Teaching Man To Man Defense: Step-1

From Coach Phil:

“I like your M2M philosophy and the drills you use to teach it. I have several questions about teaching it that I hope you have the time to answer.  (other questions will be answered elsewhere on Perfect Practice)”

Q:  1) What is your actual teaching progression? If today was your first day teaching a varsity team your defensive principles, how would you approach it?

A: On the first day of a varsity practice (tryouts or ‘regular-sized’ practice) my primary focus would be:

• Closeouts
• Off-Ball Defensive Positioning

Closeouts

The most important rule on defense is also the most obvious: Don’t Get Beat!!

• Surprisingly, less experienced Coaches tend to overlook this at the high school level … treating ‘simple, boring’ on-ball defense as though is were secondary to more ‘cutting-edge’ stuff like team help rotations

• Here’s a different way of looking at help rotations: In a perfect game, there would be ZERO defensive help rotations….because in a perfect game we would contain every offensive player.

Don’t GLOSS OVER closing out…really teach it! HOW??

• Make it competitive!
• The biggest challenge of closing out is learning how to pressure the offensive player without giving him too much room to shoot.

We sprint at the offensive player, then we    CHOP HIM DOWN,

• Approaching with short choppy steps that give us the balance we need to defend the drive

• With our hands-up to challenge the shot.

• Running 2 minutes of a dummy-style closeout drill where defenders pass to a shooter and run out at him with the hands up is not what I would spend much time with.  To me, that is  glossing over the skill.  See the video below:

• This might be a good way to initially demonstrate the skill,  but you want to quickly move ojn to something more competitive and game-like.

Work hard to eliminate the habit of “opening the door” – see the images below

#1	#2
#3	#4

• Instead, players must work hard to lunge, cut-off the drive and turn the offensive player in another direction

Off-Ball Defensive Positioning

I would introduce the shell drill on the first day but keep it very basic:

• Keep the offensive players stationary and just work on adjusting defensive positioning as the ball moves:

Simple Shell

Here are the biggest keys:

• Proper positioning
• Jump to the ball!  – Players need to adjust their defensive positioning when the ball is in the air, NOT when or after an offensive player receives a pass.

Jumping to the ball is a critical part of a good man to man defense because it not only provides better support but it eliminates possibilities.  What I mean by that is:  iuf an offensive player catches and reads on the permeter against a slow-to-react defense, he is going to start to find opportunities like, for instance, driving lanes, that he can attack.  Against a team that jumps to the ball and adjusts when the pass is in the air, those driving lanes aren’t going to be available.

But….VERY few teams jump to the ball in games at any level.

It is easiest to teach jumping to the ball in a stationary shell drill because the concept can be isolated.  Other versions of the shell drill introduce additional concepts  like “help and recover” –   you want to teach by building on concepts, rather than throwing too many things to your team at one time  and increasing the likelihood that the concepts wont transfer into game-play.

Note:  About 15 years ago I was coaching a JV team very early in the season.  Two Pac-10 coaches visited in the same week, as they were  in recruiting one of our very talented varsity players.  BOTH of those coaches, who were from different schools,  approached me while I was teaching these basic skills and told me that they were working on the exact same things.

My point:  I would run this stuff and teach it well at any level, whether I was coaching 5th graders, varsity, or division-1 basketball because the skills being developed are universal

Filed Under: Basketball Defense Articles

Spread The Word: