Tracking a team's effort

Last night, the Big Ten Network had a story on the University of Minnesota's "Hustle Chart."

I emailed Ryan Saunders, a graduate manager on Tubby Smith's staff at UM, asking about the chart. He was nice enough to email me back with some details.

During every game, the UM staff charts steals, blocks, charges, deflections, and hustle plays.

According to Coach Saunders, it's "not uncommon for Coach Smith (pictured above) to ask during timeouts how many deflections we have" as it serves as a tool for gauging the team's overall effort. Not surprisingly, "much of the time, [deflections] coincide with the score."

To hold players accountable, the team posts the "Hustle Chart" in its film room that lists the best offensive rebounder, screener, player who took a charge, hustle player of the game, defensive player of the game, deflections, assist/TO ratio, and blocks leader. [They also maintain an updated cumulative deflection chart in the locker room that highlights numbers from the last game and season totals.]

"Players always are aware when they do not make the board, and we are sure to point it out when somebody is dominating the hustle chart or if their name is missing."

Connecting basketball and business to build a better organization

As Jason Quick writes, Larry Miller, president of the Blazers, "is known for his humility, and style."

To his employees, he is warm, approachable and inspiring. He often spends the first 45 minutes of his morning gliding from office to office, just to chat. In meetings, he encourages what one employee calls "creative tension," or debates, which is in sharp contrast to the tight-lipped fear many felt in previous regimes.

Along with POR coach Nate McMillan and GM Kevin Pritchard, Miller's management has been a key to the team's turnaround.

Quick traces the turnaround to a four-day team-building retreat in Arizona that Miller arranged for 14 members of his staff, including Coach McMillan.

By the time McMillan returned to Portland, he was a changed coach, and the Blazers were a changed organization. By the end of the week, the department heads would put their minds and bodies together to scale a 12-foot wall, balance evenly on a teeter-totter and coax a horse to reveal its hoof. In the process, there were scrapes, cuts and emotional, late-night conversations.

For Miller, it was the foundation to his grand vision of making the Blazers a global brand. Before he could push the Blazers forward, he had to eliminate a longstanding barrier between the basketball and business sides of the company.

To do that, he had to develop a sense of team.

A former executive for Nike, Miller says his goal was to "make everyone feel they are part of the team. To me, any leader is only as good as the team he has working for him. And my style has always been to try and get the right people in the right job and let them do their job."

According to Coach McMillan:

"I learned a lot about the people who are very important to this organization, and they learned about me. It became personal. It became emotional. And I came out of there feeling very strongly about making this organization better. It became family. It became, for me, a sense that, 'I want to work for you. I want to be a part of making this organization better,' because those are good people."

An example of why you play the game, not the score

If you've not read it yet, there's a story in today's USA Today about Belmont's remarkable come-from-behind win over Campbell last Friday night in which Belmont scored "30 points in the last 3:27, a pace that would have had them post 348 points in a 40-minute game."

With 3:27 remaining, Belmont trailed, 75-57, only to win the game, 87-84.

Rick Byrd (pictured here0 admits there's no magic potion to apply when a team is down, apparently hopelessly, and time is running out on a chance for a comeback.

"Sometimes," the Belmont coach says, "it's just fate. The mentality of the two teams in a situation like that is entirely different. When you've got the lead, you don't want to shoot quickly, and you don't want to foul. You almost have to play conservatively with a big lead. It's a sense of protectionism and conservatism against a sense of urgency. We had nothing to lose."

According to Virginia Tech coach Seth Greenberg, whose Hokies came back from 18 points down to beat NC State in overtime recently, convincing your players it's possible to comeback -- and having a plan to do so -- is the key.

"You try to paint a picture (for the players) of how you're going to get back in the game," Greenberg says. "You try to show them a scenario where you can get it from 16 to 10, then from 10 to five with four or five minutes to go. Getting stops is the big thing. If you trade baskets, you're not going to come back." [The Hokies held the Wolfpack to one field goal in the final 9:51 of regulation.]

In the Belmont-Campbell game, Campbell certainly had a hand in letting the Bruins back in the game. According to the USA Today story, "Campbell missed 11 of 20 free throws after taking the 18-point lead."

[Here's a detailed description of how Belmont rallied to beat Campbell.]

Officials don't win and lose games for you

After the Lakers beat the Cavs in Cleveland yesterday, Cavs coach Mike Brown, reacting to something LA coach Phil Jackson (strategically) said before the game about LeBron getting too many calls at home, said:

"Officials don't win and lose games for you."

It's a point too many players, coaches, and fans refuse to acknowledge, especially in a time when many people -- players and coaches included -- don't want to take responsibility for their part in a loss.

After close games, you'll often read/hear a lot about "bad calls" by the officials. In fact, there may have been some bad calls. But how many mistakes did you, as a coach or a player, make that contributed much more to the loss than an official's call?

Using the Lakers-Cavs game as an example, CLE shot just 63 percent from the FT line. The officials had nothing to do with missed free throws.

Officials don't make bad passes or execute plays poorly. Passing and execution is the responsibility of the players, not the officials.

In games where there are perceived missed or bad calls, what ends up happening is that the focus on the officiating becomes a distraction. It also becomes a convenient excuse. The attitude often becomes, "Well, we can't win because the refs are obviously against us..." and the team stops competing. Players start thinking they're victims. The "poor me" attitude comes into play.

As Mike Jacobs, the head men's soccer coach at Evansville, wrote recently, "as a player or a coach, there are only so many variables you can control during the course of a soccer game — a call that a referee makes (or doesn't make) is not one of them."

According to Coach Jacobs:

"As much as athletes and coaches probably feel that 'working' the refs is glorified by watching ESPN, the idea of shouting at the referee during the game becomes more of a hindrance and distraction to the officials and your own players. As a player, arguing with the referee or even getting yellow-carded for dissent are signs of a lack of mental toughness or focus."

Coach Jacobs rightly contends that "the coach who complains about every call gets tuned out pretty quickly by an official, and now the coach has lost a forum to even discuss a call with the referee."

Of course, as posted previously on this blog, there are times when it's important to challenge a call -- particularly a blatantly bad call. The key is being smart and strategic about it.

As for CLE coach Brown, he may not agree with every call, but he's not going to whine about them:

''I've said all along we're not the only team that gets techs. . . . We do believe we're a no-excuse team. We never want to say after the game that it's the referee's fault.''

Coaches don't win games during games, they win before games

About five years ago, author and sportswriter John Feinstein wrote a book titled "Let Me Tell You a Story" that captured his many conversations with former Celtics coach and president/GM Red Auerbach, who won nine NBA championships and 938 games as a coach, and another seven titles as GM.

Coach Auerbach died in 2006 at the age of 89.

Here are a few highlights from the book:

~~~~~~~~~~

You can't control every single play. Coaches today figure you can't control a fast-break the way you can control a half-court offense. These guys don't want a running game because they lose control if they have one. They want to walk the ball up the court so they can stand up and control every possession, every pass. They feel more secure that way. That's why we're getting all these games now with teams scoring in the sixties and seventies.

As a coach, you have to go out and get the best players you possibly can, coach them as well as you possibly can, and then, ultimately, like it or not, trust them to know how to play. You can't micromanage the game.

One thing [Phil] Jackson does well is he trusts his players, which is one of the reasons they play for him. He's not up on every playing pointing to where the next pass should go. And then, when the Lakers lose, people get on him because he wasn't up screaming or calling a time-out the minute the other team scored two straight baskets.

A lot of coaches get up and scream or call time-outs so they look like they know what they're doing. Does it work? Maybe for some guys, but the thing that always works best is winning.

The biggest mistake coaches make is overcoaching. When you see a guy up, especially in the pros, trying to control every play, that's overcoaching. If you guys don't know where to throw the ball or who they're guarding or where they're supposed to be on defense once the game starts, you're in trouble. Like I said, though, it's about control and about looking like you're in control.

That's not to say you don't pay attention to detail. I used to always go out with my team for warm-ups because you never knew what you were going to pick up by watching the other team. Maybe someone is limping just a little. Maybe someone looks listless, like they're sick. Maybe you see that something looks wrong with one of your guys. You never know.

I always said you didn't win games as a coach during games, you won games as a coach before games. Choosing your team. Preparation. Practice. Knowing the other team's strengths and weaknesses going in. Once the game starts, if you haven't got all of that under control, you aren't going to win the game by being an X and Os genius. Players win during games, not coaches.

When I coached, during the season, my practices always got shorter and shorter. Why? First of all, you have to rest guys as the season goes on so they can be fresh for the play-offs. Second, they shouldn't need as much practice late as they do early. You can only go over things so many times before they stop listening.

Now if the guys didn't come in prepared to go hard, I might keep them longer. But they knew that. They understood as long as they came in ready to give me their best effort, we were going to get them out of there in an hour and a half tops, maybe less than that late in the season. I go to college practices and I see a guy in January or February keeping his team out there three hours. That's crazy.

I watch a lot of college practices. First of all, they're too long. Kids can only concentrate for so long, especially if they're being asked to go to class and study too -- which a few schools actually insist on. And even though they keep 'em out there forever, they never seem to teach them fundamentals.

I always believed that you teach guys to do what they can do. These days, everyone has all these assistant coaches. Honestly, I don't know what they all do. I look at some NBA benches now and there are ten guys over there. Ten guys! That's almost one for every player. So why are they all so weak on fundamentals? The college coaches blame it on the high school coaches, the pro coaches blame it on the college coaches.

I know you can still teach guys. Larry Brown does it. Lenny Wilkens does it. You just can't accept a guy saying he doesn't need fundamentals. Everyone needs them. Guys don't learn to box out because it isn't sexy. A good box out doesn't get you on SportsCenter, does it? But it wins games. A good pass -- a simple one -- doesn't make the highlights either. Only the spectacular one.

Coaches today drive me just a little bit crazy. When I hear one of them say after a game that he's going to have to look at the film to figure out what happened, I bust out laughing. I mean, who do they think they're kidding? You lose a game, you know exactly why you lost the game. You know who screwed up, and if you don't, you shouldn't be coaching in the first place.

When I coached, we didn't have film or tape or anything like that. You think I didn't know who could play and who couldn't play? These guys today want you to believe that what they're doing is some kind of science.

Coaching is simple: You need good players who are good people. You have that, you win. You don't have that, you can be the greatest coach who ever lived and you aren't going to win.

Turning timeouts over to the players

During some timeouts this season, UC-Irvine men's volleyball coach John Speraw, who guided the Anteaters to a national title two years ago and won a gold medal in Beijing this past summer, has "started saying less and asking more questions, instead of telling them what to do."

According to Coach Speraw, his objective is to "teach these guys to be responsible, independent young men, and part of that lesson needs to start on the volleyball court with how they strategize and how they communicate with one another. I wanted [the players] to talk among themselves. I’ve done that periodically and with some good results. I like it."

As for his players, they say it helps give them ownership:

"I think it empowers us a lot. And because we’re being so vocal with each other, we can understand it and put it into terms better for other guys on the team, especially the younger guys, who don’t have as much experience," senior Taylor Wilson said.

"We talk a lot about being a self-sufficient team. We talk a lot about what’s going on and what the other team is doing and we try to figure out ways to score points on the other team. [Coach Speraw] really promotes that a lot. He likes to have the staff sit down. They say a few things here or there, but he really enjoys when we can try to figure out how to try and stop a team."

Managing the clock

Interesting story in ESPN The Magazine about clock management. The article is about managing the clock in NFL games, but has relevance for basketball.

According to the writer, "Clock mismanagement occurs every week in the NFL. Even in the playoffs, when you'd expect coaches to be extra vigilant about each precious second. After all, these are the guys who burn upward of 100 hours each week micromanaging game plans, scripting plays for near-infinite scenarios, dissecting film and anticipating an opponent's every possible move. But when it comes to one of the most direct factors in wins and losses—how and when the clock is stopped in crunch time—coaches are often clueless."

In his book, "Football Clock Management," John Reed contends that "Every second you leave on the clock unnecessarily may be the one your opponent uses to beat you." And while a number of NFL coaches reportedly own Reed's book, most won't admit it.

That's because, according to Reed, "Coaches are reluctant to admit they don't know everything about anything."

Interesting to know that "a few coaches even enlist a quantitative research analyst," who "spend game days in a luxury box, clutching complex charts, breaking down info about time intervals between plays and relaying advice to the field. (Using computers during games is illegal.)"

These math geeks prefer to remain anonymous; it's an unwritten rule that only coaches should make strategic in-game decisions. But to some bosses, like Bill Belichick, there's no one more valuable. The Patriots head coach lets only one voice come through his headset in a game's final minutes: that of Ernie Adams, New England's research chief, a boarding school friend of Belichick's who's fairly obsessed with the technical, historical and numerical minutiae that win and lose games.

While it's not a guarantee of success, experience certainly helps. As Titans coach Jeff Fisher (pictured above) puts it:

"The longer you've done it, the better prepared you are. You've experienced everything."

Balancing a razor's edge

Made it over to the Lakers-W's game in OAK last night. [Here's the box score.]

Watching two of the league's best veteran coaches manage minutes for their young players reminded me of something Jim Boylen told me Rudy Tomjanovich used to say about balancing winning and developing young guys: "You can't serve two masters."

To paraphrase Rudy, "It's like balancing on a razor's edge. You can fall off either side if you're not careful."

For the Lakers, who have some injuries, Coach Jackson got 6-foot-9 rookie Sun Yue into the game for a few minutes. As this article describes, Sun looked "uneasy" on the court.

Sun entered the game in the second quarter with 5:56 left and the Lakers leading by 16 points. He was back on the bench with 2:42 left in the second quarter and the Lakers lead down to seven points.

After the game, Sun admitted he's not comfortable with the system yet, saying, "I might not be getting used to the whole system 100%, but I think I'm at about 60% and it's getting better."

According to Coach Jackson, the staff has a plan for Sun:

"He's still a guy learning how to manipulate the offense and get into the position where we want to work on the floor. We just want him to go in there and play spot minutes, just do a job. I thought he did fine. He hustled and he worked hard. Things deteriorated around that group that was out there, [but] it wasn't all his fault. He has practiced hard. He's worked hard on his game. He's not ready yet, but he's going to have to play. Some of it's about advancing the ball and setting up the offense and being comfortable under pressure out there."

On the other side, Don Nelson got rookie Anthony Randolph into the game for nearly 15 minutes. He finished with 8 pts, 2 rebs, and 3 fouls.

After the game, Coach Nelson said he's trying to "bring my guy along the way I think is best. [Randolph] takes things for granted and he's got to work his way into it."

What often goes unseen to even ardent followers of basketball is how the flow or momentum of the game changes when young players who aren't as comfortable with the system enter the game.

In Sun's case, he showed good athleticism, ran the floor well, and can handle for his size, but he lacks experience and clearly is not ready to be on the floor for extended periods with a team challenging for an NBA title. Of course, with all of LA's injuries, Derek Fisher needed rest, which gave Sun a chance to play some.

This game was a good example of how every possession of a game is important. Every time down the floor matters. With Sun, three minutes had a real impact on the game.

Two final observations:

1. Kobe's out for pre-game and halftime warm-ups and, unlike a lot of guys, isn't chatting or casually shooting. He's focused, taking game-speed jumpers.

2. W's fans are incredible. 20k there last night. Knowledgeable. Passionate. Loyal.

When it comes to coaches and refs, "oftentimes, the angles don't connect"

Good article in the NY Times about communication between NBA coaches and referees.

CLE coach Mike Brown (shown here), for example, "adopted the strategy, taken from his mentor, Gregg Popovich, the San Antonio Spurs’ coach, of addressing referees by their first names at the outset of the game. Brown tells his players to do the same. Again, it develops familiarity."

Says Coach Brown: "I try to set the tone early about having a communication during the game, because there may be some things that you’re right on and there may be some things that I’m right on, but at least we can talk about it to see if we can get it right for the next call."

According to DEN coach George Karl, "some calls are argued... so coaches do not have to alter their schemes in the middle of a game. If he instructs his Nuggets to play aggressively but the referees are calling touch fouls, Karl starts arguing calls earlier."

Says Coach Karl: "You go into a game thinking you are going to play through your big man and he gets in foul trouble, you’ve got to change."

One 30-year veteran official dismisses the notion that refs have any hidden agenda.

"You’re just out there trying to get the plays right. The coach is trying to win, and sees things from a different angle. And the referee is trying to get the play right from a different angle. Oftentimes, the angles don’t connect."

NYK coach Mike D'Antoni concurs, adding: “They’re doing the best they can do, and I’m doing the best I can do.”

Rudy Tomjanovich, who coached the Rockets to two NBA titles in the '90s, offers advice for coaches, recommending that they "never get personal" with refs.

"It’s always about the basketball play — the way I see it and the way they see it. I never say, ‘Well, you aren’t doing this right.’ It can get as heated as you want about a basketball play, because you aren’t talking about the guy."

Moving into the "CEO role"

Steve Sarkisian was asked this week what he thought would be the toughest adjustment in moving from an assistant coach at USC to head coach at Washington:

"The biggest challenge, in my opinion, will be time management. I'm so used to just dealing with the offense and the quarterback. Now there are obviously head coach obligations I'll have to attend to, so it's going to be really important that the offensive staff I put together can work without me, but also keep me abreast of what is going on so when we have a game plan, we're ready for Saturday afternoons."

After speaking at length with Pete Carroll, Coach Sarkisian's boss at USC, UW president Mark Emmert was confident the 34-year-old Sarkisian was ready:

"When you're looking at someone who hasn't been a head coach, you've got to see that they understand the nuances of the game and the complexities of the operation. They haven't done the CEO role, the management role, the personnel side of it and those kind of issues.

"One of the really impressive things about Steve is that Pete Carroll really has done a wonderful job getting him ready for this. He's worked hard at giving Steve all those kinds of experiences and has actively mentored him to be ready to be a head coach."

The need for "brave conversations"

Was talking with a coaching friend this afternoon when he used the phrase "brave conversation."

He was referring to the difficult conversations that are sometimes necessary in coaching and in life.

Patrick Lencioni, who I've posted about here in the past, has written a lot about our fear of conflict. According to Lencioni, "many of us are taught to avoid conflict at work at almost any cost. It's as though one of the unstated goals of doing business is to avoid uncomfortable interpersonal situations."

The problem is, "avoiding productive conflict leads to two of the most poisonous elements of organizational life: politics and mediocrity. Avoiding constructive conflict around an issue breeds destructive conflict around people."

Lencioni contends that when we don't express our feelings about sticky issues, we tend to "get frustrated and those concerns leak out emotionally." Of course, it takes the kind of brave conversations that my friend was talking about to resolve these issues.

These kinds of conversations can be really uncomfortable, but they're absolutely necessary, whether you're talking about a husband-wife, father-son, or coach-player.

Instead of ignoring problems or "elephants in the room," Lencioni believes that "leaders need to mine for conflict. They need to probe for areas of disagreement." In his words:

Conflict is an essential building component of a high-performing organization. While it can be uncomfortable at times, productive conflict is a competitive advantage that any team should desire, even if it comes at the expense of a little temporary interpersonal discomfort.

Withstanding the fury of a fourth-quarter game

Lakers coach Phil Jackson is concerned with the frequency with which his team has let big leads get away.

Against WAS this week, "the Lakers led by 16 in the first quarter, but it was chopped to two a few minutes before halftime. The Lakers worked it back up to 20 in the third quarter, and still led by 19 with 7:27 left to play, but they escaped a loss only after Caron Butler missed a three-point attempt as time expired at Verizon Center."

After the game in the locker room:

[Coach Jackson] picked up a marker and started writing on the white board in the locker room. When he was done, Dallas, New Orleans, Phoenix, Indiana, Philadelphia and Washington were arranged in a neat vertical line, representing the teams that had come back from double-digit deficits in the second half against the Lakers.

Derek Fisher (pictured here with Coach Jackson), a veteran of five NBA Finals and 13 seasons, took it a step further.
He approached the board and wrote "Boston Finals," followed by the number 24, a reference to the 24-point lead the Lakers blew in a Game 4 loss to the Celtics in last season's championship round.

Coach Jackson blamed himself for letting the lead get away and promised to make adjustments:

"I think it was poor coaching, that's what it was tonight. Putting too much trust and faith in a younger group, the second unit, that perhaps can't hold it on the road. They can't withstand the fury or the tensity of a fourth-quarter game, so I'm going to have to change it up a little bit, I think."

Jimmy Patsos' strategy for stopping Stephen Curry

Been thinking about Loyola coach Jimmy Patsos' strategy against Davidson in which he essentially double-teamed Davidson's Stephen Curry the entire game.

The strategy effectively shut down Curry, but left Loyola playing 4-on-3 against a very good Davidson team, which won the game easily, 78-48.

Coach Patsos (pictured here) has come under heavy fire for this. But understand what he was trying to do.

As a coach, you never want to let the opposing team's best player beat your team. The idea is to design a scheme that forces other players to take the bulk of the shots.

I've posted before about having special rules for special players. In the NBA, teams devise schemes that attempt to limit the damage guys like Kobe or LeBron can cause. It's the common strategy of "You might get beat, but at least make someone else on the team beat you."

In the three games leading up to the Loyola game, Curry scored 44, 30, and 39 points. In the game he scored 30, he also had 13 assists. Most would agree that Curry is a special player who deserves special attention.

In this game, Davidson had the better team and better players. But give Coach Patsos some credit. He made a difficult decision, but one that he believed would give his guys the best chance to win.

I didn't see the game, but once Davidson's lead swelled, it seems like it would have made sense to alter the game plan -- mixing up the defenses -- in an attempt to close the gap and get back into the game.

It's critical for a plan to be flexible enough to allow for changes during the heat of battle. Adjusting a game plan doesn't mean scrapping it. There's an old saying:

"It's a bad plan that admits of no modification."

But if before the game you told your team that Curry wouldn't score, it's likely you'd believe you'd have a good chance to win the game.

And, had Loyola shot better than 34% from the field, they may have had a chance to win.

Coach Patsos also got his guys to buy into the strategy. Yes, they lost the game, but they executed a game plan they believed would help them win.

Coach Patsos offered a candid, detailed explanation of the strategy against Loyola:

"The decision to deny Stephen Curry the ball for the entire game was a calculated risk and conscious choice by myself, our staff and our players. We had a tough win the night before vs James Madison and our best defender Tony Lewis is hurt and is out for a week.

The game plan to beat Davidson, a top 25 team with a lottery pick in Stephen Curry, and 6 of 8 players back from an Elite Eight team, was to keep Curry from touching the ball.

If this was last year, we would not have done this because Curry played shooting guard. The decision was based on the fact that he plays point guard now. He is tremendous, not only averaging 35 pts, but also 9 assists per game. This means he accounts for 53 points per game for Davidson.

My young, tired and inexperienced team met with the staff and we all felt this was our best chance to win the game. It was a risk, but we felt it was our only chance to win the game. The players were all for it, they have a say here at Loyola Basketball.

The game started well, and Davidson was forced to use two timeouts to deal with the situation. The lead of 9-4 was an impressive start for our young team. We used a combination of triangle and two, box and one and a full court press to stop Curry.

Unfortunately, we could not make open shots, and committed twenty-one turnovers (mostly unforced). At halftime, I asked the team if they wanted to play straight man to man, or stay with the game plan.

They wanted to stick to the game plan in hopes we could run better offense, make shots and maybe the Davidson players would cool off from the 3 PT line.

In the second half, a seldom-used Davidson freshman made 3 straight 3-pointers -- it was not the Greyhounds' night.

Loyola Basketball tries to WIN every game we play! We played hard until the end, diving for loose balls and running our offense, we just struggled offensively.

In closing, I take responsibility for the loss, however, this was not some self-serving promotional plan. Curry is a great player who controls the game much like Tiny Archibald. He is more dangerous now because he plays the point and can score and pass."

Minutes are not a gift

Don Nelson was asked earlier this week about playing time for young players.

He gave a clear, candid response:


"There's always going to be somebody who's not playing. It's up to them to keep their minds open and be ready to go when I call on them. First of all, it's up to those players to deserve their minutes. It’s not a gift. They have to deserve them.

We’re diligently working to try to improve their games and when that moment comes, I’ll be glad to play them.

I have two young players [who] are able to play in an NBA game right now and you’d have a chance to win that NBA game. The other players I would think you wouldn’t have much of a chance to win at this point in their careers."

Managing playing time

Great quote from Phil Jackson on managing playing time and keeping the big picture in mind:

"It's just trying to keep everybody prepared to contribute. Sometimes you can only play a guy a couple of minutes. They just have to understand that whatever they have to do, to go in there and play is an important part of it. A coach can always read disappointment on a player's body language. But this is a team that wants to win and they know to do so they have to be willing to put 'me' second to team. That's an important aspect of it."