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I discovered a new BLOG through the Fast Model, FastDraw family of coaches… 48 Minutes of Hell. Pretty good stuff, very detailed and really good use of FastDraw diagramming tool.
Real good entry on San Antonio Spurs defensive principles.
Bruce Bowen
Chances are, if you’re a regular reader of this blog you have a pretty good idea of what the San Antonio Spurs like to do, and avoid, on the defensive end of the floor.
But from time-to-time, I find it helpful to review things to keep them fresh in my head. And seeing as it’s mid-August and the NBA is on vacation, I thought we’d take a look at a couple of the bedrock principles of the Spurs’ defense.
Force guards away from the middle of the floor
It’s easy to boil it down to this: when the ball-handler gets to the middle and into the lane, bad things happen. This is because the offensive player has options. And the basic premises of defense are to limit the number of ways the offense can score and make it as hard as possible for them to do that.
When opposing guards get into the lane, they cause damage. They get good looks at the basket, find open teammates and draw fouls. A ball-handler in the middle of the lane usually has a better look at the basket than when forced towards the sideline or baseline. Additionally, he probably got past the defender guarding him en route to the lane. This means other defenders will have to rotate over to help on the ball-handler, leaving other offensive players open if the ball-handler can find them with a good pass.
In the play diagrammed below, Steve Nash got to the lane against the Spurs defense late in Game 2 of the teams’ Western Conference Semifinal series. The Suns had a eight point lead with about a minute left in the game. It’s a pretty significant advantage that late in the game, but not insurmountable. On the play, Nash used a pick at the top of the 3-point arc from Amar’e Stoudemire to get by George Hill and into the lane.
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Posted 3 days, 23 hours ago. 1 comment
From everyone I have spoken to this event was one of the best coaching resource tools they have ever been to. People continue to rave about the University of Florida Coaches Clinic that Coach Donovan and his staff put on every year (sadly, I have not attended either – that will change next year). These two coaching resources must be “Top 5″ for coaching growth and development.
If you attended either of these events (or others) and can provide information and feedback, it would be greatly appreciated.
Post a comment and I’ll share it with everyone.
Above is a link to 70+ pages of notes provided to a friend of mine by:
Adam Cohen - University of Southern California
I don’t personally know either of these guys, but they did a tremendous job detailing the information provided by Coaching U LIVE. On first impressions, these are two young, detail oriented guys who “get it.”
Thanks for sharing with all of us.
Notice the diagrams provided by FastDraw.
CLICK HERE for .pdf of FastDraw play
Easily the BEST play/drill diagramming tool available. Nothing else compares to it. Combined with FastScout it is no wonder 28 of the 30 NBA teams (nearly 900 college and close to 10,000 high school and youth coaches) use it for their scouting, drill and play diagramming needs.
Purchase it below.
FastDraw
Julius Erving
From the latest sports science and fitness research by Dan Peterson and theorignalPGC.
Anterior cruciate ligament injuries are a common and debilitating problem, especially for female athletes. A new study from UC Davis shows that changes in training can reduce shear forces on knee joints and could help cut the risk of developing ACL tears.
“We focused on an easy intervention, and we were amazed that we could reduce shear load in 100 percent of the volunteers,” said David Hawkins, professor of neurobiology, physiology and behavior at UC Davis. Hawkins conducted the study at the UC Davis Human Performance Laboratory with graduate student Casey Myers.
The anterior cruciate ligament lies in the middle of the knee and provides stability to the joint. Most ACL injuries do not involve a collision between players or a noticeably bad landing, said Sandy Simpson, UC Davis women’s basketball coach.
“It almost always happens coming down from a rebound, catching a pass or on a jump-stop lay-up,” Simpson said. “It doesn’t have to be a big jump.”
Hawkins and Myers worked with 14 female basketball players from UC Davis and local high schools. They fitted them with instruments and used digital cameras to measure their movements and muscle activity, and calculated the forces acting on their knee joints as they practiced a jump-stop movement, similar to a basketball drill.
First, they recorded the athletes making their normal movement. Then they instructed them in a modified technique: Jumping higher to land more steeply; landing on their toes; and bending their knees more deeply before taking off again.
After learning the new technique, all 14 volunteers were able to reduce the force
Dee Brown
passed up to the knee joint through the leg bone (the tibial shear force) by an average of 56 percent. At the same time, the athletes in the study actually jumped an inch higher than before, without losing speed.
Hawkins recommends warm-ups that exercise the knee and focusing on landing on the toes and balls of the feet. The study does not definitively prove that these techniques will reduce ACL injuries, Hawkins said: that would require a full clinical trial and follow-up. But the anecdotal evidence suggests that high tibial shear forces are associated with blown knees.
Hawkins and Myers shared their findings with Simpson and other UC Davis women’s basketball and soccer coaches, as well as with local youth soccer coaches. The research was published online Aug. 3 in the Journal of Biomechanics.
Simpson said that the team had tried implementing some changes during last year’s preseason, but had found it difficult to continue the focus once the full regular season began. In live play, athletes quickly slip back to learned habits and “muscle memory” takes over, he noted. More intensive off-court training and practice would be needed to change those habits, he said.
“We will be talking about this again this season,” Simpson said. Implementing the techniques in youth leagues, while children are still learning how to move, might have the most impact, he said.From The latest sports science and fitness research by Dan Peterson on theoriginalPGC
Posted 1 week, 3 days ago. Add a comment
Traded by Knicks, Lee Was Still a Team Player
By HARVEY ARATON
When Marni Jaffer was about to deliver her husband’s eulogy to a crowd of 300-plus mourners, she noticed a familiar face rising above the others in the back of the funeral chapel. She had never met the man, but she recognized him from her television screen.
It was David Lee, formerly of theKnicks.
David Lee with Knicks Coach Mike D’Antoni. Despite being sent to Golden State, Lee attended the funeral of a Garden security official.
“I thought it was wonderful that he came,” Jaffer said. “And it also struck me how he stayed in the back, paying his respects quietly, not wanting to have people say, ‘Oh, it’s David Lee,’ and intrude on my husband’s moment.”
The funeral for Scott Jaffer, a longtime N.B.A. security official whose primary post was Madison Square Garden,was held July 11. Lee had been in St. Louis, his hometown, after being dealt by the Knicks to the Golden State Warriors in a sign-and-trade transaction that was announced soon after LeBron James’s all-about-me ESPN extravaganza.
Expected back in New York the next week for a basketball camp, Lee was stunned to hear that Jaffer, 63, had died.
“The guy took care of our security stuff, drug testing, things like that,” Lee said in a telephone interview. “He couldn’t do enough for us, joked with us every night, and it turned out he had cancer for three years and not one of us knew about it.”
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Posted 1 month, 2 weeks ago. Add a comment
A nice variation of the “Zipper” set into a Pick & Roll from the Boston Celtics, game 6 vs. the Lakers.
Line-up was: 1 – Rondo, 2 – Allen, 3 – Pierce, 4 – Garnett and 5 – Wallace.
The pre-action is nice… it forced LA into 2 G – G switches. It put Rondo coming off a Garnett P&R in the middle of the floor (with his defender off a switch) and Ray Allen spotted up in the corner.
Allen wasn’t shooting the ball very well, but this was nice – Rondo got to the rim or had the throw back to Garnett several times.
Posted 1 month, 3 weeks ago. 2 comments
