The Minicopa Endesa is one of the top youth tournaments in the world, for sure the most famous for this age group (U14). On Sunday more than 8000 people were in attendance to watch the final, a “mini-Clasico” between Real Madrid and Barcelona.
In this tournament players like Rubio and Doncic were able to compete against some of the top competitors available for their age group at the time.
I’m not a scout, so I won’t comment on this tournament through that lens. I also think that these kids are incredibly young, and there’s a discussion to be had in our world about the hype and pressure we sometimes put on very young kids. No one player will be singled out in this piece.
Today I want to share with you some of my observations on how these teams play, undoubtedly some of the best U14 teams in the world. Before diving deeper, a few premises:
The Minicopa is a HIGHLY competitive environment, so what we see from teams here is probably not exactly what they would do in a normal setting during a league game. Whatever we might think about this, it’s important to acknowledge it if we want to understand what we see.
There is no “copy&paste” in building a player or an academy, and this article by the great Mark O’Sullivan explains it better than I ever could.
A context like Real Madrid or Barcelona not only has access to some of the best players in the world through recruiting, but it is also a very specific social context with its own characteristics and limitations. Every club and reality presents its own challenges as well as opportunities, and this is something that we must understand if we want to produce something valuable in our club.
But let’s start. Today I will focus only on what the teams were doing on offense and as teams, not highlighting the individual skills that most jumped out to me. Maybe there will be a separate post for that, or those considerations might be diluted into another project I have in mind.
Offensive ideas
Transition
These teams are RUNNING, the pace is high. The benefit of trying to run in transition, especially at an early age, is very well documented and agreed upon by most coaches.
I’ve seen a good dose of creativity in the passes. You see people trying to coordinate their bodies in unorthodox ways to harness the energy they need to make a longer pass, and this is a perfect example of self-organization as a reaction to the natural constraints of strength that they have at that age.
It’s important to remind ourselves that, with kids, it’s impossible to ask for runs and plays in transition while controlling the turnover at the same time.
We don’t want our players to be careless with the ball, but obviously, we know there’s a balance to find. Too many times we see coaches reacting very angrily to a turnover, it’s one of the cases where our actions and our body language contradict what we preach in practice. A common response for coaches in these situations, and I’m guilty of this, is to say that “yes we want to run but just not like that! That pass was too risky to make, he should’ve seen it!”, but by doing so we simply lower the bar of risk-taking for our players, if we keep acting like this they won’t be trying different and creative passes anymore.
These are just a few clips showing some fastbreak, wait and watch until the last second of the last clip, trust me is worth it.
Half-Court offense
The first thing to notice is that most of the teams have at least a basic starting structure, an alignment they use to then play mostly 1v1 with the ball to create advantages and dominoes (here’s a great explanation of what I mean by dominoes)
The most common alignment I’ve found is the 4-Out-1-In, and this actually surprised me in the beginning but now I think I get why it’s so common. Notice that this alignment was not used only by the teams that have a real interior player that they feature with many post touches, like Barcelona and Real Madrid, but also by teams that were not playing through the post at all.
The main reason why I think that this alignment makes a ton of tense for this age group is how easy it makes to create gaps to attack with the dribble, by far the most common source of offense at this level.
4-1 Alignment: Bigger gaps for everyone!
So this is the first video, you can see how usually the interior player is not in the low post position but on the baseline, the dunker spot, with his shoulder pointed toward the half-court, his position stretches the defense all the way down and leaves more space for the drive, which again is the primary goal of most teams.
Some examples of how teams get into drives from this spacing.
Look at the first clip, how after a pass and cut the player realizes that his teammate is driving toward him and stops his cut, preventing the help from his own defender.
Having a player in the dunker also facilitates the decision-making on the drive: now if the defender helps the passing decision is not between a hypothetical corner player and wing player with a defender jumping in between the two, but it’s between a player all the way on the baseline and a teammate usually in the corner, it makes it tougher for the defense to rotate and take that pass away.
4-1 Alignment: Handoff entry to create a double gap
The dribble handoff is probably the most used action in this age group, most of the time is not even used to really attack or generate an advantage the way is used with older players, but just to create a double gap for our teammate to attack and create something.
I’m not a huge fan of this, not playing an action to really use it at its fullest, but it’s something worth sharing since it can be (maybe) an introduction to the action without spending precious time coaching all the different reads and coverage solutions that can arise from it.
As you see usually the player receives the DHO attacks in the space from where the ball was coming, creating a dynamic 1v1.
It’s interesting to see this action being used both at the beginning of the play, as the entry option most of the time, moving from the unorganized transition to their half-court spacing, or at the end of the play if the first attempt to create an advantage was not successful
I will leave here some examples where a DHO action was used more aggressively to attack: to shoot against the under (the first two clips), to fake the handoff and attack in the gap (the second two clips), or with a nice immediate drive against a jump switch on the last clip.
4-1 Alignment: Post touches
As we said earlier the 4-Out alignment is not made with the primary idea of playing through the post, but for sure it’s a part of that, some teams feed their post a lot as a real target, Real Madrid is first on the list, and other teams use it more as a way to make the defense shrink and generate closeout.
I like the variety of actions that you see here, a give&go from Valencia, a nice pass out from Gran Canaria with a very smart cut on the baseline creating contact with the defender, and some excellent ball movement from Madrid.
One of the things that I like the most about this alignment and this way of using the big as a passing facilitator of the offense is that allows big men that are not yet dangerous enough to create advantages 1v1 on the perimeter to be incredibly involved in the action as a decision maker, especially if there is some cutting action going on around them or the defense is reacting to their catch by shrinking or even trapping.
5-Out Actions
The interesting thing about the 5-Out spacing is that while the gaps are tighter between players, the space in the paint is completely open for business, so as you can see the first clip is a perfect example to show that if a team doesn’t do a good enough job defending the gaps or decide to play a close-deny on players one-pass away it’s easy to generate an immediate drive.
From there you can see how the empty paint can help you to create some advantages, in the first three clips the advantage is taken immediately on drives on single gaps, I think that if you are advocating for this spacing in your team one of the main reasons can be the fact that this alignment really forces your players to use the concept of push-and-pull on drives perfectly, as you see in the clips from Badalona and Valencia in the video.
Then in two clips, we see the ball handler attacking immediately toward the middle in the double gap generated by the passer, while in the last clips of the video, we see a flow of dribble handoff used to generate double gaps.
General thought:
We can see how in a 4-Out alignment it can be easier to have gaps to drive in, without any specific action being used to create those, but once we generate those advantages we always find somebody in the paint, creating a slightly harder challenge to maintain those and finish with a basket, while maybe with a 5-Out alignment the part of creating a double gap to drive in can be trickier but once we do it it can be harder for defenses at this age to be prepared enough to contest the drive.
Just an additional note on the decision between playing with a 4-Out-1-In alignment and a 5-Out one: I am a huge fan of a 5-Out spacing at a higher level, even as young as U16, but with a 5-Out alignment most of the double gaps are generated either by a screening action or a handoff action, we could obviously generate those same gaps with a cut+replace motion but that would create an overload on the opposite side with a very tight spacing for an eventual drive&kick.
“Dribble at” to generate a backdoor
The “Dribble at” is one of the most used “actions” that you see in youth basketball, to call it an action might be a stretch, is the connection that a player makes to a teammate, either by simply looking at him but mostly looking at him and taking one dribble to him to generate a reaction in the defense.
This can lead to a backdoor action or also to a dribble handoff if the defense is not reacting or still sitting in the gap.
Here are some examples of great backdoors generated by this connection between players.
The concept of “dribbling at” to generate a reaction can be huge if you’re trying to implement an offense, not only is it a good way to connect two players, either for a handoff or a backdoor but it can be built up to generate other reactions, for example, we can ask the player behind the backdoor to make a blast cut in the double gap generate by the backdoor cut.
Even more, we can easily imagine how the idea of a “connection” can be used when we are going to play more complex actions with our teammate, so maybe now I connect with you and pass you the ball for a Get action, or maybe I dribble at you and if you are face-guarded you turn yourself into a screener for me, the options are all there on the table!
It’s also one of those concepts that can be applied and taught both in a 4-Out and 5-Out alignment.
Special situations
These alignments and actions were 80% of all the offenses in the tournament, using as a foundation the ability to create advantages 1v1 and to maintain it with passes and quick decisions.
We saw some more complex actions, especially in more controlled situations like the beginning of the quarters or a BOB, here’s an edit of some off-screening actions happening in the half-court
While this is a collection of some BOBs that teams have played throughout the competition, I like mostly two things:
How Real Madrid flowed immediately into a Get action, being able to generate some advantages immediately with a low P&R, something that they were not using in other phases of their game
Barcelona’s use of the screen-the-screener action, a classic cross screen for the big followed by an offscreen for the shooter, their kids had the ability to read the defensive choice and screen either the original defender or their own man if he was trying to switch on the player coming off.
Watching these, both the ATOs and the BOB we have to remind ourselves what competition are we watching, one where the result is very important and the development is not the primary goal in every special situation drawn up.
I am not against drawing up specific ideas during timeouts, even at this age, it doesn’t necessarily be a screening situation, but recreating a specific alignment can help us shape a specific challenge or a specific situation that we want our players to read, taking away some “noise” and randomness, although that is obviously not a bad thing in general in this stage of their development.
Also as expressed by my friend Alex here, drawing up ATOs can be a good way to get players to learn our terminology and simple things such as how to read a board during a timeout.
The last topic that I wanted to address is the use of ball screens, there were not a lot of those in this competition, although Real Madrid did find two great 3pts off the dribble from a P&R situation in their last quarter in the semifinal.
I wanted to highlight two of the clips in this small edit because they show important concepts of the use of P&R at any level:
At around 26” we see a great screen and rescreen against the under on a ball screen in transition, on the rescreen the big almost perfectly initiates his roll when the defender is committing to go over the screen, without the need to wait for the contact, the pass to the roll is good, from there the young kid he’s not able to make the extra pass out, but the first part of the play is astonishing
At the 40” mark we see a backdoor cut from the wing when the ball is going toward him, punishing the position of his defender who’s looking at the ball and not at him.
This idea, the concept of always being a threat 1v1 also when playing off the ball is a crucial part of the development of any player, something that they can take with them in any context or system they’re ever going to play in.
The pure essence of basketball at this age is the 1v1 with and without the ball, this can manifest in different forms:
Being quicker than the opponent to switch from defense to offense and run in a fastbreak
The ability to blow by your defender off the dribble and force a help in the paint. Speaking of this, a huge topic for this age group should be the use of contact on drives, too many times we see players avoiding contact both in the drive and on the finish, while we know that that’s the opposite of what we want, here’s a great example of a drive with the perfect angle, attacking the hip of the defender:
In order to teach our players how to use the contact on drives is crucial to spend a lot of time practicing with a defender, either guided or live, to get our players used to the specific information that the body of a defender provides.
Being able to punish the defender off the ball as well, how and when to cut if the defender is not looking at me, and how to create a passing window for a teammate who’s driving at the rim.
For us coaches the real dilemma is this: How much structure do we want to put in place to create the right condition for these abilities to develop and thrive?
If we let them play completely free without any alignment simply “playing in the open space” they will have the freedom to make a lot of decisions but that can be overwhelming for players, creating a lot of “noise” on the court and making it harder for them to focus on the real specifying information that they need to perceive to play their 1v1 with and without the ball.
At the opposite end of the spectrum if we force them into a structure too rigid they will become accustomed to that, so they won’t be primed to perceive possible pieces of information if they don’t have the freedom to act on those.
It’s a tough question and there is not a single right answer for every context, as we said in the beginning every social context is different and there is no copy-and-paste solution to the development of players.
It’s important for coaches sometimes to just “stay” in the question, examine the pros and cons of their system, be conscious of what we’re sacrificing operating in a certain way, but also be confident in the perks of what we’re doing.
I’ll post more clips from the Minicopa for sure, skills, reads, and ideas, to see all of that you can follow me on Twitter @Franz_NanniBk.
You can reach me with comments or questions on this topic and others either there or by mail at fr.nanni@gmail.com.
Thanks for taking the time to read this!
Great recap Francesco!
It is interessting to see/read how spacing templates (like 4-1 or 5 Out or the 2 Side Break in Transition) give players & teams the basic structure to apply great offensive concepts like creating & attacking double gaps and how basic 1x1 (see shoulder = attack the rim (preferable initiate contact with defender to create better angles and expand the advantage even more); see chest = countermove or pass (to where the help came from)) and off-ball movement reads align with that spacing framework, to create advantages & start dominoes.
Also interessting to read, that teams not using Pick & Roll as a trigger/action that much and by far looking for more other duo triggers like DHO & Gets to create dynamic 1x1 situations. But you need players to be comfortable with the ball & against/with contact (to still be able to perceive and read the situation accordingly) and have a wide range of finishing solutions to be effective.
So playing a lot of 1x1 (+1) small sided games and manipulate constraints to shape learning and present different affordances, is crucial.