Coaches often time spend time talking about the importance of each possession. Outstanding coaches find visual ways to bring out the importance of each possession. It is not enough to say, "each possession is important." What is critical is to visually paint that picture of a good possession. Depending upon what type of system of play you utilize, there will be certain variables with what defines a good possession. With our motion offense, screening is important. Because we believe good offensive basketball begins in the paint, obviously paint touches are a necessary part of our success.If you want your team to excel in certain phases of the game, you must measure it. We chart post touches (high and low). We chart screens. Taking care of the basketball is something we emphasize so we have an extremely detailed turnover chart. There are several elements important to our defense so we designed a special defensive chart. The most important chart we keep, as we have discussed before is a Possession Evaluation Chart that we got from Dean Smith and modified to add fouls per possession. Anyone interested in our stat package can email me at: rstarke@lsu.edu.
In "The Carolina Way: Leadership Lessons From A Life In Coaching" by Dean Smith, Coach Smith talks about the importance of possessions and grading his team's play:
Our coaches graded every possession of each game. It was tedious work and took more than five hours to grade game tapes, but we thought it was important. We reward unselfish acts that helped the team: good defense, setting effective screens, diving on the floor in pursuit of the ball, assists, blocked shots, deflected passes. We didn’t even want the official game statistics kept for the media to be give to our players because they stressed points scored over all other aspects of the game.
We kept many statistics in practice. Our managers recorded three-point shots attempted and made in each practice. We did the same for foul shots. We wanted to know who our best shooters were over an extended period of time.
