We were joined by Concordia St. Paul Head Coach Matt Fletcher to discuss building offense around personnel. Fletcher broke down their “Bump, Tap, Hit” guard-to-guard screening system, how they teach and time cuts, and the difference between playing fast and shooting fast. Here are seven of our favorite lessons from the conversation.
Transcript
Dan Krikorian 00:43
Today, we’re excited to welcome D2 Concordia St. Paul head coach, Matt Fletcher. Coach Fletcher is here today to discuss insights and teaching points behind effective guard-to-guard screens, timing cuts, and we talk program rebuilds and aligning offensive and defensive systems during the always fun Start, Sub, or Sit.
The Practice Lab is now live inside SG+. It’s a new space we’re building with Drew Dunlop 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. And now, please enjoy our conversation with Coach Matt Fletcher. Coach, really appreciate you making the time for us. Excited to talk to you about a bunch of stuff today, so thanks for hopping on.
Matt Fletcher 02:12
Yeah, I’m really excited. Thanks for having me, and I’ve been listening to this since it kinda started.
It’s one of those… Yeah, I’d never thought I’d get that phone call, but I’m really excited to be on and excited to chat basketball with you guys today.
Dan Krikorian 02:24
Thanks, coach. Coach, wanna start with a topic that I think we were discussing a little bit before the podcast.
You’re seeing it a lot in different places of the world, rising as an action, guard to guard screening, and taking away maybe for a second the traditional one to five, one to four, which obviously is still highly valuable, but also mixing in other types of screeners and guard to guard actions and how you’ve thought about that, implemented it into your offense, and I guess thoughts on that going forward.
Matt Fletcher 02:53
Yeah, it’s kinda unique ’cause it didn’t happen on purpose, to be completely honest with you. A couple of years ago, we were really point guard five dominate ball screen ’cause they’re kinda two focal points of our offense. We wanna keep the ball in their hands as much as we can.
Well, then shifting into the following year, we had a different roster. We had a different skill set, different size, and different positions, and all of a sudden we were like, “Well, I don’t know if that’s our best bet to continue success with that we were having.” So we were trying to pivot around, figuring out what would be best for this group, and we have a ton of really athletic wings. We had lineups this year where we played three to four point guards, quote, unquote, “at the same time.” So we were thinking, “How can we play those guys together?” And then we played an undersized five a lot too, who’s technically not really a five. So we’re like, “How can we use him as well too?” And that’s kinda where we stumbled upon watching the Pacers, where they’d throw that ball ahead. And how they played out of it was different after that for us, but that’s what spurred my brain starting to think of ideas on, “All right. How can I… I love the kick ahead. I love the playing out of the advance of the ball, but then what? What can we do?” And that’s when I stumbled upon just guard to guard and the Draymond Green type of stuff where, you know, we can’t set the moving screens they do in the NBA, but using guard to guard actions and putting those guards in switch, not switch situations when we have guys that are point guards getting those kick aheads and maybe getting a screen and roll with a guard or a pick and pop or a ghost screen, and really tried to create some randomness to what happened when that kick ahead was thrown, and that’s where we kinda stumbled upon it and then started really liking it and creating empty sides is the main reason we did it. We wanted to take that corner guy that was on that ball side, and he would come up into the action to create an empty where that guy could look to attack and then become a point guard which a lot of our guys already were.
Dan Krikorian 04:41
Early on, when you start teaching, implementing guard to guard screens, I mean, there’s all different ways that they can come, right? I mean, you can actually set the screen. You can ghost out of the screen. You can start and stop. You can do all these different things going into the screen. What’s the early teaching points with it?
Do you want them to set it all the time? Are you trying to be tricky and slip out? I mean, I guess, what’s… That guy come out of the corner, what do you want, especially early?
Matt Fletcher 05:04
This is where we got creative, you know, ’cause we have shooters, we have drivers, we have cutters. And I think at the college level, most guys can do most things, but we want our guys to really focus on what they’re great at. So then we wanted to make a different type of screen action that fit each type of player, whether it’s a shooter, a driver, a cutter, whatever it was. So that’s where we came up with our terminology last year was bump, tap, hit.
And so when the guy would run up from the corner, he would yell out, “Bump, tap,” or, “Hit,” and that was telling the ball handler which type of screen he was gonna do to create that mismatch or that indecision by the defender. Then what we did along with that was we charted it. So I would talk to certain players on the team, and let’s– we’ll just use a shooter ’cause that’s the easiest one to describe. I bring a shooter in, I say, “Hey, you know, you’re a shooter. We want you to get pick and pop as much as we can. So I need you at about sixty-five percent.” We called ghost screens tap last year. So if we yelled tap, it was a ghost screen. We wanted him at about sixty-five percent tap or so, but he had to mix in bump and hit just to keep the defense honest. And then we would chart that and say, “Hey, man, I think you gotta mix in a couple more bumps. You gotta roll a couple times.” Just to make sure they’re staying honest with that to keep that ghost more effective. Then we did the same with cutters, and we did the same with others as well, too. And then hits were specific, mainly matchup based, right? So hit would just be a traditional pick and pop. We just want to hit. We want to get the switch. We’d use that a lot to get into a Barkley if we had a smaller guard. We had basically a four man that was a point guard as well. And so if teams were switching, we’d call hit, so we could get that switch and go into a Barkley action, and that was the way we created the advantage with that type of system. But that’s kinda how we originally did it, and then we branched off of it. You know, we would screen into the ghost screen, or we would screen into the bump tap hit, and they’d yell it out. We just wanted to create randomness for them and be as predictable to each other as we could. That’s why we communicated it, and then we would, you know, hopefully catch them sleeping here and there just to get that ball in the paint to get our advantage going, which is the whole point of the initial one to five ball screen. We just wanted to do it a little bit differently ’cause we could win a lot of one-on-one matchups just off the bounce. So how could we just use that, create spacing, get guys to spots, and then as we’ll branch into that, set up our cutting and our ability to play off the ball.
Patrick Carney 07:17
Coach, can we just go through the bump? What was the difference between the bump and the tap?
Matt Fletcher 07:22
Yeah, so tap is your traditional ghost screen, right? We called it tap ’cause we wanted to tap the hip, open up the hips, avoid contact, and pop out.
Bump was a traditional, like a one to five screen and roll. So you’re gonna come up, you’re gonna make a hit. Now, depending on the coverage, which would be scouting based, are we slipping out early? Are we hitting and rolling hard? Kind of depending on what the defense was of the other team. But bump meant you were gonna screen and roll, and then hit was hit and then pop. So you had ghost, hit and pop, and then screen and roll were the three that we mixed in throughout it. And then we would go into every game with, “All right, guys, we’re gonna hammer bumps tonight. Let’s get as much as we can. They’re gonna check from that backside. We’re gonna use that check. That’s what we’re gonna do tonight.” So then that guard would roll, and what we realized is even when a guard’s rolling on a bump, we were getting the same checks and coverage from help side as we were when it was a five. And sometimes it made it easier because the show or the switch was a guard, so the passing angles were easier for us to throw over the top or around because it’s not a 6’9″, 6’10” five man guarding the ball on the screen coverage. And it was something that they just weren’t used to covering, so most teams just resulted to switching, and then we were able to do a little bit more matchup based type stuff like that.
Patrick Carney 08:33
You mentioned a little bit with when it was maybe a hit situation and maybe you getting some Barclays, what were you working with the ball handler in terms of maybe order of operation, timing, when to attack, you know, if they knew it was gonna be a bump, tap, or hit? Did anything really change with them and how you taught the ball handler in the action?
Matt Fletcher 08:51
That’s a good question. So one thing we do, and this kinda goes back to our system, is we play really fast. And I always have to tell people, like playing fast doesn’t mean shoot fast. Playing fast is a pace, it’s a style, it’s aggressive. It’s less sets, so you have to play with more pace and more quick reactions. You know, when you catch it, we always talk about zero-second decisions. So when you catch the ball, you gotta decide what you’re doing right away. Well, that kinda led into this.
So we try to get into our first bump tap hit in three seconds. So anytime the ball gets inbounded, that guy’s got three seconds to cross the half court, and the corner guy, he’s turning around immediately getting right into that action, playing with pace. So if it’s a hit, so all of a sudden we’re all yelling, “Hit,” that meant the cone was in the corner. We’re gonna yell, “Hit, hit, hit, hit, hit.” So we make that screen, and that guard is attacking the baseline. Layup first. We always talk layups first. If you can get a layup first, go take the layup. Usually, you get a hit situation, they’re gonna try to cut you off and immediately get into our Barkley action, and then we had reads off of, you know, where that Barkley was, how low it was to the baseline, and who’s gonna cut and where we’re gonna shape to.
Dan Krikorian 09:58
When you’re trying to have this action come out of the corner, are you teaching your guys to still run to deep corners early in transition first and then come back to set these screens? Or on the same side of the ball, are they stopping and coming back? I guess, what’s the balance of how you’re teaching that early thrust of the pace and guys getting deep corner first?
Matt Fletcher 10:15
That’s a really good question. This is where I think coaches really have to figure out it’s okay to change. It wasn’t working for us right away. We were running deep corner, sprinting all the way down like everybody teaches. You know, get to the corner, get to the corner. But we were so slow getting back up. We were stalling our ball handler out. So, like, how do we change it?
What do we do? What do we switch around and make that work more seamlessly with better timing? And so we talked about sprinting to the half court. So if you’re the corner guy, you’re gonna sprint full throttle to half court, and when you get to half court, you’re turning around. You’re looking. If the ball’s coming up your side, you’re stopping at the three-point line and turning around and getting right into your bump, tap, or hit. If the ball’s opposite of you, yeah, you’re gonna fill deep corner. Or if it looks like the guard is gonna look to attack the middle, you just keep going. It just turned into a more of a read for us. But at the beginning of the year, we were doing deep corner, and it wasn’t working. And so we had to make a couple pivots a couple weeks into practice. Like, eh, that just doesn’t feel right. And so we’re glad we made that change ’cause it definitely changed our pace bringing the ball up the court.
Patrick Carney 11:14
With these guard to guard screenings, we’re talking right now a lot, like the early offense, maybe the first trigger. But as a possession went on and you had to keep playing through some secondary actions, the organizational piece when maybe if the ball ended up in the middle third, middle shot clock, late clock, then how you also thought about teaching, organizing these guard to guard screens.
Matt Fletcher 11:35
After that first initial action, then it was freedom of motion, right? And do what you felt, and we wanted guys to do what they could do to use their best attribute for us. And I think what we really did a good job of was we always talked about action. We wanted to hunt action, and then every guy tried to hunt their action that helped us the best on the offensive end, and that’s where I think we continued to grow throughout the season.
Say, the wing ball screen happened. We didn’t get anything out of it. Ball got swung all the way around to the other side. It could automatically, say our, quote unquote, “five man” was in the corner and it got swung around, he could sprint right up into another bump, tap, or hit The ball got up into the middle third, and we love the match up. Guys will yell, “Cone,” we’re gonna spray out, and that guy’s gonna try to attack the paint out and get to two feet in the paint. If there was a shooter there and he wanted to get up and do a ghost screen, we just always yelled, “Action, action.” You know, like, I go listen to some other coaches when we… I go to practices, I hear, like Nico at the Gopher, he yells, “Fix it,” all the time, “Fix it.” And I think what those are is terminology of guys hunting the actions that they work on, the reads they work on within their drill work, just within the freedom of your motion. But the last thing I wanna do is say, “All right. Any time it gets to the middle third, we’re doing this, or any time it gets to the corner, we’re doing this,” ’cause I want that little bit of indecision, and I want guys to have the freedom to, say you catch it in the middle third, if we’re always ball screen, but you love that match up and you could stampede catch it and get right downhill right away, I don’t wanna limit you to having to wait for that ball screen. And that’s kind of the method of after the initial action, we want the ball in the paint. How we get it there, we just study and we work on throughout the whole entire fall, having guys play every day, filming it every day, talking about different actions, different ideas that guys can do and hunt, and then we really try to specialize with what guys are gonna try to hunt to try to get us those actions that work best for them.
Dan Krikorian 13:24
A couple minutes ago, you mentioned something that I just think is interesting. You said, basically, “We play fast, we don’t shoot fast, and there’s a difference.”
Matt Fletcher 13:31
Yep.
Dan Krikorian 13:32
How do you teach your team about that difference? What’s important there for them to know? ‘Cause I mean, you know, players love to play fast, and have the freedom, and then go screens and all that. But then, okay, we’re still gonna take the right types of shots, and then how do you, I guess, find that balance?
Matt Fletcher 13:48
I think there’s three keys to it. The first thing is you have to identify, we call them green, yellow, reds. So we have green shots, yellow shots, red shots. What are our green shots? And it has to be abundantly clear on what green shots are. And I think what we do a good job is, is building relationships with players, being open and honest with our communication with them, so when it is time to call them out about a shot, they understand it’s not that you can’t make that shot, it’s just that we make a different one more. And I think sometimes players get lost, and because they do, they work so hard in the summers to increase their game and what they’re capable of doing, and you don’t wanna put a limit on them. But at the same time, if you could shoot a standstill three ’cause you were better at getting your feet right, and when you shoot that at 40%, but off the dribble or a one dribble or a shot fake one dribble, you’re shooting 33%, well, then we’re gonna really hunt that standstill. And we just try to communicate that to them. And then we also make sure they understand that if you’re the best player on the team, you probably have more green looks than maybe, say, a new guy or a role player.
And we try to be really candid about those things, and have those conversations always as a group, in front of everybody, making sure if we have a guy that’s a standstill sniper, he shouldn’t have to feel like he’s gotta do something he’s uncomfortable doing to get a look. We should have guys trying to hunt him to get him those looks. And so a lot of focus on that, and then a lot of talk about, you know, the first green look we take. Actually, let’s put it this way. The first green look that we can get, we’re gonna take it. We’re never gonna turn it down. So if you’re a sniper and you’ve missed three in a row and you get a green look on the next one, you’re letting that thing rip. And I think that’s just our mentality of the way we play. If it’s green, we take it. No matter who it is, no matter how your game’s going, green is green, and we take it. Uh, and then some guys that get hot, that’s when they start to live in that yellow range. And if they’re on a scorcher, I’ll let them get into that red too. We’ll have a couple nights like that too. But shot selection’s tough to coach. I think it’s difficult. I think it’s harder with, you know, the way the landscape of college basketball is a little bit right now, ’cause you don’t have guys that are with you for three, four, five years all the time anymore. We’re fortunate enough here, we’ll have 14 returners this year, so they kinda understand what we’re doing and what we’re looking for. But shot selection’s the key to playing fast and taking great shots.
Dan Krikorian 15:55
Coach, the next layer to this offensive stuff, when you’re doing these guard to guard screens and all that, I think you mentioned it too, a lot of times teams end up switching or try to stay whole. I feel like a lot of the great offensive teams that you see, like, they’re just so good at cutting around a switch or off a penetrating drive, or even sort of a jumbled possession, they still get back.
I love the quote you said from Medved, to fix it. Like, they can fix things with great cutting and spacing. I guess the next layer for you then is how are you teaching? What is the cutting concepts or, you know, what are the things that are important from a cutting standpoint in the next layer of offense for you?
Matt Fletcher 16:30
There’s steps to it, right? And I think the first thing is your space spot’s gotta be filled. I’ll go back to this again. You need to be predictable to your teammates if you’re in a free motion offense like we are, and you need to be unpredictable to the defense.
Well, for us, where that naturally happens is everybody takes the ball out of bounds, everybody’s the outlet, everybody has to run corners, everybody has to run the middle third. So naturally you’re in a different position at all times. So the first thing we do to start the year is we memorize. We memorize whose read is it on what type of drive. Just for an example, if you’re a kick ahead, same side, baseline drive, that’s the opposite slot’s read. Whether he goes or not, that’s the read we continue to work on the entire year. We’re showing cutting clips going into the conference tournament this past year. So we try to memorize whose read is it when it’s time to cut, and then if the cut goes, then what? Where do you fill to? ‘Cause if a guy cuts, that means there should be filling. Guy should be filling that hole where he cut from. So we spent a ton of time, and we call them details, at the beginning of practice every day, we’re working on who’s cutting from where on what drive, and it always is triggered off at two feet. We’d rather you cut extremely late than early, because college basketball players are good players. They’re gonna get to two feet sometimes, they’re gonna have a counter move, they’re gonna spin back, they’re gonna make a play, so we’d rather you not run into them. So when the driver gets to two feet, that triggers the cut, that triggers the shape, like we’ve kinda talked about, so our guys know exactly where the cut will come from, so their read is simple. But then, you know, if one time you’re the cutter, the next time you’re the fill, the next time you’re the driver, it’s a little tougher for the defense to become, or really understand it for the most part. But spending the time to memorize first, and then from that day forward, we teach every day. Every single day we film it and we show it. “Hey, this should’ve been a cut here. Maybe a bleed to the middle cut rather than a baseline.” You’re way too early here. You need to be faster. You need to be slower. Hey, cut this one and run into the help defender. You’re not gonna score, so just cut in there and clog it up. This one’s a cut to score type read, and we just work on it every day. And some guys, it’s natural, and you’re gonna get some easy layups for them, and some guys are gonna do it because they’re told to, but no different than a screen or some other actions you run as well.
Dan Krikorian 18:42
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Patrick Carney 19:50
When we were talking about your bump tap hit and when you were targeting hits and matchups and you said you’d get into your Barkleys, and based on, I guess, the location or the depth that that ball handler can get on the Barkleys, that would also trigger some weak side action, some cutting. What are you guys teaching, again, through the lens of cutting when you’re getting into a Barkley situation?
Matt Fletcher 20:10
The best way to put that is there are certain guys on our team that hunted that action. We had bigger guards that wanted that Barkley. So once we started to utilize that, we started playing live with that in practice a lot. So our backside guys could start to understand certain guys and what they’re looking to do, what their moves were, so they could kinda time out when they would cut and when they wouldn’t, if that makes sense.
We had a guy named Sam West last year, and he was really good at a spin back. So he was gonna go one way, but he was never gonna stay that way. He was coming back a different direction. So our cutters knew they had to be really, really late ’cause his first move wasn’t his last move, and so they understood that. We had a couple other guys where it was straight power. He was gonna go one way, attack the middle, or attack the baseline. Well, then that cut was gonna come as soon as the help went. And we really talk about see a chest and move it. So when the chest of the help side defender commits to the Barkley move to come help, the cut should happen right then and there. Boom. As soon as the chest commits, we got two on the ball, action triggers right away as soon as that happens. And trying to understand with each guy how fast that’s gonna happen and when it’s gonna happen was kind of the key that we had to really focus on ’cause it was a little bit different with each guy. But reading that help side defender is kind of our key that we watch on film, that we talk to them about. When that guy goes, so do we. ‘Cause technically we’re trying to get that guy to say, “Hey, if you got two on the ball, you did your job. Get to two feet and let’s play. Now you did it. We got the options. Now you’re hunting an assist or a hockey assist pretty much.”
Patrick Carney 21:39
And with it being so personnel based in terms of who the Barkley man is, were you still designating then a spot in terms of who was gonna be the cutter? Was it still the slot, or was it if he goes middle, it’s gonna be the baseline, if he goes baseline, it’s gonna be the slot in terms of who cuts?
Matt Fletcher 21:55
So this is I think the part why people stop trying to coach cutting because if it was Sam and he went middle, we got to the point where we still knew it was gonna be our 45 slot guy. But when it was Ryan and he went middle, it was gonna be the corner guy ’cause he wasn’t coming back to the baseline. And so getting that studying down and getting to understand that you gotta play off of who has the ball, no different than… And I tell coaches this, no different than you know when a guy drives if he’s looking to shoot or pass. You play with him every day. You know exactly what he’s looking to do.
So learn to play off of it. So we always talk about, “I don’t coach the guy with the ball.” You work on that all summer long. You train. You’re, you’ve been playing since you were five years old. When you have the ball, you have the easiest job on the court, no different than when you’re guarding the ball. You just guard the ball or you have the ball. Everybody else has so many different things that they should be worried about and focused on, engaged into. That’s where we spend all of our time. You know, so if a guy drives and it’s Billy Bob, whoever it is, the driver, I’m working on those other guys. Like, “Hey, you gotta know when he makes this drive, what’s he looking to do? If he’s looking to shoot it, then you better be flying in there to crash the glass. If he’s looking to pass, then play off of that drive. If he’s a score, hold your space and then crash.” Type of, you know, you really try to teach that. Again, where we wanna be predictable, I can’t beat this into a guy’s head enough, we wanna be predictable to each other because that’ll create the unpredictability to the defense that is trying to figure out what we’re trying to do.
Dan Krikorian 23:25
A couple minutes ago, you mentioned how early on, you gave the example of the baseline drive and the slot or 45 cut, that you’re gonna have to memorize that. And then we’ve been talking mostly about these read-based cuts.
So how do you start teaching both? What’s like a memorization drill or concept look like where we’re just gonna hit this rope for a little while till it’s in your head, and then how do you then practice it where, “Hey, guys, this is a little bit of a read, your angle, your timing, your spacing.” What do those things look like that are different?
Matt Fletcher 23:56
So that’s how we start practice. And we’ll never just do– So we don’t do two line layups, or we don’t just do basic shooting drills.
It’s always into the details of what we’re trying to teach and get the guys to memorize. We do it on the defensive side of the ball too. But offensively, we work on zero second decisions. So they’re gonna read a closeout. Does the closeout force a middle? Does it force them baseline? And they’re gonna drive full throttle until the help commit. So our coaches are gonna be simulating a closeout, forcing them one way, and then they’re gonna come across, and they’re gonna show chest, so that means two feet. And then that’s how we shoot our “two line layups” is when the guy drives. If it’s a middle drive, we’ll work on the corner cut first. We’re just gonna hit that corner cut when the help commits. So early on, the first couple weeks of practice, we’ll just do drive middle and just so they know exactly. When it’s a middle drive corner, it’s your read, and we’re just gonna drill that timing over and over and over again. Then we’ll do baseline, and we’re gonna trigger the 45. Then we’re gonna add a empty, so we got three guys on the backside. Is it the middle guy, the top guy, or the corner guy? We’re gonna add that. And then we’ll add where we’re reading the closeout, and then the cutters have to read whose read it is. We just progress through it all fall to really get them to understand one thing at a time, understanding whose read it is. And then once you get to that point, now you’re showing film on, hey, this is… You know, we had a guy named Ben Kopetsky last year. He transferred to Appalachian State. When Ben drove, it was score first. It’s not a knock on Ben. He had an ability to score the basketball. So our cuts when Ben drove were beyond late. Wait, ’cause he was gonna draw two, and he was gonna still try to get to something else, then cut. Whereas when it was Sam or Ryan, for example, you’re cutting when they’re driving ’cause they’re looking to pass before they’re looking to shoot. And so we really tried to work on those things, and I think as we progressed the entire fall, we started to catch those nuances as coaches in practice and on film, and then we were trying to create that as well through our drill work, our communication to them.
But I think the easiest way to do it is make it a rule to start, make them be extremely late. You’d rather be late than early, and then go from there and expand from there. And I think that’s where we found success with it, is being okay with creating some rules. In college basketball, that doesn’t happen a whole lot. I wanted everybody to understand that if you’re the corner guy in a middle drive, yeah, you’re gonna cut. I don’t care if you’re the five. I don’t care if you’re the point guard. No different than if you were the corner guy in a kick ahead, you were the bump tap hit guy. We just wanted everybody to understand their role within the system and to become really good at it and making reads at it.
Matt Fletcher 26:31
And then what we found is, you know, you get your leading scorer two wide open layups on back cuts, and that ball goes through the net, watch out. You know? It just sets your team up for better success offensively, and every team’s hunting those easy baskets, right? And those are hard to come by at the collegiate level, and we’re trying to make sure we get… We want eight to 12 points a game just on easy layups that are uncontested.
Patrick Carney 26:53
Especially as you see teams for the second time or get late in the conference tournament, and teams, like, sit on the cuts. You know? Or they know you’re a cutting team, so they sit on the cuts. But the cuts do have the benefit that they still are creating space.
But going back to that just teaching shots selection, and you mentioned just, I’m sure it’s a little personnel, but, and you talked about two foot being the trigger. But if they are able to, to attack, there’s no immediate back cut, there’s no immediate clear one foot finish or getting the rim. They’re playing off a two. What’s next in terms of how you then start to teach maybe shot selection? That, yes, the cutting created some space for the driver. It’s not a clean, easy rim decision. What are you teaching? What is then a good shot? What is maybe a green, yellow, red shot in the paint for you guys, or how are you teaching then where that guy should maybe looking to get off the ball and keep the flow moving?
Matt Fletcher 27:43
So our shot selection’s broken down into four tiers. First one, free throws, obviously. Free throws, you want free throws or a wide open layup. Easiest two. Second one’s gonna be a side shoulder layup. So the chest is not committed. You’re not shooting it over the top of a body. You got them on your hip. Go finish at the rim. No secondary defender comes.
Then we want paint touch kick out threes, so inside out threes, ’cause kids live on the gun now. They shoot like that. That’s the way kids train, which is just fine. We’re gonna use that. We’re gonna hunt those shots more than we’re gonna hunt perimeter pass, which is our next one. Perimeter pass, plus ones, those are our top four. So when a guy drives, you know, that’s a really good question. We really harp a lot on when the help comes, get to two feet, and where we try to become really, really good, and what we saw later in the year last year when we saw teams a second or even sometimes a third time, was they took those cuts away. They would really pinch it in. Well, then what we’re getting is the kick out on the opposite side because if you have two on the ball and then they take away the cut, there’s nobody left to cover the skip pass. So we did a really good job later in the year of driving not too far, getting that help and seeing that cut, and maybe cutting a little earlier to draw that help in and playing out of that skip pass to grow that advantage and keep that advantage moving.
And then that guy’s got a shooter, or he’s got to attack as well too. And then with that, what we do a lot of is we’ll do a lot of empty warm-up stuff where we’re working on our cutting, and then where do you go after that? After you drive and you kick it out, where do you go after that? After you kick it out, and then you drive again, really guys understanding where they’re emptying to, where they’re filling to. If you’re a team that uses the dunker spot or you go empty corner and kick guys out, you have to really focus on your spacing too because otherwise the cuts are null and void. So you gotta do a really good job, again, where I’ve talked about you have to be elite off the ball. You have to focus off the ball because you never know when it’s gonna come back to you in this type of system. And if you’re a guy that gets lost, you’re just standing, you’re in the way, you probably just killed our advantage, killed the drive, or killed the cut because you just weren’t urgent to go get relocated back out.
I suggest a lot of teams, if you’re starting from scratch, you’re really trying to get this going, instead of emptying them corners, empty them to a dunker. You know, the Boston Celtics three years ago with Jrue Holiday, use that dunker spot to teach kids, all right, you cut, you drive, you’re in the dunker till someone kicks you out, and then you can expand off of that just so they understand that, hey, I’m a point guard. Yeah, coach has got me in the dunker. It means I got a job to do no matter what it is. And I love that Jrue made a name for himself that year just playing in the dunker as a point guard and making the rim protector a point guard down there instead of a five.
Matt Fletcher 30:18
And so using spacing and urgency to relocate, and I think you can meld it all together because if you don’t, what we focus a ton on, if you don’t have a green shot, we’re kinda taking the decision out of your hands. You’re making the decision quickly, but really there’s no decision.
If you don’t have a kick-out three that’s open, you should be attacking on your catch. And so where we found most of our layups or dunks off of cuts was on the second drive. It was never the first drive. The first drive would maybe drive, and instead at some teams will screen, which is just fine. It works in many different ways, you know? But for us, I’m not a huge screen guy. I just don’t see guys working on their game in the summer coming off of flare screens and down screens and stagger screens anymore, because it’s just not the normal. Which is fine, so we had to adapt our system to fit what kids are good at now, and they’re dang good at it. So we tried to make it so guys want the ball in space, they can shoot standstill threes, and they’re dang good at attacking closeouts and finishing at the rim. So we wanted to make that as best we could. So if you don’t have a green look when you catch it, then attack and go get your two feet in the paint. We try to take the decision out of it for you a little bit to speed up your decision-making, and then we just want that ball peppered around and making it unselfish style, and that’s recruiting good kids that wanna move the ball.
Dan Krikorian 31:35
Just for maybe clarity on my end, are you afraid of then a drive on top of a drive? You know, I think you hear like drive, kick, swing, and then you can re-drive.
And then obviously you’re gonna talk about relocating, and we talked about the skip pass too with the cut drawing and the second help. Are you worried about, yeah, drive, we kick it, and you attack on drive on a drive at all?
Matt Fletcher 31:56
Nope, because if you drive baseline and you kick 45, 77% to 81% of the time he’s gonna attack back to the middle. He’s not gonna go baseline.
So if we’re gonna teach you when you drive baseline, you’re gonna empty baseline. If you drive middle and kick a corner, 80% of the time he’s going baseline, so you’re gonna fill behind, and we work on those spacings. So another thing we’ll do drilling, you’ll drive, you’re gonna kick. How do you empty? And it doesn’t happen? Absolutely. You’re gonna run into a guy if he does a jab and attacks away from the ball where it was coming from. Yeah, you’re gonna run into each other every now and then, but it happens very, very little. Actually, what we’ve taught them then is if that happens, auto go screen. So if you kick it out and that guy’s driving right at you, you’re right in the way, go screen it. Get set like you’re gonna set a screen and get out of the way, and let’s see if we can create some indecision. But it happens very little for us, just the way we use the wings and the baselines a lot, so that ball’s going opposite an awful lot, which just gives you time, and at the very least, just to empty back where you came from, so you’re just not gonna get in the way too much.
But that’s why we tape the dunker down. You gotta have both feet in the dunker after a pass or a cut or a drive, ’cause it gets you flat to the baseline. So even if you are in the way, quote-unquote, you’re in the dunker at least, which would hold space to be a dump down as well.
Dan Krikorian 33:15
Coach, this has been awesome so far. Thanks for all your thoughts there.
I think Pat and I could probably just keep going and going on this, but we’re gonna move on to a next segment of our show that we call Start, Sub or Sit. We’re gonna give you three options around a topic, ask you to start one of them, sub one of them, and sit one of them on the bench, and then we’ll dive into your answer from there. So Coach, if you’re set, we’ll dive into this first one.
Matt Fletcher 33:37
Let’s do it. I’ll give it a try.
Dan Krikorian 33:39
All right. We’re gonna go to the defensive side of the ball now.
Matt Fletcher 33:42
All right, here we go.
Dan Krikorian 33:45
And this Start, Sub, Sit has to do with if you’re gonna play fast on offense, fast and with freedom and decisions and all that, we’re gonna start, sub, sit, your start being the thing that is most important to also get right from the defensive side, so that these things kind of stick and marry together. So hopefully it’ll make sense once I give you the options.
So start, sub, sit, things to get right on defense when you’re playing fast. Option one is your transition defense. Defensive transitions, gotta be in place. Second option is your defensive rebounding and getting out. Get the rebound, how are we getting out into our spacing, and how are we blocking out? And then the last option is just more or less your defensive aggressiveness and intensity. So if you’re gonna play one way offensively, how do you think about the intensity and aggressiveness on the defensive side so that these things marry? So start, sub, sit, defensive transition, defensive rebounding, and then defensive aggressiveness.
Matt Fletcher 34:43
I’d probably start transition defense, because I think the goal of our system is create easies, and we don’t wanna give any easies up. I think they’re demoralizing. I think it just deflates your team. So if we can take that away, so kind of the method of we’re gonna score as easy as we can on you, and then we’re gonna make it as difficult as we can for you to score, it can just wear on teams a little bit.
I’d say a second one is defensive rebounding. That’s been a big focus for us the last few years, growing on the rebounding side of the ball. We do a lot of stop score stops, stringing growing runs together, and that all starts with defensive rebounding, and I think our program, where it’s at now, is at its best, is when we get a defensive rebound and we got as much randomness going as possible. So whoever got the defensive rebound, whoever the kick ahead is to, that’s when we are really dangerous. And then I’d probably sit the aggressiveness, because I think your defense, no different than your offense, I think your defense has to fit your personnel. You know, I could wanna press all day, and there’s a couple programs that do… You know, Gannon won it this year for Division II, and their pressure was insane. I went down to watch them at the Final Four, and their personnel fit it perfectly. They had a bunch of dogs out there getting after people the entire game. I think your defensive system, no different than your offense, has to fit who you are a little bit, and I think you should change a little bit. Doesn’t mean your system should change, but your aggressiveness could, depending on what kind of athletes you have, what kind of size. Do you have a rim protector? All those different keys kind of factor in. No different if you have a team that doesn’t shoot the three well, you’re not gonna hunt 50 three-pointers in a game. That’s kind of the way I’d go with those.
Dan Krikorian 36:11
I wanna start with your start. And when you’re playing, going back to our first conversation, you got guys in different spots, switching, cutting, ghost screening.
How then do you think about offensive rebounding so that your transition defense is whole? Whether how many you’re sending, where guys are going, because you’re potentially getting mismatches and switches and different cuts and all that. You could potentially be scattered all over the place. When the shot does go up, going to your start, then how do you get your transition defense good?
Matt Fletcher 36:42
Yeah, so we are a crash four or five. It’s one of those things where you’re attacking the middle inside shoulder, you’re tagging up on your guy at the very least. You’re attacking the ball if you can get a rebound, but we’re trying to stop them immediately.
If you’re the shooter, it’s your discretion. Did you shoot it from the middle third, the wing, and you kinda hang out up there? If you’re in the corner, you’re hauling back as fast as you can. That’s something we adapted. I actually listened to Dan Hurley talk about it. He’s like, “Well, we sent five, and it fixed our transition defense.” And the year going into that, I think it was three years ago, we were bottom 20th percentile in the country for transition defense. And I’m like, well, if it works for him, he’s way smarter than me. I’m just gonna try it. And that’s how I told to the guys, too. I said, “Guys, Coach Hurley did it. They just won a national championship, so let’s try it. And if it doesn’t work, we’ll change it, but let’s give it a run.” And it worked pretty well. We stole a lot of possessions. We had a bunch of games where we had 15 plus total rebounds, and on top of our offense being good, it added pressure to the defense. And then what we notice is teams don’t run out. If we wanna play fast and we’re crashing the glass on you, they’re just worried about getting the defensive rebound, and getting the possession, and getting a good shot, ’cause they don’t wanna get in an up and down game with us. It’s just not the style that most coaches that we see wanna do.
Patrick Carney 37:53
My follow-up has to do with the defensive aggression, and I think we do hear teams that wanna play fast, but then if you wanna be aggressive defensively, like there is just like a physical toll, so then it comes down to depth of your roster, how willing you are to sub, and maybe how quickly your three, four-minute spurts. My question then is how you think about pick-up points.
You know, do we wanna be a team that’s living in the scramble or being more staying at home, drop coverage, and playing into being able to play faster than an offense, and maintain your offensive pace, and not saving your guys on defense? I don’t think any of us want that, but-
Matt Fletcher 38:28
Feels that way sometimes.
Patrick Carney 38:29
Yeah. Yeah.
Matt Fletcher 38:29
Yeah.
Patrick Carney 38:29
I mean, I, I think the players wanna do that, but us as coaches-
Matt Fletcher 38:33
Yeah
Patrick Carney 38:33
… you know, giving them a defense that you know they can also continue to execute with intensity and not just burn them on both ends, and then it’s, yeah, the question of, well, how roster depth, how quickly do I wanna sub?
Matt Fletcher 38:45
I think that’s what’s grown here as we’ve developed our culture here and our program. You know, I think both sides of the ball, and I’m not saying this is right or wrong, this is how I believe it should be done. I have a system on both sides of the ball, but I try to create systems that are adaptable to your personnel. In college, I get to recruit the players that come play for me. So if I try to recruit players and bring them here and get them to do things they’re not good at, then what was I recruiting and what was I watching as I watched a kid do something really well, and then I get him here, and I try to change him into what he is?
And I’ll just use our five-man. Our starting five-man this year will be Chet Kloss is his name, and he’s gonna be 6’6″. He’s a really built kid, but he’s really athletic. He’s not 6’10”. He’s not gonna go block shots, but he’s an energy guy. He rebounds. He runs. He’s fast. He’s athletic. He’s strong. And so he is really good when we are aggressive in ball screen coverage, so we’re gonna use him in aggressive ball screen coverage. Our backup five, not that. We’re gonna play a different ball screen coverage when he comes in. But our system of keeping the ball to the baseline, loading up to the ball, keeping it out of the paint, the reason why we developed a defensive system the way we did is I want rim twos and I want free throws. Yeah, I’m sitting there thinking, all right, what do we wanna do on defense? When we first started to kinda get this thing rolling, said, “Well, if we’re trying to get rim twos and free throws, why wouldn’t we wanna take that away from the opponent?” Right? So if you’re hunting two shots that are the most efficient shots in basketball, let’s make sure teams aren’t getting those. ‘Cause if you take away rim twos and free throws, that’s a less percentage of kick-out threes than they’re shooting as well, too, ’cause the ball’s not getting in the paint. And so that’s kind of the “system” that we follow.
And then what we do with ball pressure, pick up points. This year we’re gonna have two of the most athletic point guards in the league, both about 6’4″, really built good athletes, so that we’re gonna let them pick up and pressure the ball a little bit. Last year, Ben Kopetsky had a high usage rate, and the year before that was Antwon Simmons, crazy high usage rate. We let them sit back, and sometimes we even moved them off the ball because they came off ball screen so much. So I think our systems on both sides, what I take a lot of pride in is I’m willing to change. I’m willing to adapt to fit the guys I have. And I think your pressure has to match your depth, it has to match your athleticism, and it has to match your rim protection. The most aggressive teams, if you watch them, they got a big guy in there that they’re funneling everything into. If you don’t have that, in my opinion, pressure is dangerous because good athletes can go in and finish on another guard or an undersized big. And so if you have that rim protector, that’s when I think we would really ramp up our ball pressure and feed it into their guy that can block shots.
Patrick Carney 41:21
Priding yourself on defensively on being no rim, no free throws, what, in terms of three-point attempts, will start to concern you and your staff?
Matt Fletcher 41:32
I think what happened a couple years ago is we were giving up both. We were giving up the paint, and then we were trying to rotate and take away three-point shots. That was kind of the goal, ’cause we were a good three-point shooting team when we won it two years ago. And I was like, “I wanna take away threes. We’re gonna make threes, and we’re gonna take them away from the other team.” Well, then we were giving up twos, and then we were over-rotating and giving up threes as well, too. And I’m like, “That’s just not how it works.” So I had to figure out, what are we willing to give up and what are we willing to take away?
And then what we started to kind of marry together is when we got really good at loading into the gaps and loading to the ball and making them throw skip passes, we’re really athletic, especially at the Division II level. And we’re able to get there and contest. And yeah, you gotta live with some nights where the ball just goes in for the other team, but what we noticed is the law of the averages within the league in the Division II level, you’re gonna have the best nights against you are gonna be around that 40%. But if you’re limiting attempts because you’re taking away the paint, you’re still gonna have that scoring number come down. And I think what we really focused on was if we’re gonna score, we’re about 85 a game, actually about 88 a game. We had some buffer. We had some room to understand, all right, we’re gonna give up some threes. They might make three in a row. But we’re gonna stick to it and not give them layups and give them free throws. But urgency to certain guys, going over ball screens on certain guys, maybe we’d blitz a certain guy. Just to try to mix up rhythm and stuff was usually how we would try to deter the three-point shot a little bit more than kind of changing our system as of late. We just trusted our effort and getting there to contest, but then how we guarded, you know, maybe we’d blitz a baseline drive or we would blitz a ball screen just to throw off rhythm. It was kind of the method we’d do rather than adapt our system.
Patrick Carney 43:11
All right, Coach, our last Start, Sub, Sit for you. We’re labeling this program builds, so we know in talking to you and looking at your career, you’ve come into two different situations and turned around a program.
When coming into a new program, what’s the most important to get right in terms of how you align your program? So option one is it, we’re calling management, your AD, the staff above you, aligning them to your program. Option two would be aligning your staff, or option three, aligning your players. They’re all important, of course, but what would be the most important to get right when coming into a new program and building?
Matt Fletcher 43:51
Ooh, that’s a good one. I’d say for Division II, I’m a Division II coach right now. I was Division III before this. So at Division I, I’d have an idea if it’d be a different order. But for us right now, I would say your first is your staff. It’s not ’cause of experience, but it’s because of understanding how vital it is for the message to be the same when you’re trying to build something, ’cause the success will not be there right away. It’s not gonna come right from the beginning, and your message has to stay steady. And if you can trust your staff to continue to do that, that’s how it can continue to grow one step at a time.
And then that, I think, bleeds into your players, right? Finding the right players, but that, with recruiting, I’m not at every game and I’m not watching every player. My staff, again, has to be aligned with me, understanding what types of kids we’re wanting, what type of players we’re wanting to fit our mold. That’d be one and two probably. Yeah, administration, I’m a big believer for administration that if they support you in any way, shape, or form, you should do your job and find ways to win games. Obviously, there’s levels to that. There’s financials to that, and there’s challenges. At the Division II and Division III level, every school has challenges in different ways. But I played at a school that was small, in the middle of rural Minnesota. Weren’t fully funded, didn’t have great facilities, and we won. And what I believed in that situation was if you find people that care about the situation, you’ll win games, ’cause every team is talented. And this is what I tell families a lot is, every college team is loaded with talent. Thousand point scorers, All-State, Hall of Famers at their high schools, and JUCOs, and everything. Then what separates it? Why do the same programs win, especially at the small college basketball level, right? There’s not a financial difference when it comes to, uh, you know, I don’t have a million dollars to give players and somebody else in my league doesn’t, right? That’s not the difference in our league and other leagues. There’s a difference, and why do the same teams win in the different leagues across the country from Division III all the way up to Division II? The programs continue to win, and I believe it’s just the continuity within the locker room, the expectations when they walk in and what to expect, and the standard at which they live, they operate, they play, and then the distractions are limited.
And I think that starts with the staff you hire and the players you bring in. Because if you’re worried about stuff that isn’t basketball, you’re already behind. And you guys know coaching at the Division III level. If you have something on your brain that isn’t trying to win that game that day, you’re already at a major disadvantage. And we talk about that with our guys all the time. Finals week and midterm week or during the conference tournament, it’s not a coincidence.
Matt Fletcher 46:32
If you’re doing well in the classroom, our grades have went up here, and so has our wins/losses. ‘Cause they go play in those crucial weeks of the season with their work done behind them.
And so those are the little things we really try to focus on. I think it all starts with the staff. I’ve been fortunate. I had the same assistant for eight years, one of my best friends. He’s now a head of high school coach here in Minnesota. And then I bumped up a guy that played point guard for me. So my continuity and understanding what I’m looking for, who I’m looking for, how we do things, I’ve never really even had to think about it, which has been a blessing, obviously.
Patrick Carney 47:06
Looking at the admin side, and when you take a new job, like you said, we’re gonna maybe lose first or this program’s had some tough times rebuilding. What about the interview process or the school, like, drew you to apply and wanna work there when you knew it was still gonna be tough, but there was something there?
Like, what, in terms of culture, vision that you, with the AD talking that still made you want to apply and take on the challenge?
Matt Fletcher 47:35
Yeah, that’s a great question, too. It’s like you guys have done this before. You got good questions.
Patrick Carney 47:40
Yeah.
Matt Fletcher 47:40
I grew up in the Twin Cities. I played college basketball in this conference. CSP always had talent. They were kinda up and down, never really turned the corner and made a run.
And then when I got into coaching post-playing, my dad was a coach for 25 years and an athletic director as well. So I’ve been in, immersed in this life for my whole life. And I remember getting into coaching right away, and I said, “When CSP opens, if I’m fortunate enough to get it, I’m gonna take that job, ’cause that’s a sleeping giant.” And did I know that right away? Probably not. And then what I had a belief in is Minnesota, I think, has a lot of really good basketball, a lot of really good high school basketball players. I mean, it’s winter. What else are you gonna do here? You can’t go outside. So everybody plays basketball or hockey here. And I just felt like the Twin Cities should be just a hub of all the local Twin Cities kids that are good enough to play Division II should just stay here. And when I took the job, we had two kids from Minnesota, and neither were from the city. And now we have 18 on our roster this year, and 16 are from within 30 minutes of the school. And I think what I saw was that belief from my admin, that understanding of I had some in- … cushion. Like, you had some time to do it the right way. We took nine freshmen to start, so we knew it was gonna be a tough road to begin. And just having that understanding of what my plan was, and it fit what they wanted, I think that’s what gave me the ultimate confidence to take the leap of faith and do it. But I also believed that this was somewhere we could win. I didn’t know exactly how it was gonna go, but I felt like my vision for this school, and I knew what the conference was about from playing in it. I just felt like I had an idea that could really stick, and took about a year more than I would have liked, but ended up working out after that.
Patrick Carney 49:22
Going back to the alignment, you talked a lot about the staff and the importance of staff alignment. I’d like to hit on the communication piece.
And I know you’ve been now with the staff, I think you said some of them eight years, a lot of continuity, a lot of familiarity. But if you can think back to maybe when it was you were a younger coach, newer staff, how you thought about the clarity of your communication and maybe, like, the level of detail that you needed to go into so that whenever you left the staff meeting, or you presenting things to the team, no coach was just missing the mark on what you wanted to do.
Matt Fletcher 49:54
The way I really go about it, and this could be right or wrong too, you know, I don’t know everything, but I feel like my coaches enjoy working for me. But I think what I try to do is, if you teach a player a new play, and he runs it wrong, or isn’t grasping one of the actions you have in the play, do you blame the player, or do you blame yourself? And that’s where I think coaches need to humbling yourself and understanding that if I’m putting players in a bad situation to not succeed, you can do the same thing to your staff.
You have to be able to evaluate what is your GA good at? What is he comfortable with? Not every guy can go in and present a scout right away. Not every guy can take a drill on one end of the court, and you can stand in the middle as a head coach and have hands off and let your coaches do that right from the beginning, no matter how well you communicate that to them, what you exactly want. ‘Cause they’re not comfortable with it yet. No different than players, right? And that’s why you see freshmen when they come in, they’re learning. They’re figuring things out, and then their comfort level, even by Christmas, is different. Well, I think the same goes with young coaches.
You have to give them freedom to screw up, and then help them. Don’t get after them. They’re trying to be professionals with you. You’re never gonna yell at somebody in a workplace like that. If there’s something I need done different, we communicate it. We talk through it. And if they screw up, as long as it’s being on time, if they’re giving it everything they got, what else can I ask of them? No different than a player. And then I gotta evaluate myself, like, where am I putting these guys? Am I putting them in areas to have success? And so earlier on, I did more myself. I took more on myself during drill work, during warmups, to do it exactly how I wanted, let them feel it out and understand it, and then gradually give them more and more and more freedom.
And now, for the first 40 minutes of practice, I don’t say a word. They do it all. But at the beginning, it wasn’t like that. And no different than your players. You bring in a new team with 15 new players, you’re gonna teach them how you want them to stand during warmups. You’re gonna teach them everything. By the time they’re juniors, you don’t. It’s different. And I think growing that continuity within your staff, within your players, that stuff goes a long ways because I always tell our guys, “We get four timeouts a game. I’m not winning you this game. My coaching staff’s not winning you this game. You guys gotta win this game on your own. It’s 92% of the game is w- you eight, nine of you on the court together winning the game. And so we’re just trying to put you in spots to do that.” And I think you can do the same with your coaches. On the bench, what role do you give them on the bench? Well, don’t give them a role they’re completely uncomfortable with and then they fail. Help them learn through those different things and understand what they’re doing is vital, it’s important, but at the same time, help them, and then grow them as you go.
Matt Fletcher 52:29
But I think that’s the hardest part too is coaches sometimes just assume a new guy comes in, he can handle whatever you throw at him. That’s rarely the case, especially with a young coach.
It’s no different than a freshman. You hear it all the time in the NFL with a quarterback. Does he get ruined in his first year, or does he find success? I believe that’s the same thing for young coaches. A lot of young coaches get ruined by their first experience with the way they’re treated or the way they’re operated with within their staff. So I urge coaches, treat them like players. Take them under your wing and show them exactly what you want. If they’re not understanding, it’s on you, it’s not on them.
Dan Krikorian 53:01
At this point in your career, you’ve done a couple times now where you’ve gone to a program, built it. What do you think about now adding to your own personal toolkit or skill set as a coach?
Like in the off season, what are you looking to add, or what do you study, or what do you think about? Because you’ve now done the early lift deals that we were talking about, and you’re kind of in a little bit of a different spot now. What do you think about now?
Matt Fletcher 53:24
I wanna win at a national level, so that’s the next step for the program, I think, where we don’t just win a game or two in the NCAA tournament. We make a run. We go after this thing. I think every year is its own year. I realize that because when we won it two years ago, I really wanted to win. I wanted to win for the school. I wanted to win for St. Paul, and the Twin Cities. It had never been done. I wanted, you know, I wanted all these things.
And then we won, and I remember vividly talking with my wife on our deck about three weeks later, and I’m like, “I wanna win next year way more now than I did before this year, because now I wanna show that it wasn’t a fluke. Like, we can continue to do this.” And I think any coach that loses that drive to do it again, that’s what I think separates from, you know, being able to do it consistently to randomly, sporadically throwing it in there. So last year, we won 19 games. We finished third. When we first started here, we were winning one, three, five, and eight games. Now, we won 19 last year, and I got done with the year, and I felt deflated. It was a down year. We didn’t make the NCAA tournament. We got upset in the conference tournament with a lead going into the last four minutes of the game. And all summer, I, “How can we get better? How can we figure it out? How can we take another step offensively, be more efficient? How can we get more free throws? How can we be a top five defensive team rather than a top 10 and solidify?” I just think that’s kind of my MO for it, and I love living where we are. Our families are here. We got a great situation. I think CSP’s a great school, and we should be able to continue to win every year.
Dan Krikorian 54:50
Coach, well said. You’re off the Start, Sub, Sit hot seat
Matt Fletcher 54:53
That was fun
Dan Krikorian 54:54
Thank you for going through that. Hey, we got a final question to close the show. Before we do, really appreciate you coming on, being so thorough, open. Like, this was a really fun conversation, so we appreciate your time today.
Matt Fletcher 55:04
Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun.
Dan Krikorian 55:05
Coach, our final question that we ask all the guests is, what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career as a coach?
Matt Fletcher 55:12
You know, I’ve listened to a lot of these. You’ve had a lot of great guests on that give a lot of good insight, and I hear a lot of, you know, coach to who you are, be yourself, a lot of different things down that realm or different influence they’ve had with the leaders that they’ve worked for. Mine’s a little unique. I think the only reason I can do this at this level is the investment I put into my family outside of it. It’s a game, and it’s a sport, and I think the second coaches jeopardize their families to try to grow their career in this is when it’s lost. And so what I’ve really tried to do is when I go home, I shut it off. Sunday mornings, I have a tradition with my kids. We eat donuts every single Sunday morning. We’ve done it for nine years straight. I haven’t missed one.
I won’t. I don’t care if we win. I don’t care if we lose. I don’t care if we just won a championship. I don’t care if we’re on the road. We get donuts, and we spend that 20 minutes just to communicate and talk. They’re nine and seven, so they still like me right now, but trying to make sure that I understand what’s important, and it makes me a better coach because they see me as a dad and a husband first, and it makes me authentic to who I am. I’m not perfect. I’m not the best coach. I’m not the best offensive coach, the best defensive coach, but they understand that I’m exactly what I’m trying to be and trying to do, and I feel like when I poured that into my kids and my wife, that’s when I’ve… It’s a weird investment because no one told me to do it. It was just something that I needed to do to keep my sanity and understand that these are kids. I’m coaching 18 to 22-year-old men, kids, men, boys, whatever you want to call them, and the second I took it too seriously, I just had to go back to my family, and that’s when it kind of brought me back down to Earth and understood that it’ll be all right.
It’ll be all right. So that’s been kind of the big focus for me through this whole career and the ride of ups and downs and bad seasons to great seasons.
Dan Krikorian 57:05
All right, Pat. Hey, that was a really fun conversation, like, so detailed, so in-depth. You know, it’s fun when we get these really interesting, unique offensive points of view, so really fun conversation today.
Before we dive into our takeaways, quick shout-out to Coach John Carrier who connected us, reached out about Coach Fletcher. Always fun when we get a really good coach from someone in the network that, you know, reaches out and does that. So anyone else ever has a good podcast guest, we have that online form, um, our newsletters on Sunday mornings that people can reach out from. But appreciate coach reaching out, and Coach Fletcher was awesome today.
Patrick Carney 57:38
Yeah. You said it before we hopped onto this recap. It’s just really fun when you get these guys that are great at offense, really think a lot about offense, and what separates them or makes their offenses efficient is just their ability to, like, be so simple within it. You know, you kind of walk away and it’s like, “Ah, it sounds very simple.” Always go back to Ben McCollum. It looks complex, but you make it very simple to your guys, and that’s then obviously how you can teach them and keeping everything, I think, like, the clarity in which they teach offense really stands out, so that was fun to hear from Coach Fletcher today.
Dan Krikorian 58:08
What is the quote from, I think it’s Einstein? Make things as simple as can be, but not simpler.
Patrick Carney 58:13
Yeah, I think that sums it up pretty well actually.
Dan Krikorian 58:16
End of the recap.
Patrick Carney 58:17
Boom.
Dan Krikorian 58:19
All right. Before I get any other quotes, let’s get into this recap. For the first takeaway, I’ll throw that to you.
Patrick Carney 58:25
So my first takeaway is from the guard to guard screening section conversation piece, and when we kind of talked about their first trigger, how they kind of trigger the offense, and specifically getting into the bump, tap, hit guard to guard screening.
Dan Krikorian 58:39
Yeah.
Patrick Carney 58:39
And coach was nice enough to share what that meant, the logic behind it, how they’re teaching it, and kind of diving into there with hunting mismatches with hits if you’re a shooter playing. Throughout the whole conversation, he really talked a lot about just, like, hunting your strength and that dictating the screening preference you want from these guys. I like the point where they really emphasize charting it and making sure that it’s not, “Yeah, you’re a shooter. We want 100% ghost or the tap,” but really trying to keep the defense off balance by making sure like, “Hey, you need to roll on this one. You need to bump it a little bit more.” I thought that was a really good teaching point, again, just to continue to keep the defense off balance.
I think we see that a lot talking to other coaches. I’m sure we prepare our scouts. You just know, like, hey, this guy will never set a screen, and you can kind of prepare. A complicated action can then become maybe a little bit simpler because you know however you want to teach it, you know, just stay square on the ball. He ain’t setting it. He’s always ghosting out. So if you know that one out of four he is gonna really set it, that’s enough. You know? We- That’s a possession we can gain. And so I really like that, how he talked about the hit and then get into some Barclays. I feel it’s been a while since we touched upon some Barclays. And I’ll leave it here because it bleeded into, I’m sure, another interesting conversation, the cutting stuff, but how they played around the Barclays and the cutting, but I really like him kind of sharing a little bit of their secret sauce with that ghost screen and the clarity of communication and bump, tap or hit.
Dan Krikorian 01:00:06
Some of the really, really, I thought, great points, getting to the cutting, I guess, for a second because you just talked about the ghost screen stuff, which was obviously really, really good. When it got to, like, the second layer and the cutting, I liked listening to his cut timing about late versus early. That was really good.
And then I thought what was just really, really good was personnel based stuff, where teaching early on the memorization of where the cuts are gonna potentially come from, but then as the season progresses and you and your staff and the players and the team understand who else is on the court with you and what that person’s tendencies are-
Patrick Carney 01:00:43
Yeah
Dan Krikorian 01:00:43
… timing and setting up the cuts based off of that, that’s just really high level, and obviously it takes a while to get to. It’s not like- Something you can do within the first month of the season.
I mean, I guess if you have a veteran team. But he mentioned that got better where they know someone who’s more of a scorer and is looking to score on their first and second move, don’t cut as early, versus guys that are more pass-oriented players you can cut earlier. I thought that was really good. So that was part of the cutting I really liked. I also liked him talking about, going back to what I said, memorization early, just pounding it into, like, this is where, this is how we’re cutting, and then randomizing it through, like, small-sided games, where these cuts are coming from, reading it. So you’re getting really good teaching stuff. The bones early and then kind of fleshing it out later I thought was really good when it came to the cutting.
Patrick Carney 01:01:30
One of the things I have of note and I thought was a really good teaching point with cutting or being random, he mentions that you need to find a way to make it predictable to your teammates, and I think we’ve talked about this a lot and think about ourself, and I think that’s where, like, having your spacing, filling spacing spots, because to the, the memorization, if we look at it through the lens of cutting, like, you know what spot is gonna cut, but the player in that spot provides the randomness based off of their skill strength. You know, we looked at Valencia too, where their late clock, not always, but they have a call where they’re gonna ghost always from that right corner. And so everyone on Valencia are predicting, they know what’s coming, but it’s that player, their individual strength, that defender that then makes the action random. And I thought that was a really good point he made when looking at cutting or just how they’re trying to play random through ghost screens is the spacing spot dictates where the action is the trigger, but that player will make it random, but at least the other four guys know what is going to occur.
And he talked a lot, I thought, when we got into the Barkley stuff too, and just will the player in the Barkley’s gonna make it random? But we’ve seen them every day in practice. We know kind of what they’re gonna do, and our spacing spots, our cutting spots are gonna be ready to react off of him.
Dan Krikorian 01:02:46
Yeah. He had a Niko Medved quote about fixing it, I think he said, where you get to an action or a spacing or a person here that, how do you fix it? How do you make it so that everybody’s playing to their strengths and skill sets, and, like, that obviously takes a little bit of time to get to, but I thought that was a really good teaching point there.
Patrick Carney 01:03:01
Absolutely.
Dan Krikorian 01:03:02
And the quote is from Albert Einstein, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler,” in case you were-
Patrick Carney 01:03:07
Mm-hmm
Dan Krikorian 01:03:08
… wanting me to correct that.
Patrick Carney 01:03:09
I was gonna bring it up off air, but
Dan Krikorian 01:03:11
Yeah, we’ll just settle it now.
Patrick Carney 01:03:13
Yeah. All right, Dan. We’ll keep it moving here. Sorry, I’m just kind of processing that quote. Uh.
Dan Krikorian 01:03:19
When you drop that knowledge, it’s tough.
Patrick Carney 01:03:20
Y- yeah. Need a second to regroup.
Dan Krikorian 01:03:22
Yeah.
Patrick Carney 01:03:23
Keeping it moving. I’ll bring it back to you for the second takeaway of our conversation.
Dan Krikorian 01:03:27
Kinda hard to pick between the start sub sits because I thought they both went to really interesting places, but I’m gonna go to what was yours and the program builds, the tough to align. And I guess over the last couple months, just in this off-season, you and I’ve, amongst ourselves, amongst round tables and coaches and summer leagues, I think the thing that comes up a lot is just alignment of staff and culture and people higher up in your organization and just the process of doing that and people that have gone through it and done it well. It’s always interesting to hear what’s important to them and how they do it, and so I just thought that was a really good conversation.
He also had some good stuff in there about the treatment of young coaches. I thought that was really cool to hear, a coach that’s come up through it, have success, like all the stuff he does, but then kind of the recognization of how difficult it can be for a young coach to break in and not make a lot of money, and how do you foster them along, help them along, you know, model the way first, kind of like he mentioned, until eventually they can do more things on their own. I thought that was just a… Overall, that whole start sub sit I think was a breath of fresh air to listen to.
Patrick Carney 01:04:30
I agree. That was also what stood out to me, his thoughts on just staff alignment, communication, and developing young coaches.
I agree with the way he looks at it that, you know, and we talked about before with, like, culture too, like, if you’re not correcting it, you’re allowing it, so it, as the head coach, like, it kind of all comes back on us. That’s the responsibility we bear, so it’s the same thing if you have an assistant screwing up. I mean, it’s not because they’re, have ill intentions. It’s at some point or the other, they’re developing, they’re trying to get comfortable, and we need to help them along the way too, and it’s how we choose to do that or not do that says a lot in how we treat the staff, our staff. And I just, like, the perspective of viewing them as a player, like, they’re also trying to make this their profession or they’re trying to do the best job they can, and so they’re gonna need helps along the way, just like we’re gonna need help along the way, and I think that’s when we always hear people talk about, like, having great mentors are so impactful-
Dan Krikorian 01:05:27
Yeah
Patrick Carney 01:05:27
… as well, and I think that’s also the role we’re gonna assume with our staff. So I think that’s really important.
Of course, another part of, like, where this conversation came from is the amount of decisions a head coach has, the importance that clarity and moving everything forward and in the right direction, and this is why, like, just to give these guys… I mean, you wanna give them freedom, you wanna empower them, but, you know, just to, like, carte blanche or really, like, being so hands-off, it all comes back to you on one way or the other. And yeah, I just think it’s a really important conversation to be had, and I really enjoyed Coach Fletcher’s thoughts on it.
Dan Krikorian 01:06:01
For sure. Pa- ton of stuff we went through today. Was there any misses, not from Coach Fletcher’s end, of course, but anything we could’ve gone deeper on had we had more time?
Patrick Carney 01:06:10
I really enjoyed the other start sub sit. I thought his conversation. It’s always interesting how you build your defense, no rims, no free throws, or no three-point attempts. That can be a whole nother bucket if we want it to be, but I enjoyed his thoughts on just limiting three-point attempts or how they view three-point attempts when it’s not, like, their major emphasis, let’s say, if that makes sense. Of course, you know, you don’t wanna just give up complete standstill threes, but where everything falls in perspective to your defense. So I liked that part.
The one thing I guess I wish we could dug deeper on was back to the cutting section, he talked about using that dunker spot and, like, emptying out to the dunker and maybe using that to help teach relocation if guys aren’t just quickly picking up to filling corners or don’t know where, what spots empty out to and the value of teaching through the dunker spot. And I just think that opens up a whole nother conversation and then how you just continue to space when you do find yourself in that dunker. I know you do it a lot. I think that’s a really good teaching point and one that I wish we maybe followed up on a little bit more.
Dan Krikorian 01:07:09
Yeah, like the dunker spot becoming a place where it’s not just a place to hide a non-scoring five-man for 30 seconds and just park him down there.
Patrick Carney 01:07:18
Yeah, exactly.
Dan Krikorian 01:07:19
I’ll just give you my quick miss, not by a coach, of course, but we talked a lot in the first bucket about guard to guard screening, guard to forward, these kind of different types of screening combinations. Maybe just going to where if you did see where it would be advantageous to go to a more traditional one-five spacing, how you would adjust, how a call or just the movement, the spacing, the cutting around if you’re gonna get more traditional or need to or see that it’s advantageous.
I mean, I’m sure they have that in their back pocket for whenever they need it if it’s something that they need to get to. I thought it would’ve been interesting.
Patrick Carney 01:07:52
I agree.
Dan Krikorian 01:07:53
Well, once again, we thank Coach Fletcher for coming on. This was a fantastic conversation. Thank you, everybody, for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
Patrick Carney 01:08:05
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.