MOTION THOUGHTS & CONCEPTS

ENTRY FLEXIBILITY
As we will later touch on, entries are a great way to jump start your offense. If gives you the opportunity to provide a little detailed structure to your motion in attacking an opponent. I think it is imperative that you take a look each year at your best players and design your entries to maximize their abilities.

We rarely use the same entries from one season to the next. We have some entries that we like to maintain, but we will add different wrinkles to them depending upon our personnel. We will even adjust an entry in the middle of the season to prepare for an opponent. There have been times where we designed an entry to use in a game for a particular opponent and never used it again the rest of the season. They are that simple to install.

POSSESSION EMPHASIS
We also have a few hand signals that we can use at any time. I would imagine that many fans and even a few coaches will see us utilizing these hand signals and think that we are calling plays when actually we are just communicating with our team. As we mentioned earlier, If our team has become too perimeter oriented, we will hold up a “fist” to indicate that we want the ball to “find the paint” through dribble penetration, paint flash or post touch. We also hold up five fingers to indicate that we want five passes on this particular possession to help us become a little more patient. We are big believers in running our offense in such away that we allow the defense to make mistakes and big part of that is being patient.

SCRIPTING
A few summers ago I was reading “Building A Champion” by Bill Walsh. He went into detail about how he learned from Paul Brown to script plays. They would actually start the game with 25 scripted plays. I have been giving it some thought and we are going to try and apply that to our motion this year. My thought was to script a particular concept for the first five possessions. Maybe against a team that packs it defensively we will look to run Regular until we get a double-staggered screen situation. Or we start out in Triangle and make sure Seimone (Augustus) gets two touches before a shot. We can script two or three possessions coming out of a timeout. I am looking forward to how effective this may be. We did this for three years and had great success.