Scouting

When scouting an opponent, look for player tendencies and for general offensive and defensive tendencies. While it is certainly valuable to scout all of an opponent’s plays and schemes, over-analysis in this area can often lead to confusion. General tendencies are easier to strategize against effectively: for instance, if you notice the team has tendency to begin its offense with an entry pass to the right wing on nearly every possession, you can strategize against this by overplaying the point guard to the left or through strong denial of the right wing entry pass. This might have the effect of disrupting the opponent’s rhythm as they struggle to enter their sets. This is a simple adjustment to make in a preparing for opponent because it doesn’t require a significant amount of practice time to implement. It also does not put demands on your “second team” to memorize complicated patterns.

Using a second team to rehearse an opponent’s patterns certainly has its place. However, if overdone, this tactic can lead to stale practices as the second team will rarely play with enough aggressiveness or execution to match game conditions. This is the result of being asked to run through unfamiliar patterns that often require too much thought to be executed at full speed. The majority of the time, I prefer to have the entire team work on our schemes, and to keep the focus on aggressiveness and execution.