From: Dan Thompson

I learned a couple of things this week that you may have already noticed, but I thought I’d pass them along anyway.

Pass & Cut
With one of our younger teams I noticed that during the pass and cut layer, they were acting as if the ball were a hot potato and in many cases they were looking to pass about as fast as the ball hit their hands. Then I noticed that the varsity was falling into this pattern as well. Then I was watching the DVDs of the clinic and recognized that during some of the “live” demos the same thing was happening. No one was catching the ball, getting into triple threat position, and making themselves tough to defend and be unpredictable. They became a “threat to pass”… big deal! We want them to be a threat to score.

Once I pointed this out to the varsity players a light kind of went on… “Oh, you mean I don’t always have to pass? I can drive, shoot, or pass?” After that, they started to become a threat when they touched the ball.

What we did for the younger kids is create a pass and cut drill. We played 5 OUT with no D. Upon receiving the pass they had to look at the cutter and yell out there name, then look to the rim and yell “shot”, then make some sort of a jab step or up fake and yell “drive”, then finally they could pass the ball coupled with yelling the name of the person they were passing to. So it might go something like this:

1. Receive the pass
2. Look at the cutter and yell “CHRIS” as Chris cuts to the basket
3. Look to the rim and yell “SHOT”
4. Then jab step and yell “DRIVE”
5. Then pass to the filling teammate and yell his name “JT”

What we found is that it obviously slowed things down a bit, but it gave them the recognition that every time they get the ball they need to be a threat and not get rid of it as soon as they touch it. We were missing cutters, open drives, and open shots because in their minds we were in “Pass & Cut.” It takes about 2 -3 seconds when they get the ball to go through the steps, but it helped solidify all the options.

I also found that it doesn’t hurt to slow things down a bit. Sometimes we actually clog the middle by passing and cutting too quickly. By slowing the pace down a bit, more options developed, particularly “drafting”. That is what I call dribble drive penetration on the back of a cutter. Talk about being able to drive a truck through the gap!

The other aspect that opened was the defense over the read-line back cut. When a offensive player filled up to a spot, the slower ball movement actually gave the defender time to recover, get over confident in denying the pass, step over the read-line, and allow wide open backdoor cuts. When we hurried too quickly, we may get an easy pass to the filling teammate, but we’d rather have a pass going to the basket any day of the week! This was too great a temptation for the defense to overcome and time and time again they stepped over the read-line. Don’t get me wrong, we missed the pass a million times, but they are slowly catching on and getting it!

It was good for us to recognize that if we slow down the pass and cut, be a threat to score every time we touch it, and watch for the backdoor cuts, good things happen – by the way, the middle seems to be wide open more often too!

Safety Valve
The next thing I found had to do with our safety valve pass. This may have always been obvious to you, but the light went on for me this week. We are fortunate to have 6’3” and 6’5” wing players who can play almost anywhere on the court. They are extremely multi-dimensional players and the defense has to respect them as shooters, penetrators, and even post players.

What I found is that if they were to dribble penetrate and have to use the safety valve option, they could actually stay in the post and “re-post” if you will. The safety valve can shoot, penetrate, or throw into the post and make one of their 4 cuts. We were effectively creating mismatches where smaller players were now having to guard the taller perimeter players in the post. We actually penalized the defender for stopping the drive by making him defend a good post move… poor defender he can’t win!

In addition, when both of these “big wings” were involved together (one as the post and one as the safety valve), we had a 2-man game going on that was nearly unstoppable. Who do you want to stop? You can’t stop them both! The Laker cuts were deadly off of this post entry and the pass back to the safety valve had some wide open 3’s because the D had to stop the penetration or it was a dunk. It was some really good basketball.

Those are the 2 “lights” that went on for me this week so I thought I’d pass them along.

Rick’s comment: Thank you so much for these types of observations and the tweaks on how you drill it, emphasize certain aspects, and generally teach it. This is exactly what I’ve been waiting on and exactly what I meant when I said that as a community, we could collectively come up with the absolute best ways to teach this to our teams. These are the kinds of details that make the difference.

Can you imagine me trying to put your types of teaching points on the video in every layer and with every detail within that layer? I’d still be working on it! I want to come back later and see if I can come up with a collection of the best drills/practice plans/ teaching points, etc. In that manner, I could continue to equip the coaches to be more successful teacher/coaches. And each year, we could narrow the manner of teaching down to the absolute, “proven by experience”, best-use-of-your-time ways of teaching the R&R.