonna raise their hand. You have to look at people’s body language sometimes when you’re going through, like, a walkthrough. And if you see a player in the corner as you’re explaining something scratching his head, you gotta take a mental note and say, “Hey, I need to grab Pat after practice. He doesn’t have a feel for this concept. He might wanna ask a question, but not in front of the veterans.” The art and science of coaching is so layered and so nuanced, you gotta pick up on those things. And then that’s, like, the beauty, too, of knowing your players, spending time with them, watching individual film with them as much as possible. You’ll get to pick up on some of their behaviors, what to look for. And then sometimes you’ll ask a question that you already know most of the people know the answer for, and you just wanna make sure they feel good about the answer, and we feel like we’re on the same page. Like, we got this. We’re so locked in. The best thing in the world is a locked in athlete. There is nothing better than a locked in athlete. Like, when we went to the championship and when we won it, every single person in that building, staff, player, doesn’t matter, we were all super locked in each and every possession. It was like– I’m getting chills right now, but it was like the world stopped spinning and everything was in harmony and doing exactly what you want it to do to get the win and impact the game.
Pat 45:02
Charles, for our next start subset, we’re gonna go back to the court. This time look at the defensive end, specifically switching defense. And we’re gonna give you three options, and in your mind, what would be the toughest to teach when executing switch, when being a good switching team?
So option one, the KYP, knowing the players that are in the action, their strengths. Option two would be the physicality, executing the switch, the technique, proper physicality in the switch. Or option three would be the shrink or stick decisions we’re calling them of the players around the action, off of the action, whether it’s off-ball, on-ball, the primary action, but how the three players, let’s say, around the switch, their shrink or stick decisions and gap help.
Charles Klask 45:52
I would start with physicality as much as possible. As soon as you know that guy is coming to set a screen on the ball, I wanna get connect with contact, attach as soon as possible, push him out, up, and away. And if we can completely neutralize the action, that trumps everything, in my opinion. Sub, I would sub the KYP. You wanna apply as much KYP to everything you do, whether it’s closeouts, your technique, tactics, strategy, whatever. But in the midst of it sometimes, I think that comes secondary.
Obviously, everyone has strengths that you’re trying to mitigate. I totally understand that. But as many things in the heat of the moment you can just rely on your default or base system, you wanna try to do that. If you can layer on the KYP, go ahead. And then the last one, the shrink, I would say if you guard, part of the reason why you wanna switch and switch properly is to just keep bodies in front of bodies, and then those other guys don’t have to shrink as much or pull in as much, and we can stay ready to guard the shooters. If you do the first two correctly, you shouldn’t have to worry about the third one. So a big counter to switching, so it’s kinda like the Gortat. We call it just drive back the new gap. So I’m on the left slot. Screener’s coming in to set it on my right hand. As soon as I get the ball, he’s gonna roll to the basket and out to the right side. My new defender’s on my right hand. I’m gonna quickly drive it back to the new gap, the wake, all right, that the roller left. And now that guy that’s guarding the left corner, just a moment ago, there was a body in front of me. There was somebody already in that gap. So my mind says I don’t have to plug this gap. It’s already plugged. Now the roller goes away, and he has that oh moment, and now he’s late to plug the gap. So the shrinking is important. If there’s nobody in that gap, then that means you are. And then obviously as much as possible after you switch, you wanna get square and don’t give up any angles or strengths.
Pat 47:48
With the physicality piece, what I’m curious about is the preparation, you know, doing your work early to be physical at the point of the action. What role does maybe your base gap stance, gap pressure play in being able, if you’re gonna be a switching team, to really then switch with physicality?
In terms of, like, if we’re gonna be very compact, are you gonna be chasing a lotta actions versus if we’re high and wide in gaps, then they’re gonna have to run through you to get to any action.
Charles Klask 48:16
Those are really tough. There’s two situations that I categorize those things with. So is it a set? Like, is he starting at the right block, and I know what the action is coming in front of me? I have time to get attached. You know, their alignment is telling me what they’re doing or their play call, whatever it is, whatever their indicator is. So now I can apply exactly the type of coverage I want to apply. I should be able to at least.
Now, when it’s like a flow play and I’m in a gap, I’m in a shrink, and all of a sudden this guy runs outta nowhere and I don’t have the time To get connected with contact and push them out, up, and away. Then it becomes more just a read and react gray area situation. So our rules are like guidelines, especially when we know what’s coming. Everything else is instinctual. We kinda leave it to the players’ discretion. And then when you’re scouting, you’re trying to evaluate, does this guy slip more times than not, or does he set it? Who is it? If it’s Christian Brown trying to bring a rusty defender to the ball, we know Christian wants to set it to get the switch so we get the advantage mismatch. That plays into it a little bit. What we try to go into the game, like last year, we said this was a slip team. Most players, most times, slip. So everything is a square to start. Come in with the initial thought they’re slipping, and then if they adjust and start setting, we can adjust to that. So we try to give them like a rubric of like, if this, then that, without like overwhelming them.
Dan 49:45
With the slipping teams, and just for my clarifications, the priority still is on like, “Hey, let’s be physical, force them to set it,” or is it more just like we’re just gonna be square, square, and just know that 80% of the time they’re getting out?
Charles Klask 49:56
As much as possible. Yeah, so our little catchphrase was physicality reduces slippage. The more I can get my hands into his body, I can feel what he’s trying to do and nudge steer him away from that, that it’s more of like just a murky, muddy feeling, and we’ve got them. They wanna play fast. They wanna gas it and ghost it, you know, whatever it is, and we don’t let them do those things. Sometimes it’s not gonna happen, right?
You’re gonna make one call, and it was the wrong read, whatever, or you can’t get attached the way you want to and steer the screener. So in that situation, it’s like a zone switch, and now we’re just trying to get two guys in front of two guys. And then we have emergency rules if everything breaks down, right? And we get two guys stuck on the ball for too long, emergency rotation, we’ll just pull triggers. We put out one fire. Somebody’s gotta be the fireman and put out the next fire.
Dan 50:50
When you can steer the screen and you apply the proper physicality, and so they’re gonna set it, decisions in the defender switching over the screen or under the screen.
Charles Klask 50:59
Yeah, that’s another KYP thing. If it’s a shooter and they’re really good at stopping behind and finding the space between to launch their shot, we would go over the screen to make sure there’s less space to make that decision.
And then after the switch, your chest is gonna be on the high shoulder, and you’re just retreating with a long arm in the passing lane to, like, the roll pass. If he’s popping in there doing that, you’re actually kinda like blocking, trailing, or chasing him into the screen, and then you’re gonna almost do a 180 to get back to your shrink spot or be ready to close out. Now, if it’s a roller, if it’s not a shooter and you know he’s rolling, right before the point of the screen, we wanna give one good push, two hands on the hips, push out to facilitate the under, right? And then you can stump his roll from e- even happening.
Dan 51:46
Charles, my last question on this has to do with not all switches are created equal, and what type of messaging and building blocks would you have, say, for switching that’s gonna be used to, like, weaponize your defense? Where in zoom action, we’re gonna switch it all out and pin it on the side and basically weaponize the switch, so we’re in control of the possession.
Verse switches that are, like, for fixes or 911 situations where you have to switch, like the triple switch out stuff. So, like, I guess the difference between, “Hey, we’re gonna switch because we can really use this to our advantage,” verse, “These are fixes that have to be taken care of,” and I guess the balance of teaching that with a team.
Charles Klask 52:24
A lot of it’s, again, based on what your players can handle. We have some little triggers of when you can increase your aggressiveness.
Say you’re running zoom action and they just ran it three straight times, and now they’re getting a little lazy with it and not really setting up their screens. They’re just… You know, like so many teams will run fluff action, so the first two times in fluff, they’re not even looking to score, but they’re also not expecting you to be aggressive on fluff. So, hey, this time we’re gonna jump out, deny one time, and we’re gonna keep the zoom action on the side. We’re not even gonna let the guy coming out of the corner touch the ball. We gotta make him do something else. And then it’s also tailored around the skills and ability of the offensive players to read those types of distortions or disruption defense, where if I have a ball handler, my five is not a good passer. Well, we’re gonna apply even more ball pressure on him because we know he can’t make the backdoor passes. We’re gonna get more aggressive denying Devin Booker coming out of the corner to his right hand. So it’s also tailored on those things. If we don’t think they have an ability to break our disruption and penalize us for it, we’ll increase our aggressiveness.
Dan 53:31
Charles, you’re off the Start, Sub, or Sit hot seat. You killed it. That was a lot of fun. Thanks for playing that game with us.
Our last question that we ask all the guests is, what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career as a coach?
Charles Klask 53:43
I would say when it comes to the whole learning component, there is no budget for it. If I felt like I needed to fly to Austin, Texas, to watch a training camp of a team because I thought it was gonna help my growth and development, I would max out the credit cards, do whatever it took just to get to those places. If I had to drive cross-country or buy a book, the audiobooks are expensive, but, you know, I try to read a book a month. When it comes to our budget with my wife, I will tell her, like, “Listen, there’s no limit to this. The only limit is how hard I wanna work at my craft.” I love learning, and the same thing applies to my kids. If my wife has a conference and it’s in Hawaii and that’s what she feels like she needs to do to improve her craft, again, no budget. Kids wanna go to a camp at Michigan Ross Business School and we think it’s valuable to his growth and development, boom, sign the check. We’ll figure it out. I’ll get a second job, UPS driver, barista, whatever. We’re gonna make it happen.
Dan 54:51
All right, Pat. Hey, that was one of the more enjoyable ones we’ve had this year so far.
Coach Klask has been a great friend, someone that we highly respect for who he is as a coach, and then obviously what he’s done for so many people in the coaching community. And I think what came across today is just how high level of a thinker and coach he is, and feels like that’s like what we’ve been able to do the last few years, just not with a microphone in front of us.
Pat 55:15
Yeah. Getting the opportunity to meet and develop a relationship with Charles, Coach Klask, was long overdue, this conversation, we both felt, and also one of the ones we’re just going into the conversation, whatever kind of topic we settled on, we knew it would be a rich conversation with just a wealth of knowledge.
And Coach Klask can speak so well on so many topics.
Dan 55:36
Absolutely. Well, Pat, let’s get into our major takeaways, and so for the first one, I will kick it to you.
Pat 55:43
Kind of the little background on how we settled on this conversation is that, you know, in our conversations with ourselves about our own offense, but with other coaches, just how everyone wants to play faster, play with pace, play more random. But I think, like, once you, like, okay, let’s do it, but then the next part, and I think what we kind of are always hearing back from coaches is, like, that kind of what next happens, ’cause it is gonna be random. It is gonna be… There’s so much more the unknown, you know? And I think that’s what then builds the hesitancy in coaches because we just don’t know how we then can react or teach it from there.
And also the other side of the coin is then, well, if we really get it too random, you know, every team kind of has a one or two, Charles said, rulers or your top decision-makers, the guys that the ball needs to be in their hands. How do you make sure it gets in their hands? Because again, it’s gonna be random. We’re not gonna be able to constantly dictate. Of course, we have set calls, but if you really wanna go this true free-flowing, play pace, play random, like, the fear is then, like, are my bad decision makers making too many decisions? And how do we make sure there is a hierarchy? So kind of thinking about that, then it’s clear that there are some underlying structures that need to be go into place for a true random pace-dominated offense. And he kind of laid out everything, the various structures that need to go in from evaluating players, your decision makers, the systems, listing out your priorities. What really stood out to me in that kind of part of the conversation before we took some off roads into some really interesting places was the rich possession he talked about, defining what is a rich possession in his eyes, and he talked about are we attacking the rim, are we getting some ball reversals, whether through passes or penetrations. But the part I really liked about then are your rulers getting a touch, and are we attacking rusty defenders? And when we pressed further on that, he talked about these healthy combos of having your rulers in plays with rusty defenders in the action. And I liked when Charles talked about how they would just go four on four, and they’d put a jersey on someone as that would dissimilate that’s the r- rusty defender. Because it is one thing we can’t play call all the time, but how does the offense identify and find ways in the natural flow to put the rusty defenders in these actions to get those healthy combos. So I really just like the framework, first of what defines a rich possession and how they would work through it in practice four on four, building it out, just trying to get the guys used to being able to randomly organize a ruler with the ball, a rusty defender in the action and generate healthy combos to drive a rich possession.
Dan 58:20
Yeah. A couple just quick things before I hit on what I really enjoyed about that first bucket. Just a couple quotes I thought were really great.
You know, at the end of the day, your solutions are your players’ skills.
Pat 58:30
Yes.
Dan 58:31
So true. That’s, you know, why player development and how they function within your system is ultimately gonna be the solution. So I thought that was great.
I really like the kind of distinction back and forth between chess and checkers.
Pat 58:43
Mm-hmm.
Dan 58:43
And it’s like the balance of play call versus free play. He also said, I think it was, like, early offensive stuff, the R lab, which was what? Rim.
Pat 58:53
The rim, the line, as in free throw line, the arc, three pointer, and then B would be the best shot, just getting the best shot you can at the end of a possession.
Dan 59:02
And I think he had another quote too about, like, the easy baskets early can be like the grease to your offense, which I thought was a nice way to put it. So true.
Pat 59:11
Mm-hmm.
Dan 59:11
You get a nice easy one in transition, it makes everything feel better. So I thought those were three little really good quotes or takeaways. And then we wandered into offensive rebounding-
Pat 59:21
Yeah
Dan 59:21
… and tagging up, and I think that was a fun place to wander into because you and I, a lot of coaches, tagging up is one of the, I don’t know, going into three or four summers in a row now of just topics of conversation and the strict disciplined approach to it. You go back and listen to Aaron Fern, this is like strictly how we’re doing it.
Pat 59:40
Mm-hmm.
Dan 59:41
To, like, variations that I think you’re seeing, and I think it’s interesting to study the variations of Charles getting in today about tagging up on the threes versus the twos. Andre Trincari, it came up with the threes versus twos tagging up.
And then I liked, you know, a little bit of the stuff where if you’ve got open lanes, go make a play.
Pat 01:00:00
Yeah.
Dan 01:00:01
Letting the players sometimes go make a play. I’ll just speak from experience, that’s, like, really true. You can’t be wild with it, of course, but if players just feel like, “Hey, I’m just gonna kind of run to this guy’s back every time,” it’s true, they don’t go hard all the time.
Pat 01:00:15
Yeah.
Dan 01:00:15
But, like, if there’s a little bit more to it where if you go and they’re allowed to potentially make a play when it’s smart, they will go harder. So I thought that was a really rich part of the conversation there.
Pat 01:00:26
You and me both love the theory, the principle behind it, but what is the challenge of this is the human element, and what you just hit on and what Klask talked about, like, we ask them all, like, “Why aren’t you scrumming it or going to their back?” And they just, “Well, I’m not really trying to get the rebound, so…” And I agree.
So, like, as more coaches have implemented this and tweaked it and tailored it, it’s always fun to then get a coach on and hear what worked for them, what didn’t. To your point You gotta give these guys the opportunity to go and to make a play to still be basketball players, to get the buy-in for them to just maybe 80% of the time they are just doing the proper scrum tag-up, and then giving that 20%, maybe that 10% freedom to make a play and just know that, yeah, it’s like Clask said, it’s like a steal, so if you put us in a bad spot, and probably we’ll see it in film the next day, but, you know, it’s gonna be at your discretion. We’re gonna empower you. And just like you said, Mitch, from your experience, I think from my experience too, what stood out was you talked about the two-second press and trying to force guys left, because I think that was the struggle I’ve run into is, okay, we can get the consistency of the tagging up, but it doesn’t just stop, like if you don’t get it, and then we just run back because maybe your other teammates are struggling to find their tags.
Dan 01:01:39
Right.
Pat 01:01:40
And you just let your man look up the court and just baseball pass it, or you’re gonna start picking off your teammates struggling with the proper tag, and how important that next element is. It’s like, yeah, you don’t get the offensive rebound, but right away you’re on defense.
It’s not like we’re full court pressuring in their shorts, but, hey, for two seconds you gotta get their head down. You gotta drop their head, try to make them go left and not just see where their teammates are and ignite throw ahead kick aheads.
Dan 01:02:04
My last comment on that, we had Francesco Tavellini on the show, and we actually reran his episode earlier this summer ’cause it’s one of the best ones we’ve had in a while. But during that conversation, we had a start sub sit about tagging up killers.
Pat 01:02:17
Yeah.
Dan 01:02:18
And I would say go back and listen to that segment if you want even more on the tagging up killers. ‘Cause one of them was if you come off of the ball or you’re tagged too early after tagging, it just kills all of the work you’ve done to tag up.
And that’s another good resource to listen to ’cause Coach Tavellini over in Europe was doing it at a high level, and, like we talked about these things, which I thought was great.
Pat 01:02:42
And one last thing, Dan, before we’ll get to our second takeaway. We had a really good conversation, too, in just the analytical side and goal setting with what you, goals for your team, macro, micro, and I just thought Coach Clask’s tool belt analogy was really good in terms of, okay, if we looked at it through goals, you know, how many goals you get them, it goes on their tool belt, and too many weighs them down.
Now they’re, again, thinking too much, slowing down. So really love that analogy in terms of what you give your players, but from a goal-setting perspective, too.
Dan 01:03:12
Absolutely.
Pat 01:03:12
All right, Dan. Well, let’s keep it going here. I’ll throw it to you for the second takeaway.
Dan 01:03:17
Both start sub sits were really good. I’m gonna go first to what was my takeaway, and that was growing and learning as a coach, and just something that I’ve really respected getting to know Coach Clask over the years is, like any time you’re in a gym with him, and it doesn’t matter who’s speaking, it doesn’t matter if it’s high school coach, college, NBA, I mean, this is someone with an, an NBA championship under his belt. Like he is locked in, learning, taking notes, asking follow-up questions. He’s all in, and I think that that’s, first of all, it’s like really infectious in a room. Like when you got someone as high level as Coach Clask willing to be that open and asking questions, I think it’s like the rest of the room’s on board with it.
And so, you know, I’ve just always wondered, like, you know, what do great learners and great minds, what are they taking notes on? What stands out? I thought his whole answer was great. Obviously, all three of these things are really important, but I’ll just go to his start. Why such a great question is one of the best things you can do for your career because you’re not just passively learning. It’s like active learning, where you’re listening and reading whatever it is to something. The process of thinking about it deeply, trying to find the follow-up that makes sense. Like he talked about supplants in your mind what you believe or where you need to go to learn more, and I think is a really, really great tool for all of us, you know, from any level on to develop that, and I think that was a great answer.
Pat 01:04:37
Yeah. Tying it together and how I was taking my notes and listening to Charles at the same time when pressed on the questions, he really clarified it like a good string of thought in terms of, you know, asking the questions to better understand so you can better teach it, and then once you can better teach it, you can teach it, I think, consistently. And I think like anything, you look at your best players and hopefully then a long, fruitful career is, it’s about consistency and not being able to just kind of hit peaks when things are in your wheelhouse and then valleys when it’s something you’re not truly understanding or a little less comfortable in, but being just consistent across the board on so many things and that, like you just hit on, is the value of being curious, asking questions. And he raised a good point.
Even if you think you understand, but whatever the coach is saying or even you are saying, it may be interpreted differently by me and it’s interpreted differently by you, and I think that’s the beauty of our ability to ask questions and not being afraid to ask questions.
Dan 01:05:35
Somewhere within this conversation, too, he talked about RISE when talking with players about right idea-
Pat 01:05:41
Yeah
Dan 01:05:41
… sharper execution. Just was like another tagline or acronym from the show that I thought was really good because, like that’s something I’m gonna steal like immediately because how many times are you in practice watching film, whatever, and like someone’s trying to do the right thing.
Pat 01:05:55
Yes.
Dan 01:05:55
And it’s like, it’s just a nice way to correct and teach where that is the right idea. We just have to do it better.
Pat, is there anything you and I missed or wish you could have went deeper on with Coach today?
Pat 01:06:07
A couple things. Wish I had followed up on just how he views film.
I thought he, you know, in his first response to the start sub had some really good thoughts on film organization and basically like efficiency in viewing film-
Dan 01:06:19
Yeah
Pat 01:06:19
… and kind of, you know, being able to accomplish the task but not be up all hours. So would have loved to have followed up on just how he views film, kind of the method he’s found over the course of his career.
And then secondly, the other, I mean, it wasn’t a miss ’cause we had a start sub sit on it, but we did a really cool film project with Coach Clask on switching defense and enjoyed his start sub sit responses to all these things that just I had follow-ups and doing the editing and us getting the chance to sit with him on the presentation. And I think one miss within that is we didn’t get to hit on too much was the shrink. I think that’s really important to switch, and I think so many times when teams do switch effectively, and then you have one guy just sitting in a gap unnecessarily, and they just kick it ahead, and the guy just cashes a three, and teams are the clarity of, you know, we don’t need to shrink or we can shrink because of the KYP, but- I think that’s kind of like a, maybe a secondary component to, like, effective switching, and I wish maybe I kind of hit a little bit more on that within our start, sub, sit conversation.
Dan 01:07:21
Well, my miss, not by obviously Charles, of course, ’cause we didn’t ask these questions, so he can’t answer something we don’t ask him. But it ties with what you just said.
I’ve heard Charles talk about guarding aces, he would call them, or, like, really great players.
Pat 01:07:33
Yeah.
Dan 01:07:34
And one of the things for a follow-up I could’ve had would’ve been with the off-ball shrink stick when it comes to, like, well, the player that was switched is now a Steph Curry, for example, or somebody like where-
Pat 01:07:46
Yeah
Dan 01:07:46
… this is a problem, the decisions on going and doubling the ball, where you double from. Like, these kind of next layers of after a switch, all your gap integrity, like you just mentioned, but then where’s the ace? Where’s the best player after the switch, and how do you account for how you’re ending a possession? I know he has lots of great thoughts on that, and I just didn’t ask him it, so that would’ve been something to be interesting to follow up on, which I think he touches a little bit on in our video, but for the podcast would’ve been interesting.
Well, once again, we really appreciate Coach Klask for coming on today. It was a really fun conversation. Thank you, everybody, for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
Pat 01:08:26
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please make sure to visit slappingglass.com for more information on the free newsletter, Slapping Glass Plus, and much more. Have a great week coaching, and we’ll see you next time on Slapping Glass.