Basketball Coaching Tips: Individual Skill Development vs. Team Play

A recent subscriber question:

Q:

How do you improve individual games at the same time improving the team game?

A:

Great Question! I think a lot of coaches feel some anxiety in the department.  I have a couple different answers

Without skilled individual players, the team game NEVER improves.

Or…as I like to say…”If you have skilled players…you can run a shotgun formation and still win games”

Good team play  happens  when two or more players  execute  different individual skills  properly and at the same time.

Although it is EASILY and COMMONLY overlooked:

• , Dedicate a significant amount of time EVERY day to basic skill development on the BIG 3
  • shooting,
  • passing,
  • dribbling

One of my personal coaching “breakthroughs”  came when I made the decision to religiously begin every practice with a pre-practice session.  Our pre-practices,  as a rule, ONLY consist of “the big 3” and conditioning.

Examples include:

• Ballhandling relays
• form shooting
• passing on the move
• footwork drills
• short team shooting competitions,

And the list goes on and on.  My outcomes improved as a coach significantly when I made this simple adjustment.  (i.e. I won more games )

To the coaches who are strapped for practice time…Pre-practice doesn’t need to be any longer than 5-15 minutes.

Actively encourage focused skill development in the offseason

While I spend time on individual  skill development in every practice, without exception, the majority of  growth &  development  SHOULD occur during the offseason..

Stated another way…During the regular season – “I’ll set aside time every practice for enough shooting to give every player enough repetitions to keep them sharp and in-rhythm”.

BUT…I usually don’t try to FIX or CHANGE players’ shots during the season – that kind of work is best left for the offseason.

That doesn’t mean that I actively encourage poor shooting form…I will make minor tweaks and I always emphasize proper mechanics.  But..showing a player ‘proper’ shooting mechanics  doesn’t change a players’ shot.  Real change (measured by consistently better outcomes) requires two things:

• Repetitions
• Muscle Memory.

This is particularly true with a skill as delicate a shooting…players often need several thousand correct repetitions in order to truly ‘change’ their shot.

Bottom line…the offseason provides the best opportunity for players to significantly improve their individual games.

Ed Schilling  – my friend and colleague at Coaches Academy – has said several times:

• “One of the problems with year-round AAU  basketball tournaments is that, quite often, kids will play the equivalent of a FULL NBA season between March and November…and  show almost no improvement!!” Too many games, too little skill development.

(note: there are some GREAT AAU coaches out there…I’m not jumping on that bandwagon.  The problem is that skill development has taken a backseat to ‘getting seen’ and gaining exposure in summer tournaments)

• The NBA offers several GREAT examples of the value of skill development in the offseason….
  • Magic Johnson  developed a  long range jumper and the ‘baby sky-hook”
  • Michael Jordan developed a consistent jump shot, a dominant low post game and turned himself into the best defensive player in the NBA.
  • After the 1986 Season when reporters asked Larry Bird how he was going to celebrate his 3rd NBA Championship, his response was:  “I’ll take a week off…then I’m going to back to the gym”