A basketball player sent on the court with rusty fundamentals is a good bet to fail

Got an early copy of James Johnson's soon-to-be-released book "The Dandy Dons."

It chronicles the University of San Francisco basketball teams from the mid-1950s that were coached by Phil Woolpert and featured Bill Russell and K.C. Jones. USF won the NCAA championship in 1955 and 1956. [Coach Woolpert later coached at my alma mater, USD.]

As a side note, Phil's son, Paul, has had a long and successful career in the CBA and D-League.

Here's a good excerpt from the book:

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When practice opened in the fall of '53, Woolpert was ready. So were the players, but they didn't know what the coach had in store for them -- in practice or during games. Woolpert had a plan: First he was going to use defense to break up the opposition's attack before it could get set. On offense he wanted to use a balanced floor, with his players working the ball around the court until they got the right shot.

Woolpert had always been a strong advocate of defense and he saw an opportunity to develop his players into an aggressive defensive squad.

"I can't see just standing around and letting the other fellow shoot. To me, it's common sense to try to stop him from scoring. There is a science and a skill to defense. It's what makes the game interesting, not a race from one end of the court to the other for one more basket."

He was also fond of saying, "We figure to have the ball only about half the time in a game, so in practice, we work on defense half the time."

Woolpert was without a doubt a defensive-minded coach. In Woolpert's system, if you couldn't defend, it was unlikely you would get much playing time. He disdained "jackrabbit basketbal," once remarking about the up-tempo offense becoming popular then: "It just isn't good basketball. I wouldn't know how to go about coaching it. You can't expect to execute scoring playing when you're running up and down the court like madmen."

Practice included what Woolpert called the "hands-up" drill. The players would line up with their feet in position, bend their knees, and put one hand high above their heads and the other one out to the side. Then they moved quickly forward or backward, to the left or to the right, at Woolpert's direction.

It was the same drill that Hall of Fame coach Pete Newell used when he was at USF and in 1959 when his Cal team won the NCAA title. Most players introduced to the hands-up drill lasted about three minutes before they begged for mercy, but eventually they could go twenty minutes nonstop. That kind of stamina paid big dividends during the season.

Woolpert was also a stickler for making his players pick up the fundamentals of the game -- dribbling, passing, footwork, and shooting. "A basketball player sent on the court with rusty fundamentals," he said, "is a good bet to fail in his operations."

In addition to sound fundamentals, a team needed talented players and a simple offense and defense. Woolpert believed that regardless of what offense a team used, "the essentially important need is for simplicity and efficiency of operation. If the players know what they are doing, and why, and are impressed with the importance of each move in an overall pattern, the chances of that pattern creating good shot opportunities are excellent."

On defense, you have to get up and get into people

Look at MIL's 29-33 record and remember that this year's team has already won three more games than it did all of last season when they lost their last eight to finish 26-56.

And keep in mind that they're missing Dream Teamer Michael Redd and Andrew Bogut (12 ppg/10 rpg), both of whom have gone down with injuries.

In Sunday's win over the Wizards, MIL's starting lineup featured former D-League PG Ramon Sessions, rookie Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, center Francisco Elson, along with veterans Richard Jefferson, and Charlie Villanueva.

According to Villanueva, the key has been the team's new coach, Scott Skiles.

"It starts with Coach Skiles. He believes that whoever is out there on the floor can win the game, and that has become contagious. The easiest thing to do would have been to mail in the season. We've been dealt a bad hand as far as the injuries to Andrew and Mike, but the fact that we've kept this team together and believed in one another shows a maturity on our part."

Coach Skiles says that while the players have changed, the team has maintained its approach, one that emphasizes defense and ball movement.

"The actors have changed, but the script is the same. We're going to try to keep the ball in the hands of our best offensive players and live and die with the decisions they make. Good teams generally can weather injuries, at least for a while, because they have a good system."

"I think you have to get up and get into people," Skiles said of his defensive philosophy. "You can't allow people to penetrate in the paint and you have to guard -- the post-ups, the pick-and-rolls and the pin-downs. We do it a certain way. There are only a handful of schemes most teams are using anyway. It just depends on the personnel on a given night."

As this article in SI points out, MIL's defense is improving quickly. "After ranking 23rd in points allowed and 30th in field-goal defense last season, they have improved to 16th and 14th, respectively, this season."

[Sessions says Coach Skiles is "real big on being in the right place at the right time."]

One scout contends that Coach Skiles' reputation as "a hard guy to deal with" isn't entirely fair.

"If you listen to him during games, he's an encouraging guy," the scout said. "He knows you're going to miss shots, so he doesn't get wrapped up in that. As long as you're playing hard, he's out there with you, or you're not going to play, no matter who it is. And they play hard all the time."

Putting down expectations and theories on paper

When it comes to hitting, the SF Giants wrote the book. Literally.

During the offseason, hitting coach Carney Lansford (center with Bruce Bochy at left), working with the team's minor league hitting coaches, developed a 16-chapter "hitting manual" designed to "spell out their expectations for coaches, detail their core theories and make sure knowledge is spread consistently and evenly like black earth on a farm field."

The book, which is part of the franchise's overarching "Giants Way" program, is something many teams use, according to Giants manager Bruce Bochy, who says the book helps ensure consistency throughout the organization.

"It's not so much a specific way to hit as much as making sure we're all doing things the same way from top to bottom: that we're teaching the same things, using the same terminology and using the same drills on every level. It's OK for a coach to have different ideas. We just want to make sure we aren't confusing the player."

Adds Lansford, who played in more than 1,800 Major League games with some 7,100 at-bats in 15 seasons:

"Some of the biggest things we can do are the simplest. If you wait till they get to the big leagues, it's too late. We've got guys in the major leagues who don't know how to hit the ball to right field."

Begging, borrowing, and stealing good ideas

On the job less than a month, new Rams head coach Steve Spagnuolo, the former defensive coordinator for the Giants, has seen how responsibilities expand in his new role.

"I'm finding out quickly that there's a lot involved in being a head coach," Spagnuolo said. "To do it right, you've got to be in there all the time. There's so many elements — free agency, the college draft, schemes, learning the building, trying to meet everybody."

Regarding his philosophy and what he'll bring to his new team, Coach Spagnuolo says he won't reinvent the wheel.

"I certainly don't think we had all the answers in New York. You beg, borrow and steal. That's all you do in the league, you steal good ideas from other people."

You win championships by pushing the ball

Interesting story today's Wall Street Journal titled "Why Carolina Owns College Hoops." It begins with this paragraph:

There are 343 colleges playing Division I basketball. They're spread all over the map -- 24 in California, 13 in Louisiana, at least one in every state save Alaska. And yet, three of the very best hail from the same narrow strip of North Carolina tobacco country. Duke, North Carolina and Wake Forest, which are all currently ranked in the nation's top seven, are located in Durham, Chapel Hill and Winston-Salem, respectively. Their campuses are so close together that a determined person could visit them all in a single day -- by bicycle.

According to the author, "There isn't a remotely comparable cluster of excellence anywhere else in American sports." He contends that "what has helped the Carolina schools excel this season is a common culture of innovation -- in this case, a warp-speed style of play."

At a time when most college teams are working the floor at a snail's pace (game speed, measured by total possessions per game, dropped to its lowest level in a decade in 2006 and has stayed flat since then), Tobacco Road looks more like the autobahn. Wake Forest and North Carolina are among the nation's 10 fastest teams in possessions per game. Duke isn't in as big of a hurry but still ranks in the top third nationally. Although Duke looked sloppy in a road loss to Clemson this week, the Blue Devils blew the doors off poor Maryland last month, running up a 40-point lead in 25 minutes.

Wake's Dino Gaudio (pictured above) says he doesn't "believe in walking the ball up the floor." In his words:

"From an offensive perspective, you win championships by pushing the ball up the floor and getting cheap baskets."

Influenced by Mike D'Antoni's success with the Suns, programs like Wake, Duke, and UNC are "part of a gradually increasing group of major-conference teams including Missouri and Washington [that] are winning by running opponents out of the gym."

In an effort to attract attention of NBA scouts, more and more college players are looking for programs with "the right environment for them to showcase their skills right away."

For the Carolina schools, the fast-paced, high-scoring systems they've adopted have helped make them more attractive to recruits who want a chance to stand out. "That's a recruiting advantage," says Jerry Meyer, national recruiting analyst for Rivals.com. "The coaches that can legitimately say 'we're going to be in the top 10 in scoring,' and that 'you're not going to have handcuffs on you,' that's what players want to hear today."

It's the execution of the skills necessary to make the system function

In its Friday edition, the Long Beach Post had a Q&A with 87-year-old Lakers assistant Tex Winter, who's best known for his Triangle/Triple Post Offense and nine NBA championship rings, but who also coached college ball at Long Beach State, Northwestern, Marquette, Kansas State (where he went 261-118 in 15 seasons), and Washington.

A couple of highlights from the interview:

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"[The Triangle Offense] evolves all the time. Phil [Jackson] had put in some of his wrinkles, tweaking it here and there. But basically our concepts, the principles of the offense have remained the same over the years. They don’t change. What matters is not the system so much, it’s the execution of the skills necessary to make the system function – that’s really the key to it. So we’ve always spent a lot of time on the fundamental skills, basic skills of the game. My methodology is such that everything sort of works itself out.

If you have time to teach it, I think it’s better suited for college. They’re at the stage where they really need development, and work on their fundamental skills. If they can learn to execute the skills necessary to make it function, they can be reasonably successful with it. I think it’s a very sound offense, that’s the reason we’ve stuck to it all these years. I still preach that.

[Over the years] they’ve bastardized it – that’s the way I put it. They use parts of it, but they don’t use the total system of play or philosophy of play. Because I don’t think they know how. If they’re going to be successful with it, you have to spend a lot more time on the drills necessary and sometimes I think – particularly in pro ball – coaches don’t feel like that’s necessary. And to an extent, it’s not. These players have so much natural ability, they more or less like to just run the screen and rolls, something very simple and forget the execution.

Seems to me that an awful lot of [teams], in the NBA anyway and I notice it in the college games I’m watching, we’re all playing pretty much with the same thing. Spacing the floor and running a side screen and roll out of it or a top screen and roll out of it, that’s got to be the most common thing I see. They’ve become very stereotyped in my mind, that’s one reason I think we’ve had the kind of success we’ve had with the Triangle. It’s different. It’s not stereotyped. It’s continuity. We try to react to the defense a little bit more. You have to read the defense. Some players can do that a lot better than others."

There is a problem, let's fix it

Four interesting points from the book "Hard Facts," a book from the Harvard Business School Press:

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Talent or ability... depends on what happens to people and how they are coached, not just their innate skill or motivation.

A study by Lawrence Kahn examined the effect of baseball managers on team and player performance. Kahn measured player ability by the average of their performance over their entire carers, a reliable indicator of player talent.

He found that some managers inspired players to perform above their ability, and other managers stymied players, consistently driving players to perform below their ability.

Ability or talent did not explain all of a player's performance in a given year. How the player was managed or coached mattered, too.

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What is true for individuals is also true for organizations, groups, and teams. Exceptional performance depends heavily on experience and effort. No matter how gifted (or ordinary) team members are to start out, the more experience they have working together, the better their teams do.

Think of the U.S. women's national soccer team, which has won numerous championships, including two of the four women's World Cups and two of the three Olympic women's tournaments held to date.

The team certainly has had enormously talented players. Yet every team member will tell you that the most important factors in their success were the communication, mutual understanding, respect, and ability to work together tha tdeveloped in the dozen or so years that the stable core group played together.

Quantitative research on team effectiveness has demonstrated the power of such joint experience in every setting examined, including string quartets, surgical teams, student groups, top management teams, and airplane cockpit crews.

Experienced teams perform better because over time members come to trust each other more, communicate more effectively, and learn to blend each other's diverse skills, strengths, and weaknesses.

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The "talent mind-set" is dangerous because it treats talent as something fixed. This mind-set causes people to believe that it just isn't worth trying hard because they -- or the people they lead -- are naturally smart or not, and therer is little if anything anyone can do about it.

A seires of studies by Columbia University's Carol Dweck shows that when people believe their IQ is unchangeable, "they become too focused on being smart and looking smart rather than on challenging themselves, stretching and expanding their skills, becoming smarter."

Dweck concludes that:

When people believe they are born with natural and unchangeable smarts, it causes them to learn less over time. They don't bother learning new things and improving old skills.

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Given all the evidence on the importance of systems, why do so many companies place so much emphasis on getting and keeping great people [or players] and so little on building and sustaining great systems?

A big part of that is Western countries, like the United States, glorify rugged individualism so much that we make a cognitive error. We forget that history, organizational goals, rewards are potent causes of what people and organizations do. We give too much credit to individual heroes when organizations [or teams] do things right and too much blame on individual scapegoats when things go wrong.

[In successful organizations] managers consciously fought their natural tendency to focus on who deserved credit and blame, and instead worked on strengthening the system.

A supervisor explained:

"There are two theories. One says 'there is a problem, let's fix it.' The other says 'we've got a problem, someone is screwing up, let's go beat them up.' To make improvement, we could no longer embrace the second theory. We had to use the first."

A good offense is an offense that gets to the free throw line

After starting the season at 11-3, Doc Sadler's Nebraska team has lost four of its last five games and is 2-4 in Big 12 play.

The Huskers' lone win in that five-game stretch came against Kansas State, who Nebraska beat by 22.

After the game, KSU coach Frank Martin complemented Coach Sadler's team:

"Last year when people would want to talk about our league I'd always say: Nebraska. And people always said, 'Why do you always say Nebraska?' Because I have to prepare to play them and Doc Sadler's teams play as hard as anyone in the country."

That level of preparation is a reflection of the work Coach Sadler, his staff, and their players invest.

In 2006-07, his first season at NU after going 48-18 in two seasons at UTEP, the Huskers were 11-4 heading into a road game against Oklahoma. According to this article, "the Cornhuskers allowed the Sooners to bust open the game with a 13-0 run that included a number of easy, transition baskets." NU lost the game, 70-53.

Coach Sadler "offered his disapproval with a grueling punishment: A two-hour practice at 5:30 the next morning. In other words – the minute the Huskers got off the bus in Lincoln. Then Nebraska had its regular afternoon practice later that day."

“I’ll never forget that,” said NU guard Sek Henry, who was a true freshman on the 2006-07 team. “It woke us up to the way he wanted to play, how bad he wanted to win. He was really disappointed in us. That was a shout out to the team.”

The message? If you think you’re out of a game on the road, don’t bother playing at Nebraska. It was a turning point, Henry said. NU has been blown out a couple times since then – especially by Kansas – but not because of a lack of effort.

Coach Sadler's starting lineup is small (5-7, 5-11, 6-3, 6-5, and 6-8), so his system emphasizes getting to the basket.

"A good offense is an offense that gets to the free throw line," he said. "It's going to give us an opportunity to drive the basketball. We do have some guys that can shoot, but we've also got some guys that their strength is not necessarily the 3-point shot but driving. I will not anticipate shooting any more 3s than we normally have."

As this article points out, "Nebraska also will try to increase defensive intensity, even though it allowed a Big 12-low 60.7 points a game last season. Sadler said he'll use the press more often, with the hope of converting turnovers into easy baskets."

"It's going to give us a chance to be competitive with our size," he said.

Making the complex simple and the irregular regular

At 71, Steelers defensive coordinator Dick LeBeau, the NFL's oldest coach, just finished his 50th year in the league.

[In the 1960s, playing alongside guys like Night Train Lane, Earl Morrall, and Alex Karras, he was one of the NFL's best cornerbacks.]

As this article describes, "LeBeau may be the most beloved coach in the game. He's also one of the most accomplished. The Steelers' defense ranked No. 1 in the NFL in 2008, allowing more than 300 yards just once in 18 games, counting playoffs."

PIT head coach Mike Tomlin says Coach LeBeau's strength is keeping things simple, but not simplistic:

"Dick is a fundamentalist, I'm a fundamentalist," Tomlin said. "Things that he does schematically are geared toward putting his players in position to play. He's a unique teacher that way. He makes the complex simple. He makes the irregular regular."

The challenge of coaching on an interim basis

When Johnny Davis (pictured here) was named interim head coach of the Memphis Grizzlies late last week, he described his role this way:

"You just try to keep the team focused. Obviously, we're in transition, and there's uncertainty surrounding the team right now. The former coach is gone. The new head coach has not arrived. There's trepidation there, angst, there's uncertainty. All I'm trying to do is hold things together."

Last month, Spurs beat writer Mike Monroe wrote that "nothing in sports is more difficult than turning around the mentality that infests losing situations that have become chronic. Little wonder that few interim coaches end up getting the job on a permanent basis."

As quarterback father-son duo Archie and Peyton Manning write in their book "Manning," "interim coaches are the equivalent of substitute teachers, unlikely to get the allegiance they deserve." [Interestingly, between 1960-December 2004, interim NFL coaches were 16-43 in their debut games.]

According to Alvin Gentry, who served as interim head coach in Miami and Detroit:

"It's a tough life. Interims are coaching teams that failed to live up to expectations. They have only a limited amount of time to audition for the permanent job, fully flesh out their own philosophy and make changes in strategy and style. Interims can also face authority and communication issues, since players don't expect them to be around long-term."

As this article points out, one challenge is that "an interim coach doesn't have much time to implement his own philosophy and style. The players are accustomed to the system of the previous coach, who used training camp, preseason and regular season games to establish his own approach. It's hard to make radical changes during the season, with a tight game schedule and few opportunities to practice. What an interim coach can do is attempt to communicate with and motivate the players."

Says DEN coach George Karl:

"The toughest thing is you'd like to try to make some changes and try to do some different things. Time just won't allow you to do that. I don't think you ever get your system in place until the next year. You move in that direction, but you don't philosophically get your stuff completely in until your training camp next year."

The Cowboys played the 49ers about a month after SF had promoted Mike Singletary to interim head coach. Before the game, Cowboys head coach Wade Phillips talked about how "for interim coaches, motivating players is the basic challenge."

"It's a tough situation when you go in as an interim, because a lot of things are already in place. First off - and this is really important - you have to get the players to play for you," Phillips said. "That's a lot harder than it sounds. There are some technical things you can do to get better. But once (a team) has put in all the hours of training camp and all the things that are done in the offseason, there isn't a whole lot of impact that you can make."

In 1998, June Jones stepped into the interim role as head coach of the Chargers, going 3-7 with the team.

"It's always hard for whoever is named (interim head coach) because his loyalty has been to that person who was just fired so sometimes it's hard to step in," said Jones, who now coaches at SMU after nine seasons at Hawaii. "We changed practice times and started practicing in the morning and did some things like that differently. You can change up the routine but the main thing is you try to find different ways to put the players in more of a leadership role, to try to get them to take ownership of the team."

The importance of an identity and style of play

Wolves GM Jim Stack on what Kevin McHale has brought to the bench:

"He has been able to show guys how we are going to play, getting guys to feel a little bit better about themselves -- I think that has been one of his big strengths. Getting guys confident with themselves and getting them to be relaxed and playing within a system. Just having an indentity and a system of play. Hopefully it will continue to be more cohesive and we will see the identity take place enough where we can say, 'okay, this is more of a long-term guy and we need more of this and more of that.' When you can't establish an identity and style of play, it is very hard to pin those things down."

Zero tolerance for negativity

Good story on ESPN about the progress coach John Beilein has made at Michigan, which has been ranked in the top 25 this season (with wins over Duke and UCLA) after going 10-22 in '07-'08.

In his second year at UM, Coach Beilein isn't buying into the hype, saying, "We haven't turned the corner yet. We can see the corner up there, but we haven't turned it."

One key to the turnaround is the coach's attitude. As one player put it, "There is zero tolerance for negativity with him. Zero. There's a standard for everything you do, and you gain so much confidence through him. You feel like you can do anything."

The writer contends that Coach Beilein "teaches players things high school coaches don't have the time to teach. Things like transition defense. Whatever he wants to call it, the way he coaches involves a learning curve. Players aren't used to reading defenses as he demands they do, nor frankly are they used to the steady green light he offers. The Wolverines take around 26 3-pointers per game, despite making only 8.8 of them on average."

"It's almost like a football playbook, there are so many plays," [sophomore guard Manny] Harris said. "He has his own vocabulary and it's hard to get down. The other thing is, it's not that you step outside of the system, but you have to be able to create. The system puts you in the position to be open. It's up to you to create and finish."

Every defense has a weakness

DEN coach George Karl, after the Nuggets beat the Knicks recently, on what Mike D'Antoni brings to NY:

"I know that defense is extremely important. But deep down inside, every defense has a weakness. Every defense gives you something. Now can the team on the court, the players on the court, find what it gives you?

That's what Mike teaches. He makes it fairly simple, fairly easy to read. Even though we won, watching them on film, I knew that we would have moments of frustration. Because of their intensity to play the way they like to play, you never totally control them.

My recollection of New York is the city game, the street game, the playground game. And he plays as fast and free as any coach I've ever played against. I know the Knick (teams) have been based on defense. But I was kidding with one of my assistants that I would like to see Mike D'Antoni get a Carolina or Kentucky or Kansas job, because people don't think (his style) can win. People don't think it can win championships. And I think that's crazy.

I think if you get the best players, [Coach D's] style will be incredibly difficult to play against –- impossible, maybe, to play against. But we have so many experts who think that you have to play defense, you have to rebound, you have to be a possession coach, you have to execute. I just laugh. Explosive offense is not as intimidating as dominant defense. But it is scary when you don't know how to stop someone.

My feeling is, when you give up a lot of points, nobody's going to think you're defending. Last year in our halfcourt defense, we were a pretty good defensive team. But no one would ever write that, because we were awful in transition and we were awful in giving up a lot of numbers. So I don't know that anybody is ever going to give the due."

Tex Winter's seven princicples of a sound offense

Re-reading Phil Jackson's 1995 book "Sacred Hoops" today on a flight to ATL and came across Tex Winter's "seven principles of a sound offense," which I've listed below.

As Coach Jackson writes in the book:

"The basic idea [of the triangle offense] is to orchestrate the flow of movement in order to lure the defense off balance and create a myriad of openings on the floor. The point is not to go head-to-head with the defense, but to toy with defenders and trick them into overextending themselves. Executed properly, the system is virtually unstoppable because there are no set plays and the defense can't predict what's going to happen next."

Here are Coach Winter's principles:

1. The offense must penetrate the defense. In order to run the system, the first step is to break through the perimeter of the defense, usually around the three-point line, with a drive, a pass, or a shot. The number-one option is to pass the ball into the post and go for a three-point power play.

2. The offense must involve a full-court game. Transition offense starts on defense. The players must be able to play end-to-end and perform skills at fast-break pace.

3. The offense must provide proper spacing. This is critical. As they move around the court, players should maintain a distance of 15-18 feet from one another. That gives everybody room to operate and prevents the defense from being able to cover two players with one man.

4. The offense must ensure player and ball movement with a purpose. All things being equal, each player will spend around eighty percent of his time without the ball. In the triangle offense, the players have prescribed routes to follow in those situations, so that they're all moving in harmony toward a common goal.

5. The offense must provide strong rebounding position and good defensive balance on all shots. With the triangle offense, everyone knows where to go when a shot goes up to put themselves in a position to pick off the rebound or protect against the fast break. Location is everything, especially when playing the boards.

6. The offense must give the player with the ball an opportunity to pass the ball to any of his teammates. The players move in such a way so that the ballhandler can see them with a pass. That sets up the counterpoint effect. As the defense increases the pressure on one point on the floor, an opening is inevitably created somewhere else that the defenders can't see. If the players are lined up properly, the ballhandler should be able to find someone in the spot.

7. The offense must utilize the players' individual skills. The system requires everybody to become an offensive threat. That means they have to find what they do best within the context of the team.

As John Paxson puts it:

"You can find a way to fit into the offense, no matter what your strengths are. I wasn't a creative player. I wasn't going to take the ball and beat the other guys to the basket. But I was a good shooter, and the system played to my strength. It helped me understand what I did well and find the areas on the court where I could thrive."

Establishing a culture of work

Saw the Spurs beat PHX just now, despite being down by five heading into the fourth quarter. Roger Mason hit a 3-pointer at the buzzer to win it. [Here's a recap of what was a great game.]

According to GMs from around the league, the Spurs' ability to find ways to win is a credit to the team's culture, which is driven is large part by head coach Gregg Popovich:

"Their system has proven to be the best in the business," Blazers GM Kevin Pritchard said. "They have such a strong culture and belief system. That means everything. They do a great job of communicating, from staff to Pop to (GM) R.C. (Buford), what they are about. There are processes in place. They make sure they are very thorough with everything."

Says Suns GM Steve Kerr:

"There is a culture of work, like, 'Nobody owes us anything.' Pop sustains it because he demands it, but also because he's such a great guy. The familiarity over the years is really important. Pop has done a great job of creating the culture. He did that in the first year, and it almost runs itself."

As this article puts it: "Popovich plugs well-identified parts into a precise system and imparts his pound-the-rock motto."

These Jacob Riis words are posted by a locker room door: "When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at this rock perhaps 100 times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the 101st blow, it will split in two and I know it was not that blow that did it. But all that had gone before."

Believing in a process

New Milwaukee Brewers manager Ken Macha on what he values as a coach:

"What you need to do is let these players know what is important to you. Playing good, fundamental baseball is important to me. Going out there and grinding it out every day is important to me. Putting a good day's work in every day and trying to get yourself improved is important to me.

I believe in process. You've got to think what you're going to do every day to get yourself better and go out and follow that process. If you follow that process over the course of the whole year, you're going to see results. You go out and play hard and prepare yourself properly and you're going to get the most out of what you have."

It comes down to chemistry and heart

There's a consistent theme in articles about NY Knicks coach Mike D'Antoni: Fun.

It's a word you don't hear enough these days.

According to Raja Bell, who played for Coach D in PHX, his former coach's influence extends beyond the basketball floor:

"The work environment he creates has a real family-type feel. With him basketball is fun, and he really helps you believe in yourself."

Lakers coach Phil Jackson, who played for the Knicks from 1967-78, says he's hearing good things about what Coach D'Antoni is creating in NYC:

"The friends that I have that are still alive (in New York) that haven't passed away from old age are really saying, 'This is kinda fun to watch.' They play freely and they have a certain sense of teamwork. They are sharing the basketball. They like what they're seeing."

Says Knicks PG Chris Duhon: ''We play a fun system. It's very exciting basketball to watch and to play.''

As for Coach D'Antoni, he puts it in perspective.

"This is basketball. This is fun. It comes down to guys having chemistry and heart, and things will come together. I think that the best way to get things out of players is trusting them and their instincts. It doesn’t come down to X’s and O’s or something you can put down on paper. It comes down to heart and brains. To me it’s all focus. You can do it if you have the will to do it."

The Triangle Offense

Good story in the Indianapolis paper this morning about the Lakers' Triangle offense.

"The offense, orchestrated by [Phil] Jackson and longtime assistant coach Tex Winter, is not an illusion. When executed properly, three players form a triangle on the strong side of the court. Jackson's triangle... is unpredictable because it is based on constant movement and then reading the defense... The Lakers run it between 70 and 75 percent of the time when they're not fastbreaking."

As described in the article, "the beauty is that any player can be at any point of any triangle. Players, roles and positions on the court are interchangeable. The point guard doesn't have to initiate the play or penetration. Jackson's goal is to space the court (he prefers players 18 to 20 feet apart) to maximize individual matchups. When the defense adjusts, that creates other openings."

According to Pacers coach Jim O'Brien, whose team plays the Lakers tonight:

"It's just different triangles that in a natural setup has a wing, corner, post triangle. It's kind of an overload situation. It's a perfectly spaced offense where you cannot get your normal weak-side defense loaded up on guarding or helping. When I think of triangle offense, they always have people perfectly spaced. To me, it seems that with that spacing you can always draw some triangles if you stop anybody at the same time."

According to one Pacers player, defending the Triangle is difficult because "it really keeps you honest. It doesn't allow you to gamble because they have a lot of backdoor options. That makes you stay honest in the passing lane, which means you can't really disrupt their offense a whole lot."

To run the Triangle, "it takes players who have multidimensional games. They have to be good passers, shooters, drivers and be able to move well without the ball. The Lakers currently have that with Bryant, Gasol and Lamar Odom."

Says Coach O'Brien:

"Phil and Tex have been running that offense no matter who they've had. Whether it was Shaq and Kobe or Jordan and Pippen, they just run it. It's a good offense no matter who is on the court for you. When they go to the bench, the Lakers are very efficient offensively when you have Kobe or Gasol in the game. They don't seem to miss many strides from their execution of their triangle offense. It's a great offense from spacing and from movement standpoint."

Keys to offensive efficiency

John Schuhmann has a good article over on NBA.com about the offensive efficiency of the Utah Jazz, who scored "115.6 points per 100 possessions" last season.

Schuhmann credits that efficiency to Jerry Sloan's system. According to his article:

At every NBA game, you will find several advance scouts (employed by other teams) sitting courtside, watching the coaches call plays and charting the ensuing action on the floor. That information is passed on to the scouts' own employer. This allows defenses, upon hearing the play call, to (figuratively) cheat defensively and take away what the offense is trying to do.

Sloan wants his opponent to hear his play calls.

The Jazz run a lot of their offense out of a one-four set, where the point guard brings the ball up, the two bigs are at the elbows, and the two wings are in line with the bigs, near the sidelines. There are plays where the first pass goes to the wings and there are plays where the first pass goes to a big.

And with each of those plays, there are a myriad of options that can be run on the fly, depending on how the defense is playing. So, if the defense hears Sloan make the call and overplays to where they think the ball is going, the Jazz will just counter it and get an open shot elsewhere.

"If you think you've stopped one thing," says new acquisition Brevin Knight, "we've got something else to go to that's off that same play."

Jazz guard Ronnie Price (above with Coach Sloan) says the structure allows players to "know where everyone's going to be on the court, so you know where to get guys the ball, and you know where guys are supposed to be. It's just making reads and common-sense basketball reads that you're taught to make when you're a little kid. It's just that we pretty much do it every time down the court.""

According to Coach Sloan: "They just can't go out on their own because nobody has any idea of what's going on when they do that. That makes it difficult for everybody."

Kyle Korver says spacing is a key the Utah's offensive success, explaining that the Jazz "run a lot of motion sets, not a lot of one-on-one, a lot of screens, a lot of cutting, a lot of movement. I'm not necessarily getting wide-open shot after wide-open shot, but I help create spacing, I keep the middle open, and that's where we're really trying to attack all the time. You need to have the people to space the floor for that to work, and that's where I come in."

Carlos Boozer boils it down to two elements:

"We have to set screens and we have to pass the ball. Basically, if you're willing to set screens and pass the ball, [the system] can work for anybody."

A system that allows players to take advantage of their skills

A story in yesterday's Portland paper makes a good point:

"[Rick] Adelman (pictured here with Joey Dorsey) has one of the league's best all-time career winning percentages, but his name rarely surfaces in conversations about the NBA's elite. He has taken teams to the Finals and developed a style of play that players enjoy. But the average fan will not hear his name mentioned in the same sentence as Phil Jackson, Pat Riley or Gregg Popovich."

Elston Turner, a longtime assistant to Coach Adelman, believes it's because "he's not flamboyant or flashy. He just goes about his business. When you have a personality like that, people don't always give you your due respect."

PHX coach Terry Porter, who was on Coach Adelman's staff in SAC, credits Coach Adelman's system and style of play for his success:

"He does a good job of giving his players structure, but he doesn't let it get to the point where they're robots out on the court. There is a flow to his offense and a simplicity to it. I think (the Rockets) have really bought into Rick's style. The guys do a good job of working his schemes and believing in Rick."

Bobby Jackson agrees, saying: "He gives you a lot of freedom. Not freedom where you can do whatever you want, but freedom with a system that allows you to take advantage of your skills as a player."

As for Coach Adelman, he focuses on helping his players maximize their abilities:

"It's a players' league, and you have to communicate with these guys. You've got to get them to feel like you're doing the best for them to make them successful and the team successful. If you do that, they'll buy in and you'll be successful."