Introducing a Conceptual Offense Part 1: Advantage or Neutral?
One of the first read that must be practiced for a team!
Introduction
I spoke about structured freedom in a half-court offense a couple of weeks ago, today I wanted to share some of my experiences building from scratch a real fully "Conceptual” Offense with my U19 team during the 2020/21 season.
This topic will be divided into two parts:
Neutral vs. Advantage: How to train to find a better balance between being aggressive in our 1v1 on and off the ball and playing together through triggers
How to practice it, basically focusing on everything that can happen after the first trigger and during a broken play situation.Set-up and starting alignment and options: How do we want to run in transition? Which positions do we want to occupy? Do we have positions or are we playing positionless? Do we have specific entries?
(Part 2 is available here)
Today is all about part 1, Neutral vs. Advantage.
I’ll break it down a little bit before diving into the clips:
The constant balance between playing your own 1v1 and playing actions with teammates is at the core of every offense:
In transition, when pushing the ball up I need to perceive if I can push it or slow down, furthermore, why push it? Is there an opportunity for me to finish in the paint? Or I’m pushing but knowing that my goal is to bring two to the ball to generate an advantage for my team?
Half-court offense, at the beginning of the play, I’m being pressed by the defense, can I exploit this pressure and blow by him, generating an immediate advantage for my team? At the end of the play, catching a kick-out pass with 10” on the shot clock, do I have an opportunity to attack the closeout of my defender or it’s better to move on to the next trigger with a teammate?
We see mistakes at every level, from youth basketball to the NBA, because players struggle to make these decisions.
Errors happen in both directions, we see players pursuing their 1v1 while there’s no advantage, but we also see players move it to the next trigger without pursuing aggressively their 1v1, either to really finish at the rim or simply to attract the defense to them to improve the situation for their team.
Obviously I have no magic trick to remove these mistakes, but I think that putting this problem at the top of the list of our priorities when building a team offense is crucial.
So the terminology that I used with my team was clear since day 1 (not very creative), we speak of Advantage situation every time the defender was in a poor position (late, out of balance) or there was an outnumbered situation (4v3, 5v4,…) and we call Neutral every situation where the defense was squared in front of the ball and in the right position behind the ball.
Going a little bit deeper with the Skill Acquisition language is important to notice that the affordances of advantage and neutral are not the same for everybody.
A defender closing out in the exact same way can be a neutral situation for player X and an advantage situation for player Y if their skills are different, their ability to drive, their first step, and so on.
This is why it’s important to let players practice these situations against a real defense so that they can learn what an advantage situation looks like FOR THEM.
How to practice it
So this was the focus during the first period of our practices together, our players needed to improve their ability to perceive the affordances (opportunities for action) presented by their own defenders, either playing 1v1 with the ball or off the ball.
Once they read that the situation was neutral we asked them to immediately move the ball and play a trigger, initially, I completely took away the option of creating an advantage with a static 1v1 out of a Neutral situation.
The first three triggers we examined were: Get, Dribble Handoffs, Pass and set a ball screen.
How we combined those together into more complex actions will be the topic for next week's piece.
So how did we do this? We tried to create as many situations as possible in our practices where it was possible to either attack 1v1 or play a trigger with a teammate. What does it look like?
These are some clips from a camp I’ve done in December in Sweden, these are U16 kids, take a look.
We added the possibility of a re-trigger in (almost) every 1v1 situation we played, so if a player is able to finish his dynamic 1v1 with a good shot he can shoot it, if he doesn’t have it he can play a secondary action with a teammate
This will not only help the players explore the concept of re-trigger, but it will help them experience directly through the points system what is a good shot and what’s not, improving their shot selection.
If a player keeps shooting contested layups believing that those are efficient looks for him, as kids do sometimes, the experience of losing the game against somebody who’s passing out the ball to play another trigger could be worth more than 100 corrections given by the coach.
In the video you see a simple example of passing the ball in a single gap spacing with the defender in the gap, obviously, we can craft all the 1v1 situations we want, off the dribble, off the catch.
It’s not immediate to find a way to add the opportunity to pass in every situation, but with some thinking, it’s possible in almost everyone and it’s time well spent when we’re working toward this specific goal.
Sometimes we can consciously not provide this option, to change the affordances for our players, even forcing them to finish against two defenders, but that’s another story with a different goal.
Building up
Building up from that, not necessarily immediately after, we can shape the same situation 2v2, in this case we constrained the player to play a Get action if there was no immediate opportunity to play 1v1.
At the 25” you can see a great example of a player staying aggressive in his own 1v1 even while playing a trigger with a teammate.
Now, these were examples of trying to nudge our players to read when there’s an opportunity to re-trigger, but what about the opposite? How can we help our players don’t lose their aggressiveness 1v1 while playing one action with a teammate?
Neutral into a trigger
Here we played 2v2 from a very static situation (defense gives the ball to the offense, as static as it gets) with the indication of creating an advantage with a dribble handoff and 7” on the shot clock, but in order to keep them aggressive we awarded them 1pt more for any solution coming from a 1v1 before the action.
Like these 2 drives that you see at the beginning of this video for example, but it could’ve been also a backdoor cut as you’ll see in another video later.
Using in the first phase some SSGs where players are allowed to use only a specific trigger is a good idea to let them explore more the different possibilities specific for that action. For example, if we’re speaking about a dribble handoff they will get to read many times the position of the defender on the ball (is there space to split early?), the position of the defender off the ball (is he going over? Under? is he aggressive and ready to deny?), and so on, for every other action as well.
Giving them more exposure to specific affordances and possibilities, with live reps against a live defense.
When we move to the next phase and open things up a little bit, giving our players multiple actions to pick as triggers, is important to build SSG where they can explore different options and discover, with the help of the coaching staff, what’s better for them and for the team.
With my players, both Pros and Youth, we always asked: who am I, who is my teammate?
I’ve spoken about this also when discussing our offense from last season
Sometimes these questions lead to a clear answer (i.e. A big should pass and set a screen for the guard next to him) and sometimes they can pick between multiple options (i.e. two wings can connect and play either a DHO or a get, getting ready to punish a probable switch), but we must help our players understand what are their skills and how can they bring value to the team, from the youth level all the way to the Pros.
This is an example of a 3v3 with a static start, where the players could start with any trigger they preferred.
Take a look at the last 2 clips as well, where you can see good examples of being aggressive in your 1v1 before the action.
Using different starting options
Using a “Defense check the ball” as the start of our SSGs is a good tool if we want to make sure that the offense will start in a neutral situation, there’s almost no read to make there, another possible option to start many different SSG is with a pass from a coach.
From this scenario you can generate multiple situations, and just by changing the starting position of the defenders (one foot in the paint? Two feet? In the smile?) and the speed of the pass from rep to rep, the coach can generate every time a different scenario for the players.
Slower passes = more time to closeout = probably Neutral situation
Quicker passes = harder closeouts = more possibilities to keep the advantage by driving
In this video, you can see players acting upon the affordances and either driving or shooting it against a bad closeout in the first 2 clips and then move on to some good examples of triggers.
I’m quite proud of the 3rd and 4th clips, you can see some quick decisions, picking a good coverage solution and executing it well.
You don’t know these players obviously but you can see how they picked the right trigger for who they were and who their teammate was.
Just two more clips to show other examples of what I mean when I say to keep being aggressive while playing actions, in the first clip you can see a fake handoff turning into a drive, in the second clip (before a bad TOV) you can see an example of a pass in the corner to a 3rd teammate to try to surprise his defender, was it successful? No, but the idea of punishing a defender who’s getting too pulled in to the paint while on the weakside was a nice one.
Keep the dominoes falling!
Almost as important as recognizing when we have an advantage is knowing what to do with it!
We played many SSGs out of a small advantage situation, trying to increase it and getting to a clean shot without stopping the ball.
For my fellow Italians coaches who are reading, the term “dominoes” is a great tool that is used in English to express the idea of a continuous flow of pieces of dominoes falling one after another, it’s quick to explain to the players and it’s a powerful analogy for me.
Once again playing with the constraints during these situations is crucial, some of my favorite if our goal at that moment is to focus on the ability to maintain the advantage:
Points are worth double if the ball never stops after the first action
Once the ball stops (the defense gets back to neutral) the shot clock starts at 7”
Once the ball stops the offense has only 1 chance to re-trigger, if they don’t find anything with that second action (the defense gets back to neutral again), point to the defense.
We can also think of emphasizing some specific actions that are important to maintaining an advantage. Like a ghost cut during a drive, or a pin-in screen to generate an open look
Putting it all together
Some possession of our team moving from one trigger to another from a neutral situation in 4v4 and 5v5.
Next time…
What will be there? I’ll break down with the use of diagrams the possible entries we had, and how we build those up, starting from 3v3 situations and letting those develop into more complex actions involving 5 players with some degrees of freedom, trying to use as much as possible generic concepts that can be applied by the players in different situations.
That’s all, thanks for reading this, as always, subscribe if you want!
For questions or comments, you can reach out at fr.nanni@gmail.com or on Twitter @Franz_NanniBk