Structured Freedom: Why and How?
How to start introducing some elements of freedom in your offense
Versione italiana qua!
This is probably the topic that has fascinated me the most in the last years, every time I see games at all levels, NBA, NCAA, Fiba, Euroleague, I always end up looking for examples of these concepts and ideas.
There’s a lot of debate in the international community about the new waves of Conceptual offenses that are taking over the NBA and slowly also the NCAA, there is a great article this week about Mizzou’s Offense.
Today I won’t talk about the whole concept of Conceptual offense in general, but I will focus on the starting point that every coach could take to introduce elements of freedom in their offense, starting from the real examples that we have used last year in the Italian second league, ending up winning the tournament with one of the best offense in the League.
Here you will find a lot of considerations from my direct experiences, in the future I hope to study other teams’ offenses as well to give you a more complete vision of this topic
Let’s start by saying that the choice to introduce some elements of freedom in your offense is not an “On/Off” switch, just the opposite of that! There are a lot of degrees of freedom and small steps that we can take in either direction to leave more or less technical freedom to our players.
In every system there are elements of freedom, even with the most old-school coaches that you can think, and the opposite is true as well, even the most “free and conceptual-based” offense has some rules and structure in it!
There’s a line, and we need to decide where we want to position ourselves and our team.
It’s not a choice that will stick with us for the season, we are still able to change things on the fly, adapt to the necessities of the moment, and evaluate the development of our players.
We can’t be sure of how they will interact with the freedom we are giving them, every group is different and every season is different.
If we end up not changing anything from our initial plan we are probably doing something wrong!
The first question should be, Why? Why should we introduce more elements of freedom compared to what we usually do?
Unpredictability: First and foremost, we don’t want only to rely on traditional sets in an age where scouting has advanced and there’s so much video available for every team
General concepts: It allows us to coach for general concepts and rules instead of breaking down situation after situation.
Adaptability: More freedom means that the same trigger or the same sequence of actions can be interpreted in a different way depending on which players are involved.
Shaping the actions according to the individual needs and skills of the playersEmpowerment: It makes the players feel more empowered and more involved in the creation of the offense itself. It gives them a higher stake in the success of it
Development: It’s a great way to develop players, obviously at the youth level but also with a pro team it’s possible to see lots of improvement across the season if we apply these principles carefully.
Let’s start by asking, what do we mean when we say “freedom” in the offense of a team?
I want to state a clear difference between a Read and an Option
Read: “Defense play this coverage - I need to play the appropriate coverage solution to punish it”, We can apply this on on&off ball screens, but also on 1v1 situations, reading a closeout and attacking it the right way without stopping the ball and losing the advantage.
Option: “Defense is neutral in front of me - I can pick different options to move on to the next action”. This is an option, this is what we mean when we speak about freedom in Offense. Reads are obviously a crucial part of the game, but those are present also in the most closed system.
Let’s take this diagram: After the screen-away the player doesn’t have a clear advantage and he can do different options, I’ve drawn up in red the decision to pass the ball to the screener or move with the dribble toward the passer.
The number of options that you want to give that player is up to you.
Our job is to put in front of the players different actions and prepare them to use those to the best of their ability.
To reiterate the difference between a read and an option: Imagine that the defender of the screener was higher on the 3pt line to help on the screen and 5 was able to dive inside, here we’re not speaking about options anymore, it’s important that our players, both the 5 and the 2 read that advantage and act accordingly punishing it.
A principle that is key for me is to always be aggressive and assertive in your 1v1 with and without the ball, it’s something that we had throughout the whole season last year.
Now, once the player has picked one of those options how can we move on?
Two diagrams as an example:
This is to show how you as a coach still can control how many options you want to put in front of your players, in this scenario we have many different possibilities if 2 passes the ball to 5 (split guard-to-guard, screen in the corner, immediate get with 5, cut straight in the paint), while only one if he decides to dribble toward 1 to play a handoff.
If we wanted to make it simpler in the beginning, or we are afraid of giving too much freedom, we can constraint it even more:
You can choose to either pass the ball to 5 or handoff with 1, but there’s only a specific path after that first decision.
But, leaving aside for a moment the specific options that you can come up with, what’s the common thread here?
There’s always ONE player in charge of deciding!
Sometimes when coaches speak about Freedom in offense they overestimate the difficulty of these decisions, it’s not necessary to have 5 Larry Bird or LeBron James on the court to play with some freedom, it’s way simpler than that.
There’s one player who’s picking an option at that moment and the others follow his decision trying to punish the defense within that specific trigger.
Obviously having “smart” players helps, but that’s true for every offense system we want to play.
The problems may arise if we as coaches are not clear about putting rules and constraints in place.
Coming back to our diagram, 2 is the one in charge of making that decision, if 1 move towards him because he wants to play a handoff he’s making a mistake, he’s eating up space and freedom from his teammate.
Examples
Let’s dive deeper into some real and specific examples of situations where we can introduce this Structured Freedom.
I’ll use videos from my team last season, focusing on the options we gave to our players in our transition offense, we started working on these options on day 1 of training camp and this was the bigger part of our offense throughout the whole season.
We had some Structured Freedom also in our half-court set plays but that’s beside the point now.
First Step
Ball reversal in transition, with a big with the ball on top going toward the side of 2, with a player in the wing and in the corner, from here we started with a single rule and a general principle that underpinned all our offense.
Rule: One of the two players has to go toward the handoff, the other has to clear the side, to clear the corner and to guarantee a possible second side after the first ball reversal
General principle: Always aggressive in your 1v1 without the ball.
This means trying to get separation on every action and to arrive alone to ball screens and handoffs
Once these general constraints have been introduced we simply let the players find those solutions themselves, often coming up with incredibly effective decisions.
Some examples of this:
This was one of the first ideas we introduced on Day 1 of training camp, and we worked on this in many ways, we’ll see those later here.
But something that we were trying to communicate and reinforce every day, both with our words but also with our actions, activities, and feedback was this: We want to be unpredictable, we want you to be creative and adaptable
One thing we've really emphasized, to borrow a phrase from my head coach, is the concept of "responsibility", of knowing who I am, who my teammate is, and what the best thing I can do for the team is.
Here's an exceptional example of that concept, where our best shooter finds himself on the wing in transition and the player in the corner, using his screen, curls around it, momentarily sealing off two defenders and leaving him enough space to catch and shoot immediately:
Of course, it's crucial for us in this case, both live and on video, to highlight this player's action, and to give importance to it, even though it doesn't show up on any box score.
Second step
Then, after the first week, we introduced a screen away entry, “away” in our terminology, the situation we saw in the initial diagrams.
In this case, a Read and an Option can also mix, as a screen away can either be called by the ball handler or emerge as a read from the big man who, if denied, goes to screen on the opposite side.
Here are some examples of screen away and various continuity when the ball was passed to the screener.
Obviously, the fact that there is freedom does not prevent us from exercising greater control over what we want at specific moments.
For example, here we chose to start the game like this, to attack a mismatch back-to-the-basket.
This is an example of something that can arise from the players or can be a call from the bench within a system.
Another important concept for us was the idea of continuing to play if the first option was denied, and you can find an excellent example of this here.
We start with a screen away and a guard-to-guard screen, but we are unable to find anything from it. The big man immediately continues the play by flowing to a dribble handoff with the player in the corner
Here are some examples of the other option we mentioned earlier, where the player coming off the screen goes into a handoff and then a pick-and-roll with the passer. These may not be perfect examples, but they illustrate the concept well:
How to practice it
It's important for the staff to have clear guidelines for what are the boundaries of this Structured Freedom, what are those constraints, and who is responsible for making the decision. For example:
We mentioned that in the case of the ball reversal toward the 2-side, one of the two players should always change sides to provide potential continuity.
These are the boundaries within which they must operate to find solutions, so it's important to define them clearly.Having fixed points of what must always happen, where we don't give any freedom, for example, if the ball is passed to the player inside, we always wanted a cutter from the passer.
This can be general rules in P&R spacing maybe, or in drive and kick situations, or maybe you won’t need any fixed rule like this, who knows.
But it’s important to consider the possibility of rules like this as a tool we can use to constrain our offense.Let's take the situation of the screen away. It's important to declare who will make the decision. It will never be the passer who goes TOWARD the ball to take the handoff, but rather the player with the ball who signals that they want to play with their teammate by dribbling toward the defender.
In another different situation, as you can see in two clips here, our rule for handoffs out of the post was that the player playing the DHO the ball decides! Pop = the other big man cuts, Roll = the other big man spaces to the 3pt line.
The real challenge for a coach is to create an environment that can generate the conditions for the best possible offense to emerge:
It is composed of specific rules for different situations, boundaries and limits to options, fixed points that cannot be changed, all based on underpinning game principles.
All of this should be then constantly supported with our words, actions, and feedback during every practice and every game.
In my opinion, this is the true art of achieving an efficient offense with Structured Freedom, and it requires a lot of work, consideration, and experimentation.
On the court we began training from the first day of training camp with 3-on-0 situations, introducing the basic rules and asking players to find additional solutions beyond those proposed, sometimes even asking them to do something different from their teammates before them.
The first time I saw this type of activity was from Pedro Martinez at Baskonia in 2018, using the following situation:
Note: For the first 2 days of training camp we didn’t play any live situation based on the instruction given to us by the Physical and medical staff.
They started their warm up with this, a set from their system where the only fixed thing was the initial double high alignment with a guard/wing and the center, from there they could create practically everything.
Starting with dribbling or passing on both sides, passing and following, or passing and going for a screening action with the teammate on the opposite side.
The request was to always generate different solutions from previous teammates, and the activity was structured so that all three players could shoot with extra balls at the end of each repetition.
A good example of introducing repetition without repetition into your warmups with a light load, is something that could also be used the day after a game.
I bring up this example also to say that Structured Freedom does not necessarily need to be applied to a transition offense, but can eventually be introduced in one or two half-court sets if you prefer to have greater control over these situations.
There are multiple alignments from which we can think of entering different options, even just this minimal freedom would make us more unpredictable and could guarantee us half a step of advantage over the defense.
In addition to these warm-up situations, we made extensive use of 3-on-3 and 4-on-4 SSGs to focus on various actions.
Sometimes we constrained the defense: Playing only a specific coverage, or taking away the possibility of going under the DHOs, and other different ideas sometimes also based on the game plan for that specific game.
Sometimes we changed the points system to put more attention to some specific actions that we wanted to emphasize that day, so maybe all the points coming from a guard to guard screen are worth +1pt, or a slip is worth 4 points, small changes like this!
Throughout the year, we continuously used video, both from our matches and from our practices, to show players specific situations, to review their choices and possible actions that they had not grasped, or to reinforce positive choices.
We used video individually, in small groups, and sometimes in team sessions.
To conclude, and I hope to return to this topic in the future, I want to speak on two things that I often hear regarding this type of offense:
You can only play this system with smart players and with a group that has played together for a long time
I'm not sure. Obviously having intelligent players helps any type of offense, even a more rigid system, as does having continuity.
But in my opinion, many coaches tend to overestimate the difficulty of introducing at least some element of freedom into their offense. Sometimes giving players multiple options can be more efficient and time-saving compared to learning 15 different plays.
I think I was lucky with the team we had last year to be able to introduce much more freedom than we initially thought possible, and our players were great throughout the whole process. But I don't think they're a rare exception, many players can do more than we think if we only trust them enough.
The coach loses control over what happens on the court
I think that it's partly true, although we can limit it to certain situations, but I strongly believe that the unpredictability gained makes the trade-off absolutely advantageous. Also, very often we cling to an idea of control that doesn't reflect what actually happens on the court.
Of course, all of these considerations would be multiplied a hundredfold if we are talking about building an Offense for a youth academy, where this "structured freedom" allows us to adapt game principles to different age groups and create a system with a common base for different groups but with different characteristics depending on the stage of development of the players.
The considerations, possible pros and cons, and details of how to teach it and what rules to put in place are obviously not finished, but it would be unthinkable to describe them fully in one piece. I hope there is an idea that you can take away and that you want to experiment with your teams.
For every question and possible collaborations, you can find me at fr.nanni@gmail.com or on Twitter @Franz_NanniBK