hoopologist

Personally, I'd be working the dickens out of passing and catching drills in my practice planning if it's an issue of that magnitude.
I'm always puzzled why practice planning does not reflect game efficacy and the lack thereof. If you spend 80% of your on-court time being gang-tackled AND you are not marching to the foul line, then it seems foolish to spend half of practice shooting free throws. My boss used to do this stuff and it drove the rest of the staff crazy. Spending 30% of our practice time on things we might use 2% of the time in game situations. Ugh.

Every kind on your team should be carrying a ball around, dribbling it to school, sleeping with it, bouncing off a wall..working with a tennis ball, opening pistachios, playing piano...anything and everything for manual dexterity.

Hey Rob,

I'd suggest working in your practice breaking the press 5 on 8. Have the offense bring the ball against 8 defenders and run whatever it is you're committed to running.
Then once you've run that a few reps take a defender off the floor. Run a few reps and then take two defenders off the floor. Ideally you're kids will have overcome the complexity of 8 defenders (though making a lot of mistakes) then find it a bit easier to go against 5. IN game situations it is then helpful to remind them - should they lose composure, that they've broken a eight-man press every day in practice.

Of course this presumes you're running something sound against the press in the first place:-)

Hello Frank,

I've read your question regarding the contrasts between Motion and a "read and react" offense.
I have also looked through about half of the pages of the pdf posted above me in the thread.

I suppose my primary question would be "what exactly are the offensive players reading and reacting to?".

As a coach I believe we must presume every student knows nothing about the game of basketball while at the same time looking for players (which I'll call College Recruiting) who have a lot of basketball savvy. The first allows us as coaches to properly prepare for the art of teaching - and that is what coaching is. The second helps the first and gives us a chance to do some other things in that teaching as the result of "better" players. I bring this up because I actually find the concept of "high IQ" being a negative requirement of a player to be quite upsetting. I'm building young people for the world of tomorrow and I'm doing it through sport. Ergo cultivating a player who can think and is not an automaton is critical both to my basketball tactics and society.

Motion is a very challenging offense to teach. That sentence also tells you why it is challenging. It requires real teaching. There are no patterned movements. Players must be taught to read their defender and how to respond to that read. They must be taught how to play without the basketball - a very tough thing in the current day of hourly ESPN highlites which emphasize only offense (with the ball highlites). And that teaching needs to be drilled over and over, often in varied ways to reach the myriad of minds on the court - just like the classroom.

As diagramed I'd have a few issues with Read and React. First it claims to allow freedom and excitement but also states that Motion has too much freedom. So right off the bat my spidey sense is tingling. Second, it mandates that in order for a guarded player to get open he either beats his man off a cut or off a dribble. These two things are fine but they are incomplete as far as offensive basketball goes. Furthermore, I believe the diagramed offense would place younger players in a position to make passes beyond their capacity AND place offensive players far too close to the baseline allowing better defenders to utilize the baseline as an extra defender.

The spacing of the offense is very nice but I'd question the statement that it is simple enough for youngsters AND complex enough for pros.

Some of the components of the read offense are in the Motion offense but that is about as much as I can say in terms of similarities. For a coach who does not understand when to make a basket cut, a replace cut, or a shallow cut, for the coach who does not understand the position of the defender that warrants each of these cuts, or for the coach who dies understand them but simply doesn't want to or cannot convey them to his personnel, Motion is not a very good choice. A patterned offense for that particular coach would likely be more fruitful.

... end the game (mentally) a few minutes after it starts.

1. Doubtful
2. Then why bother playing

:-)

In my view, a true Motion Offense cannot have patterned play. I do realize that coaches like John Calipari (and others) run offensive sets they call "motion" but I cannot, for the life of me, tell you why they call it Motion.

I base this on my studies of the offense run by Pete Newell and Bob Knight - and their subsequent book together on Motion Offense - as well as my running it first as a collegiate assistant then with several high school programs as Head Coach.

THAT offense would be very difficult to teach to the level of player you are referencing. In fact it has been very challenging to teach at the high school AND collegiate levels. It is, in my humble opinion, an offense that requires rolling up sleeves and really teaching the game. Plus it mandates having players learn the system over time and for this reason it does not translate well into the JuCo levels of play.

If the discussion is about the Calipari brand of "motion" then the rules of teaching apply there just as they would to the Flex, Wheel, 1-4, t-game et al. You determine what you can and cannot do with your personnel, map out your teaching plan, and break down the offense to teach it's elements. If those things go very well then your team executes reasonably well (as there's always slippage). If one of those areas lags, then so too does the execution.