awesome to welcome thinking basketball's Ben Taylor to the basketball podcast Ben Taylor is the founder of the thinking basketball YouTube channel podcast and author of thinking basketball the book right Ben welcome to the podcast thanks for having me Chris it's uh it's a little surreal I've been binging your podcast for like the last six months so now I'm you know next time it comes up in my media player I'm gonna be like wait wait I'm the guest that's weird uh that's awesome it's awesome to have you here I'm so excited to talk basketball and uh you know I don't think there's any debate about it players fans coaches are all smarter in part because of work like yours to be honest and I'll give you credit here and I want you to talk about it a little bit as one of the things that you do exceptionally well is you make I think difficult Concepts attainable for all and even as a coach and gloves are off your Ben you can obviously geek out as a coach here but even as a coach I get stuff from everything that you share and I just want to compliment you on that wow yeah no that's uh that means a lot coming from a coach because I think if I take a step back one thing that's fascinating to me is how when you coach you build up expertise in coaching when you play and you don't coach you build up expertise in playing when you're a video coordinator when you're a scout your eye is trained to look at different things so so each sort of role rings different expertise to the table and the name of the game sometimes when we come together as a team and we work in these environments in life is like how can we maximize each person's expertise versus saying one person always wears the Hat of being an authority so it's it's incredibly um it's incredibly exciting for me to hear that from from your side and then to the point I always find it to be a key thing to focus on where I'll have I'll have sometimes comments after videos where people will be like that action you're talking about is called the Spain pick and roll and I'll be like I'll be like yeah you know I I know that but we don't need to necessarily stop what we're doing every time for an audience because I want to make it as accessible as as possible and sometimes that requires taking really complex ideas and saying like what's the most Salient thing we can communicate in my case it's to the audience but I mean I think it applies for coaches as well where you don't have to if you get a new guy at a gym you don't have to break down the 92 000 things you can break down about screening and Screen navigation and body position and Lead Foot and reading the hand and there's just so many things you can do so so much of that is relatable in the sense that I think it's about you know what's the most important thing that someone can digest in the moment right now well I love it and uh to me what was sharing everything I share on Twitter as well I decided to be literal instead of calling it it's cross screen down screen is what I'll call it because everyone might have a different call and what I learned even with my players in connecting it back to them is for them being literal was better for them too so that's where I think there's value to how you share your information as a coach to be able to listen to how you speak because it communicates directly to all the different audiences that we want to appeal to yeah I'll say we have a tagging system on my team so I've been fortunate enough to have a number of great people that now help me with the work that we do when we put out whether it's a video or podcast or whatever and we try to have a tagging system so we can communicate the ideas consistently with each other and then I think such a big thing in basketball especially modern basketball that is just completely usurped where I was when I started playing in the late 80s early 90s is like we need a way to describe a complex thing really simply where we all know what we're talking about you know low eye High eye okay if you know that vocabulary you know exactly what we're talking about with attack um Spain pick and roll is another great example like when Spain pick and roll started it wasn't called its paint pick and roll it was called oh my God there's like some sort of back screen happening in the paint and then there's a pick and roll and then there might be a lob threat so the ability to simplify things and kind of boil down Concepts that we can all use on the same page I think is really valuable we're going to dive into so many of those things that can apply to coaching and let's start a little bit with your background because there's such relevance to your background to coaching as well and that's your background is a cognitive scientist can you talk about how that adds value to what you're doing and how you're sharing things yeah um it's funny I've had a number of people that I went to school with you know find out sort of what I've ended up doing with with all my hours in the week and they say they say like that's so straight how did you go from cognitive science to basketball honestly Chris I feel like I use the principles every day and what I do and I think they apply to so many things like coaching like teaching like development like scouting uh so so the short of it is I studied cognitive science which is all about how we learn and how we communicate and how we process information and how much of the world we can take in so it goes back to what we just said about simplifying a video concept of cognitive load if I'm communicating a concept to you do I give you five things do I add new vocabulary one thing when I work with the guys on my team sometimes they're surprised they say like you don't need to tell the audience right now that that's Marshawn Beauchamp coming out of the corner to tag like that they might not even know who that is they might not know what his number is so you're just adding more information that they don't need even when you uh communicate data and this is something that I've talked to NBA organizations about where it's like how do we communicate from our from our analytics Department through our coaching staff down to the players pieces of data that are actionable that they can use in a game what you don't want to do is give them something super complex what you don't want to do is add unnecessary unnecessary vocabulary I mean it goes back to your direct descriptions on Twitter it's great to have a tag and call something a fancy term that you know you you use internally but what you want to do is communicate clearly hey this guy goes left two-thirds of the time so we want to force him to his right or something like that that's a really simple easy concept so all this stuff about like how we process the world um how we sort of take in information how we communicate uh it's it's it feels all relevant in this in this space it absolutely does and just piggybacking on cognitive load people like you who have shared these ideas through the years and this goes way back for me before you but you know what I try and do as a coach is look at some of these Concepts and go how can I apply this because ultimately all this is about applied science ultimately is what you're saying so cognitive load an example is a platform drill what I've encouraged coaches to do is instead of having many drills have one drill that you can manipulate many different ways because it reduces the cognitive load on your players on getting into drills this maximize Active Learning Time Time on task all these other things so it's like this one three on three can meet all of your needs instead of having multiple drills and that's a great example of applying what you know already yeah I I had this thought as I was going through school of sort of like retrofitting back to the drills we had when I was playing growing up in high school and things like that and you see it now I think and you said we're all getting smarter I think there's a lot of Truth to that and it's happening in many Industries so you see this concept of like translatability when I was growing up um I mean hey look I had to walk to school both ways and it snowed and we went uphill and all that stuff but like seriously the idea that you would have a drill think about the mic and drill like you would just do these drills and ostensibly it's like okay well you're developing uh a half hook in the post or something um you know I'm trying to think of other drills that were popular in the night you'd get a cone out you dribble around or you'd you'd run another one we did in high school was you'd run um it wasn't a fast break you like weren't allowed to dribble and you had to shuffle and pass the ball back and forth to each other going down the court it's like wait when do we do this in the game um how is this helping decision making which is maybe the most important thing I love when you you get into that with coaches on on episodes and it's like the translatability of those drills just isn't there because of all these cognitive factors so how would you do it differently how would you actually set up a player and we can get into kind of like two-man three-man things that's something that anytime I'm able to watch coach's clinics it's like oh three-man drill simulating something break it down you know take a concept add a Fourth Man add a fifth man that makes much more sense in terms of how how our nervous systems work because the cognitive side people who are cognitive side and they think I did this whole pod on um types of athleticism in basketball last year something I've been thinking about forever and one of the areas I talk about is cognitive athleticism and people are thinking like that sounds like an oxymoron that's weird this is nerding it's like look your decision-making centers are a huge part of athleticism and what's going on on the court but your nervous system is also this thing that's happening under a time pressure you don't have time to think explicitly the way you would if you're playing chess and it's this intersection that is really fun and makes the sport beautiful but when it comes to the development that we're talking about you want to start with training wheels and then you want to add more and more and more it's like driving a car when you when you drive a car for the first time you're like oh okay my foot's doing this and I'm holding the wheel here and I gotta check my mirrors drive a car for 10 years and your body doesn't even know you you know you're driving a car you can show up someplace and go how did I get here that was an easy trip it's great I'm glad you brought up mindless drills because you know like I mean again I support all coaches and and whatever they want to do but we do know there's a better way and that's the one thing and I will go a step farther and I'll say basically if you do anything in basketball whether it's Player Development or team development and there is not the intent to score or stop a score that it is not connecting perception and decisions to the game and too many drills even remove that even if you're playing offense versus defense yeah yeah um I I'm just thinking of all the drills I had where there's there's no yeah there's no ball there's no score involved um and it and it's interesting because I think one of the things that's fascinating to me about basketball is how much we get wrapped up in the momentum of a couple plays that can happen within a game so it's a high variant sport sometimes guys make shots sometimes guys miss shots you had a really cool tweet that I think plugs into this the other day about if you're a defense and of course both on offense and defense I think one of the biggest learnings I've had over the years is it's a holistic system we don't care about the individual we care about the five pieces on the court working together to try to score as efficiently as possible or try to stop the opponent as efficiently as possible well the one thing you mentioned in this tweet the other day that made me think of this if you get scored on and you know why you got scored on it it's an intentional part of your focus like okay we're going to give up and above the break three because in these situations we want to prioritize you know not giving up a layup and that happens and those guys make those shots that's okay that's part of your system that's part of what you're doing so the fascinating part about basketball to me is especially back in the old days you watch a game and a team would make like three shots and it would be like the broadcasters the oh they've got all the momentum the players start hanging their heads the coaches are panicking and calling time out I'm like why are you calling time out nothing nothing happened one player just got hot and hit three shots like are you gonna are you going to change what you're doing now because of that I think having that knowledge and understanding the way the system works and then mapping that back to drills and development and focus for players is huge versus like hey they scored three times in a row the world's falling apart it's such a great Point um we called them shake your head shake their hands yeah they made a shot shake their hands like that's what we if they're gonna beat us they're gonna make that shot and it's not on you as players to make that adjustment it's on me to make the adjustment when we feel that's the case an example would be not guarding someone who can't shoot and of course they come out and make a shot and then everyone goes into a panic and go we got to cover them right and this comes back to cognitive science and all these different things that you share in terms of data Gathering Gathering why did you gather all this data and then all of a sudden abandon it after one outlier possibly happened yeah and this is a huge I mean when you get into the the data side basketball is a data driven sport you count up who scores more buckets and so when you're figuring out like a weakness in your structure you you'd want to look at say hey we've got 500 three-pointers on this guy and the other four players are really good Shooters and this guy's not a really good shooter and understanding that two or three makes in a row doesn't change that without any other good reason now the guy goes away for three years and he comes back with a completely different shot form and you can watch him in warm-ups and you know he looks like Steph Curry then maybe after three shots you might call time out and say are we sure that this guy's still a bad shooter but when you've got relevant data and you have no reason to think otherwise that's such a fascinating part of the sport to me is like a couple things go one way a couple things go the other way it doesn't change what you're doing and it's funny you say that about uh shake your hand because as a as a player I would always I would always yell at my teammates like that's good defense don't do anything else let him take that shot every time that's good so I'm curious and maybe people are doing this but uh evaluating your defense by removing the opponent field goals where they took the shots we wanted them to shoot like that would be the true evaluation of your defense right yeah I've so I've thought about trying to make a video on defense where you remove move all the shots as sort of a cognitive experiment to see how the audience would react it's really hard and it's really time consuming so I never end up doing it but this is where this is where shot quality comes in it's like how could we actually truly test that when we would get rid of the shots it's hard to get rid of the shots so what do we do we try to say what does it mean when you're covered in that space on the floor with five seconds left on the shot clock what does it mean when you give a guy an open Corner three and the nearest closeout is 10 feet away you know I think it's it's trying to use data in that way well and it comes back to like and we talk about decision making a lot is evaluating uh the outcome evaluating things independent of the outcome right right was it the right decision and if they're making the right decisions more often than not assuming we have the quality of players we want on our team and yeah I know you get into that a little bit roster formation but we're going to win more often than not if we're making the right decisions yeah it's it's um you know I I have played a lot of Poker in my life results oriented thinking versus process oriented thinking it doesn't apply to literally everything but basketball much like poker is something where you're going to do the right thing a handful of not just once but a handful of times sometimes you might do it a handful of times consecutively and the results go against you and I think you know when I think of like NBA teams that are sort of mentally resilient that is one of the things I think about like that I always think of the 2011 Dallas Mavericks where it was just the same process possession to possession and it didn't seem like whether it was Jason Kidd being a veteran Dirk Nowitzki uh Rick Carlisle was the coach of that team and of course he's been around the block and then some it's like they were down 15 in the third or they were up 15 in the third it looked exactly the same whereas when you when you turn on a college game you know you can kind of tell the score of college game just by getting a peep over at the bench to see what the body language is like it's tremendous and uh you know you just again skill development do we care what biomechanical skill they used versus whether they made the right decision to shoot and that is again old school versus new school thinking I would think generally new school thinking is yeah I don't care what type of layout they shoot I just carried they made the right decision to shoot the lamp yeah no it's it's exciting to uh to hear so many coaches especially on your show come on and sort of talk about something that uh I think in retrospect would have been amazing to have as a player growing up just a totally different mindset of coaching versus uh I always kind of joke like my dad's solution to things growing up was just do it right I think this is not helpful it doesn't tell me it doesn't even tell me a a an action plan but I mean it can be mentally deflating sometimes because I was trying to do it right so so you know what are we actually what progress what is right what is right like again did they make the wrong decision or did they make a decision different than yours so what might be right to you versus your dad could be different yeah you know that's the that's that's a reason why I don't know if I could ever be a coach Chris because um you know you only get you only get to test out the one thing at that one point in time against that one specific opponent on that one day and you'll you'll never really know if it's uh if it's the perfect perfectly right answer but you just have to it's it's a metaphor for life you just have to go for it and um and as long as you're learning from mistakes and sort of understanding the process as you go forward I think that's that's how you go from game to game and say we're getting better because sometimes you you can lose two or three games in a row but um you're playing plenty well I have this come up when I watch games with people where whether it's an NCAA Tournament game single elimination or my favorite is the first game of an NBA playoff series and the weaker team will be up by like 17 points at halftime and you're like yeah but they're just making more they're not getting good shots and the other team who you know is better has an advantage they're exerting they're they're exerting their advantage the way they want to and it's only 24 minutes of basketball give it another 24 minutes give it a they might lose game one by three but they're gonna win the next four games based on what you saw in game one and I still think that's a really hard thing for us as people the last part of the cognitive Science Background is how we perceive and talk about the events after they happen and so my favorite is the first day of the playoffs where it's just like oh my God the eight seed is up one nothing against the one seed the wheels are falling off it's like did you guys watch the game they're gonna be lucky to win another game unless they get some new players out there because of everything we're talking about because of the process because of the shock quality so on and so forth well I love you what you just said you're an advocate for coaches because again more people need to hear that the variants and the different things that come into play and then the playoff scenario is always the best because all the pundits are always like oh they didn't make any adjust adjustments and I'm like you know as coaches know like an adjustment is just doing it better it's it's been interesting so last year I feel like was the first year for us as a channel that we really tried to focus on let's do a ton of tactical playoff stuff and try to crank out more of that content and of course in the finals I think we'll we'll switch to it permanently it's a lot of work but it's really fun in the finals we get the days off so we're doing every game yeah game by game analysis brilliant of getting watch the coaches go on the YouTube and watch it and it's like it's like you want especially when you tell a story and you and you create content for a larger audience you want to be able to come in the next day and say brilliant coaching changes part two and it's like that's not always what happens because that's not always what needs to happen there's usually subtle little changes but sometimes the changes are things like hey you didn't get into the ball enough and influence him to his weak hand and that's something that we probably should have been emphasized in The Scouting Report you come back in game two and there's no magical like well we we switched Andrew Bogut to Tony Allen no one's ever thought there's nothing huge about it it's just a small thing from game to game so sometimes you have these these big adjustments that kind of feel brilliant but other times it's just points of emphasis right it's just hey we didn't actually execute what we wanted to do perfectly and sometimes it's like hold the course we're fine they just made a ton of open threes yeah you're playing against an opponent and they do things well too so I mean those are factors in it which people don't always factor in but you know I love that and uh you know on one of your thinking basketballs on the NBA app uh smartest plays thus far one thing I loved is when you talked about Jason Tatum throwing this lob pass and basically saying but I'm not sure he meant to do that yeah it's like just like we need to say that more because even some of the stuff I share sometimes it's like this one play and I'm like yeah I'm not sure they meant to run this play or the players just made a decision that made it a great play I had one of those last year as well as the first time I tried that concept last year and uh JB biggerstaff called the timeout it was against the wizards they had been killing them just Garland Allen pick and roll in the first quarter I think like three straight possessions and I want to say they set it up on an empty side so it's the kind of thing where like when you're getting gutted defensively it really stands out because it's like oh they just come down empty side there's no Third Man ready to help and Darius Garland is a brilliant passer and Jared Jared Allen is a great finisher at The Rim so calls time out and they come out of this timeout and it looks like they're they're setting up a similar pick and roll action Garland gets the ball screen from Alan and then Alan like he's gonna veer goes to goes to roll sorry I I spoiled the end of the story there he goes to roll and then veers to set a down screen which completely guts them because the Wizards weren't expecting this at all they end up chasing the shooter off the down screen I think and they get another dunk out of it well is another one of those plays where it's like did Alan forget the call did he disguise the role did he start rolling and then Veer to set the corner pinned down intentionally or did he forget that that's what they were doing out of the timeout sometimes you can't tell so it looks like these brilliant little tricks that players are playing same thing with Tatum um but but Chris even conceptually like when I Scout a team I feel that way there's more stuff out there happening that we can't really be sure of because we weren't in the Huddle and we can try to make sense of it but if there's no pattern if it's just a couple one-offs in a game or something like that the reality is we don't know and that's not something that I think is said enough when we cover basketball it's like maybe they were doing this maybe they were doing that we don't really know unless we get an answer from the staff even then we have to take that maybe with a grain of salt because maybe they don't want to tip their hand I couldn't agree more and the subtleties of the game and again if you haven't coached or haven't dove into things the way you have done you know it's really hard to appreciate those subtleties and I love that you're sharing that especially the subtleties of passing which I know you have a fondness for um just just just share some of your takeaways from watching like jokic and some of these great players in terms of passing oh uh how much time do we have as much as you want um I mean I think just at the surface passing is fascinating because it's connecting with your teammates and in basketball there's four of them that you can hit at any time and you can do it in so many different ways and so if I were to really nerd out and start to say like boy where's this where's this Fascination come from it goes back to when I was a kid I loved watching Magic Johnson and just the ability to manipulate all the stuff you can do with the ball your head fakes your eyes ball fakes uh you know I just did this piece on jokic's passing on the YouTube channel and one thing that really jumped out to me this time around was he has amazing dexterity and hand-eye coordination he has really quick hands so he's a big human being right we don't think of him as being super explosive and quick athlete I think at this point in time as an aside he is an incredible shape for a person his like he's moving so well that's just an aside but it doesn't matter how big you are your hands right he makes up for that with these really quick hands and he uses that in his passing so he'll start a pass from one angle feel a Defender nearby and change the angle on the Fly this is fascinating like chess match Dynamics right because he's not only reading the floor and all of these pieces in motion you know what who's tagging on the back side and who might be open and then how can I go on next level and use that against them uh there's one there's one pass in the video I just did where he kind of knows Dylan Brooks wants to get back out to the corner shooter because it's such a Common Rotation now so he like fakes like he's passing out to the corner shooter Dylan Brooks leaves the man he's guarding on the Block right in front of jokic and jokic just drops it off to him all these things are fascinating and then you add in the fact that as he's processing those nine those eight other moving pieces on the floor he's adjusting his hands on the fly so Defenders can't tip his passes and then I thought after this Chris like how many how many Nikola jokic passes do you ever see tipped almost none right that's incredible when you think about all the passes he throws and part of it is his height which is a cheat code because it allows you to access stuff over the top but part of this is just like there's this extra layer going on in his brain as he as he plays basketball chess figuring out the pieces to move you know with his teammates and the Defenders and things his hands are also automatically in real time going oh you put your hand up I go low you pull your hand low I go high you got multiple Defenders I wrap it around your body all that stuff to me is like endlessly fascinating and then you add in the the Dynamics in the game that have changed in the last 40 years and all the space and all the optionality Cutters have it's a lot of fun well in smartest plays from this year the other pass that really stood out is that Darren fox pass where he's driving and again he again it's just taking advantage of Advantage but also knowing how the defense is going to rotate and just as coaches go watch it but just to summarize you make me feel that basketball has another level and another level Beyond because I think so much of it is like you talk about jokic you cannot develop those skills with those mindless drills you already represented in this yeah like and if people just get more on board with just playing more basketball in practice players will develop because his skill is perceptual it's not biomechanical it's not the you know the biomechanical path it's that perceptual part of it so all these things that you show I think really help in terms of us understanding the subtleties but also show us where the game can still go I feel the same way I feel the same way I've thought this for years and and it's been amazing to watch the sport kind of grow in this direction where 15 years ago it was more stationary and I felt like kind of a guy shouting into the wind and then people would ask me like well what what direction can teams go in well take shooting passing and movement and part of movement is screening moving your body making yourself a screen threat or a cutting threat at the same time these are things we're seeing all over um you know you you publish all all kinds of work on that on Twitter and uh your site and things where it's like at the lower levels in different leagues around the world they don't necessarily have a superstar they can give the ball to so they come up with brilliant ways to combine these things you take them you add them to the highest level players in the world and it's like I don't I don't know where the ceiling is we're getting closer I think but all this movement shooting passing screening all happening at the same time the amount that players move and cut and run today compared to like 20 or 30 years ago it's astounding to go watch when I Scout old games other than getting Whiplash and trying to like Orient myself to like okay wait a second they were really focused on doubling the post from the top and then from the Baseline and that's what they're having the timeout about okay I I got it cross screen for the post and then doubling the post but the rest of it like the first thing you can do in an NBA game Chris is you can jump to 14 seconds on the shot clock because nothing happened in the first 10 seconds whereas today we just did a video on the Sacramento Kings and how they're combining the um sort of popular Concepts to the league that trickle down from Golden State's movement from Denver's handoff action from uh Steve Nash and Mike D'Antoni Pace in space and three seconds into the shot clock there's an action taking place and just how hard that is to guard and when you and when you add the word flow write one action into another into another that empowers the players and you can see it you can see it on these teams that are coming together and adding these things because Kevin herder will come off a curl and then he'll just look for someone to scream he doesn't know whether he should cut again or screen they're all working it out on the fly but if you're a coach and you empower the players to make these decisions and make the game read and react up I mean the ceiling for I think Effectiveness is just and and it and it becomes euphoric it becomes basketball pornography this this kind of thing watching it it's incredible absolutely I love every part of it and and to me again like you just said it the goal is to score the goal is to stop them from scoring so let's get right to the point and I see it from still high school and college so many teams that are just are not trying to score on offense and it doesn't put any pressure on the defense it doesn't influence us a game in the same way and that's where the NBA has really come to another level hasn't it with that type of thing um you mentioned the the influence of Golden State I know you're fond of that the the beautiful thing about your Bernie Bricker staff and then the Cleveland Cavalier breakdown was showing how a typical Cleveland or typical Golden State play split cuts on a low post entry became now a high post entry and all the same split cut reads and that's the beauty of basketball a they put it in a different spot for their person out yeah the uh Mavs even have a set where it feels like they've turned the court sideways where they put they put Luca in like a pinch post area so it's like it's like a post-up basically for him and then they it's almost like a Bilbao you and I think text maybe texted about this the technicalities of this once like they they turn it sideways so it's all going horizontal and you've got you've got staggered screens right so it's the same pattern right it's these same movement patterns of like how can I get three man and kind of four-man actions that are flowing and blend together that are hard to guard so you got your staggered screens Lucas on the pinch post on one side of the Court the first cutter starts on the other side of the court and then it's the same action you'd get out of motion strong where like you started from the top and the staggered screens are in the corner and said they take that they turn the whole thing sideways the first cutter can he can cut off the first screen he can cut off the second screen you can get into that twirl Bilbao kind of stuff for the screeners or turning around and inverting and screening for each other and they just move that to a different part of the court and say we've got a six eight post-passing genius let's do it from here also he's a scoring threat so if he has a mismatch he can attack it same thing with the Warriors split Cuts you just start to just start to kind of take these tools and move them all over the floor and that's been one of the most exciting things to watch about all the X's and O's developments in the NBA for me it's like well what are they what are they going to think of next and can I get can I get like League Pass Israel so I can figure out you know do they have League Pass Australia so I can figure out what's coming yeah it's so fun and uh yeah the thing that uh strikes me from your breakdowns and obviously what you just talked about is that look there is a structure so for those coaches that are still comfortable with the structure structure there is a structure but within that structure then comes all this freedom and freedom of decision making and that's what I think really gets highlighted when you show show that split cut breakdown is all the different possibilities within this one sequence of three players essentially and how the other two are creating gravity and being coming involved it's just brilliant stuff to be able to see and it I think it really is empowering to a coach now if that you create the right structure then you can give your players freedom and they're it's gonna not look like they're just running the same thing over and over yeah I was trying to think about the big differences between like 30 years ago and today uh and and Mike Prada of the athletic he wrote a great book recently if you haven't checked it out called spaced out which kind of and he's great with x's and o's and watching old film and it kind of goes through the history of the arms race and how we got to where we are and you go back and you watch these old games especially in like mid 2000s it was a hero ball era they were trying to get the right match up for the best player Paul Pierce Kobe Bryant Carmelo Anthony Dirk Nowitzki get him a little space on the floor and say hey we got an isolation this is great we got our best player in isolation it's great and when one player is in isolation Chris thinking about this he could go left he could go right he could pull up nowadays you could step back but that's kind of the limit to your counters for the most part there's not a lot going on in the system today you think about like that split cut or even staggered split cuts and all the different kind of route trees to borrow from American football it's like yeah we we know we know just to begin with you can accept the screen or reject the screen but there's a lot that happens after that you also don't have the ball when you're off ball this is my favorite thing about the off ball game and a couple years ago I did a video some the title something like the the hidden art of off-ball movement or the powerful art of off-ball move you don't have a ball to worry about you can't be stripped you can't travel you can use both your arms to kind of if you know what you're doing kind of nudge push maneuver a little bit because you're not dribbling so all of these things happening away from the ball in conjunction with the the space that you can create as a coach and it and and it can't be idle space that's another thing you can't just say I'm gonna put Five Guys 30 feet away behind the three-point line and Bob's my uncle I'm I'm all set it doesn't just work that way this the key to me about the spacing boom is create taking taking the post up as a valuable shot which clogs up one of the high value areas on the court and moving guys out of that space like soccer or or International Football and saying what happens if we leave that space open and it's vacated and we can cut into that space from four different directions at any point in time no one knows if our screeners are going to turn and seal that's a new one I'm seeing this year that I think teams can exploit more you know it's not an old post up it's like a new post up run your actions run your screens and then if they switch it or cover it a certain way have your six seven 240 pound small forward turn and seal and no one else is there because that's what the Nuggets do so well like you get screening action and yoga she's at the top and he's like okay okay Jeff Greener and Gordon here comes the pass over the top because you have that inside position so this is the evolution that I think of that is I think has been so not only effective but kind of fascinating and beautiful to track uh it's so beautiful and uh you know I think people listening can kind of hear some of the fondness for certain things but uh maybe dive a little bit deeper for us especially for those that are listening I haven't watched as much NBA maybe this year what are some things that stand out to you things that have impressed you especially from a coaching perspective that we should look at more as fellow coaches boy um let me let me try to grab like one or two things on offense and one and one thing on defense uh I mentioned I mentioned like two three four-man actions and I mentioned the flow I think more teams are doing that and I think more teams are putting together the idea of like movement if I have a big where I can run hand off hand off action Chris I mean just just always being able to say we can reset into handoff action use the big man um I've seen it called zooming action it's like a Chicago Miami you know this this idea where you have three players involved one of them is setting the screen for a teammate and one of them has the ball for a handoff and just how many permutations and options you can create out of that and if that's like your third or fourth option on offense after you run your primary set you are so much better than oh my God we're in isolation or even just three years ago like oh my God it's the end of the shot clock some one just run up and set a screen for the guard and see what we can get at the end of the shot clock so these two and three man actions combine with the movement we talked about split Cuts there's a ton of that going on on offense and then on defense the thing that really fascinates me on defense is how far can you go with what I call hybrid Zone Concepts um and I'll even include something as like a peel switch in this right where this the secret to unlocking the power is the communication it's having the defensive system on the same page so you can run shell drills till you're blue in the face about you know what happens when the ball goes to the weak side what happens when the ball goes to the strong side how we're going to play this passing line and this angle but when there's a breakdown what happens and when you are a step ahead and you say actually when there's a breakdown we know we're peel switching this every time what you're effectively doing if you can do that perfectly is you're effectively switching in a way that takes away an advantage an offense thought it would have and so this ability to like overload the side peel switch another another one we're seeing more of in the NBA is nexting the pick and roll um and I think next thing the pick and roll lives in conjunction with hard gapping right we saw if you missed this series the Miami Heat last year against Trey young try to pull up some film of that they were just like yeah we're gonna slide like eight feet up and off the corner shooter and we're gonna put size on the ball and then good luck making that pass because also we can recover and you can do that I see I feel like Innovation comes out of these playoff series where they coaches get a time to stop and think and go how could we really stop this how could we really choke this off and then when you start to normalize that in the regular season you're like watching a game on Tuesday in December and you go wait wait a second that's a that's a diamond in one and now did they come out of the diamond in one because now you can't even tell anymore because it's like a Mac it's like a match-up Zone diamond in one because now everyone's just staying with their man why are they staying with their man because they need to stay with their man because it you know you watch a lower level Zone at lower levels uh and you see these situations where guys don't realize like yeah the zone is completely punctured someone else needs to rotate down and if you didn't drill that you're lost if you drill all this stuff and you can communicate it in real time it's it's a fascinating dance to see the offense try to gain these advantages and the defense be like oh well we actually know how to switch rotate communicate perfectly and we don't have to rely on the old school like help your helper you know we're all going to get there when we can um because then the offense creates an advantage and they know exactly how the defense is going to respond well I love this I mean from the offensive side the sequencing that you show like the sequencing that you know again whether it was a player decision or a coach play that was actually a counter you show that constantly and that's such a beautiful thing to be able to see but uh focusing on the defense this hybrid defense idea I love it adaptability rather than one solution yeah and one thing that stood out to me and I know you've shared this a few times is this concept of pre-switching I believe this is the most underutilized magical thing especially at lower levels and we use it in college all the time and it solves so many problems so just talk about that a little bit because I do think that's something that coaches can use more of I I can I add the uh scram switch and the triple switch Yeah to this entire dance um basically you see it in instances where as all the coaches I think no listening you see it in instances where you're trying to protect a player usually trying to protect a big man and keep them closer to the basket and prevent him from getting gutted and pick and roll and things like that but it does raise the question of like why don't we see it more you know what the Celtics were able to do last year with with Rob Williams which also involves some scram switching it involves the concept of triple switching which you know is basically the same these are all kind of similar similar ideas um it's just it's a hybrid Zone because you're saying I want to keep I want to keep Rob closer to this Zone on the court I don't need him coming 35 feet away and if we're all on the same page defensively we all know what we're doing then we can kind of of dictate the terms of Engagement the way we want it for our strengths defensively versus just always reacting and and you know trying to cover up the advantage that the offense made jokic we talked about him earlier in the postseason last year the Warriors had a had a game they just they just put him in pick and roll like 50 times in a row uh and and it's not fair when you're doing against Steph Curry because because nothing about Steph Curry is fair or or really makes any sense from a basketball like traditionalist standpoint he just breaks all the rules but then you you watch a game uh against Dallas a couple weeks ago and in the fourth quarter Luca put him in pick and roll repeatedly they hedged the pick and roll over and over again and then finally in the last minute on two straight possessions they pre-switch him and keep him under the basket and keep him out of the pick and roll and Dallas doesn't score on those possessions and you're just like could could they do couldn't they figure out a structure an organized building block here that sure maybe you don't have him low on the floor 100 of the time but there's got to be some way like what Boston did where if you have if you recognize a certain type of pick and roll coming and a certain offensive set especially if the guys are stationary on the weak side that you can protect or create a kind of hybrid Zone that keeps him in a better space on the floor I'm just endlessly fascinated by this and sort of all you know overloading the side blending these things together and then I think the the Dirty Little Secret Chris is when you stand around on offense you make these defensive principles so much easier to X they're so much easier to execute when you start moving cutting screening it it becomes a nightmare but when you're stationary and you're like oh we've got an advantage we have an empty side pick and roll you three guys go stand over there that's when you can go okay bring this guy over pre-switch this guy you literally see the players talking to each other you stay there I stay here um it yeah I think it's the future it's absolutely the future and uh you know and I think it's harder at the NBA level because the spacing and the gravity but at the lower levels like college and below and FIBA and different things because there's less space these concepts are even more powerful and that's where I feel you know they haven't connected as much but pre-switching basically we're just saying let's say Ben's going to set the ball screen and I'm the high player on the same side I can switch onto the ball screen so we have a equal match up on the switch and then the triple switch is somebody rolls and we keep someone at The Rim so they take that and then I scram or get get out or get out it could be a gun combining kind of that peel switch action which is get out early too and all these different things but uh you know the evolution of these things is really fun and to me that's what makes coaching fun too is that we have adaptability yeah it's um it's really exciting to watch it's also probably why coaching right now and maybe for a very long time has been such an intense job because you're just you're just constantly pushing against the the sort of horizon the pressure of like okay there's more there's more there's more there's more there's more it's part of what makes makes basketball so exciting and to go back to what you said a minute ago about other leagues um like even just nexting we mentioned that earlier the concept of nexting the pick and roll I feel like when I see whether whether it's you or um uh the slapping glass guys those guys are great with with sharing Concepts and plays from European leagues like you you see teams executed well that practice it and it just goes back to what we were saying about being organized defensively communicating and having what is essentially a hybrid Zone concept because you can bring that third player over and if everyone else knows what's happening they kind kind of bump the rotations down the line we had this in a play last year with the Mavericks and the Suns so there's a video we did at the end of the Maverick Sun Series where the suns were down to nothing they came back in one and seven that was another great example of a series by the way where they were down to nothing and I was texting people back channeling like this is really interesting they were like wait a second the suns are a much better team and they killed them in the first two games I'm like yeah but if you half time at game three watch what Dallas did in the first half Phoenix is gonna have to do something to counter this and it felt like they never did and one of the things we had that Dallas was able to do defensively they realized like well if I pressure Devin Booker at the point of attack I can get the ball out of his hands that's a weakness of his all this kind of NBA specific stuff that we don't have to get into but the thing that jumped out to me is they have a play where they're trying to protect Luca in pick and roll and I think it's effectively a nexting concept but what was magical about it is everyone knew it was a bump down the line rotation so Luca Luca instead of like peel switching or trying to recover to one of his guys he runs straight to the opposite corner and all of his teammates five takes four four takes three three takes two and in like one and a half seconds everyone is matched up perfectly of absolutely no advantage and even if it's Chris Paul coming around that screen he's just like wait we have to just reset and try something else because that didn't work for some reason I can't even figure out why that didn't work didn't work because the defense was all on the same page with one of these sort of conceptual rotations that it's like all you're really doing at the end of the day is you're staying in between your man in the basket right that's still that's still the key and secret to basketball but if you know how to do it at this level and you can communicate it instantly it's it's magical to watch that highlights the importance again of decent defensive decision making and uh the other thing I want to highlight because you brought it up is this hybrid Zone concept uh and I've I've seen really smart college teams starting to apply this from the NBA this concept of flood it's called a flood generally is that you have someone extremely early in help and basically essentially forming a triangle but the early player and help is outside the ball Side Lane line basically flooding and taking away any type of space and the other thing that it connects back to is something I share which is defenses about perception as much as anything perception for the offense so this flood the offense perceives there's no space so they're more likely to move it so you're loaded in rotation as you said a little bit with that Luca example as well so talk to us a little bit about some of this overload Concept in terms of the hybrid and the flood yeah we have seen this used and teased for a long time um I'm trying to think if I have any examples of like the early Duncan Popovich Spurs doing it but but Tom Thibodeaux really with the Celtics in 2008 and especially in that Lakers finals you see a ton of examples the Warriors have done it over the years but it's to your point if you if everyone knows what they're doing it becomes a very powerful tool because um even the uh the Box the other night against Zion they use the same concept they said we're going to put Drew holiday on Zion because Drew's quick and he's strong so we don't want to give Zion penetration against someone like Brooke Lopez what's Brook Lopez good at he's good at staying near the basket so what we'll do is we'll have Brook Lopez flood or overload that side he rotates gets outside the lane and now you effectively have a second or third defender on that side well if you're Zion and you're looking at that you're like well I'm going to reverse the ball and that's what he does a lot of the time and you can create an advantage but the defense the defense is keyed in to all of this happening they already know the responsibilities they're supposed to take so Brooke knows where he's supposed to recover to the guy on the weak side knows that he's temporarily zoning up too he knows exactly how they want to rotate and recover when the ball swings and as any coach will tell you if you listen to him for more than 10 seconds that cross-court pass takes a long time so it allows you to reset you know the longer the past the faster you can reset your defense and when your rotations are all buttoned up it it really helps you um take away what offenses want to do one of my favorite videos we ever did Chris was on the Golden State defense last year and a lot of these Concepts and drawing a through line between like Steve Kerr used to run the point of lewd Olsen's 122 Zone in the 80s and I've seen lewd Olson's one hour 10 minute primer uh video that he put out in the 90s on like 122 Zone principles and you bring some of those principles to the Warriors and if you remember last year it was a big deal when you turn on the game and you'd be like they're in a one two two zone no they're in a 2-3 zone no they're in a box and one no no they're going triangle in two you can do these things when you're all buttoned up and communicating and you know your responsibilities because they all come from kind of the same Concepts in practice well and what do you say I mean this comes back to a little bit of your cognitive scientist side but what do you say like coaches their reaction if they're listening to this is that's too much my players couldn't handle it they don't have this basketball IQ but the reality is if if you're practicing the right way your players are very malleable and adaptable to these things and can handle them right yeah I think you have to build it up yeah um you know I think the the cognitive load stuff we were talking about earlier is a big deal but also just understanding the context of your team and your players and where they're at if you have a group of guys that have been together and day one you roll it out and they kill the basics of shell drill you should probably be adding something you should probably be adding some of these things you should probably be getting them to understand when to recognize a peel switch or whatever other Concepts you want to put in a flooding the side or whatever so I think you still you still kind of have to know where your players are you have to know where your team is and you have to still communicate that to them in a way where they can hear it where they're receptive where it's actionable all the things you talk about and you have so many uh great coaches especially the last year you've just been killing it with some of the coaches you've had come on and just walk through their different processes with their teams who are all at different places with different types of personnel so still tailor it to the guys that you have in front of you but yeah I think it's the same thing that you mentioned earlier with drills create structure and then build on the optionality and the complexity off of that anchor it to something and I think there's no reason why why uh basically basketball players vocabularies of these Concepts will just continue to get richer and richer and richer if you put them in place we've seen in other sports I think just like continue to continue to add to this and the table Stakes will contain the bar will continue to get higher and then you can stack and stack and stack more complex Concepts well I love that and you know for coaches it just connects like if you're doing the same drill the second week that you did the first week then you're not developing your players they're just doing a dance recital and we don't want them to do that we want them to be adaptable and those things that go with it uh tremendous and I want to get to this uh the back picks goat the 40 best careers oh my goodness an oldie an oldie okay but here's the thing I want to bring out of this because I think a lot of things that people like yourself are doing are driving my thinking about what I actually should be doing in Player Development and the one thing that stood out with this is when you did the NBA skill sets and you talked about spacing isolation creation Mission passing and finishing when I look at those things and maybe you can quickly outline for us the the value of those different things it surprised me a little bit the value of some of these things especially the way we talk about what we talk curious did anything change and then secondly am I right in my thinking that you doing an analysis like that drives what I should be helping players develop in terms of skill sets that are transferable to different levels of basketball well on the last point I think I think to a degree um I don't I haven't thought too much at the lower lower levels I wouldn't I wouldn't consider anybody playing professionally or even big time college basketball lower levels in this sense but I think at the higher levels the idea of spacing shooting passing movement and and plugs all this plugs into decision making right and that goes that goes back to what I was saying about about the um building a model of basketball specific athleticism I would Scout these great players whether it's from the 90s or today or young players coming into the league that are that are blossoming Superstars uh and that's one of my favorite things to do to know as a rookie I get to profile where where Luka doncic is where John Morant is where Jason Tatum is and then come back usually it's like 12 or 18 months later and come back and just see the way they've grown looking at all those great players um you realize like shooting passing moving decision making they're they're part of this mental advantage that they have so you can strip out the skill sets and you can say he's a great ball handler he's a great shooter uh he's really strong he's got a great vertical leap and those things all matter but when you when you start breaking down the film you're like no this guy's just a much better decision maker than this other player or you watch Steph Curry away from the ball and you can say physically he has a cardiovascular advantage over other players but other players also don't make the decision to go oh wait there's open space in the corner I'm gonna Sprint 30 feet along the Baseline even though I just passed the ball to a teammate this is his famous relocation three that he in a way almost just kind of invented it because no one else made the decision to just Sprint back out into open space so it's all of this kind of like playmaking decision making um passing and and the specific model you're talking about was more of a rudimentary thing to try to illustrate like this these concepts are present the tension they create are present on every basketball play you get a guy that can create an advantage you get a score that moves the defense just a little bit puts them in rotation adds a double team then can you make the extra pass can you cut to open space do you have a shooter or a finisher if I have a vertical guy right you know I'm I'm six two Chris if I set the pick and roll and run down the lane and Jaren Jackson is the help Defender we're not getting any points right but if Victor when Biana is the guy rolling down the lane and I can throw a lob to him he might not even have to jump apparently there you know so it's like that tension is present on every basketball play based on those Concepts and the thing I love about those Concepts specifically the shooting passing movie they fit together you create an advantage and you maximize that advance well I know some old school people or some people come out oh we're just creating new things to support what old things already you know they said or did but to me what you've done and what I hope I've done is that changed people's thinking in a lot of ways and saying look the number one fundamental in basketball is space it's space so why are we talking about starting with these skills and these biomechanical skills and teaching a proper layup when my Under 12 girls team they need to learn about space and then the second thing they don't need to learn is about Advantage whether I'm helping them create the advantage or they're trying to create an advantage basically the goal of offense is to score score or draw two and then if you draw two let's take advantage of that advantage and then the third part which it connects to is shot quality which is what is a gold medal shot what's a silver medal what's a bronze metal shot or however you'd find it on your team and to me you you confirm or you drive thinking for us as coaches with some of this analysis going back in data Gathering going back Generations which really helps us understand how to coach better yeah I don't think it's a coincidence that the offenses are harder to guard today as you can learn from more of this stuff now I have a question for you Chris let me let me switch switch roles um for a second when did you get into coaching what what year roughly so we talked a little bit off there it was similar to that like it was kind of like the eighth grade where I had a phenomenal person coaching me who recognized that I had probably what I would call now a perceptual ability to to see the game and enjoy the game from a different perspective almost like a coach and he was the first one that kind of alerted me to the fact that hey you know coaching is a possibility and what what year was this roughly oh my gosh this was uh oh my gosh now you're challenged me let's say 19 late 80s I would say early 90s somewhere there is where my evolution of coaching came so here's my question plugging in that timeline like let's say 1990 as a stake in the ground were they talking about spacing back then no so so so if you go back and watch it's hard to get it like before the 80s um but you'll start to see like seminars home vhs's tutorials you can still find some of them on YouTube if you go back and watch them or read old articles I was actually shocked to see how many coaches Coach K Bobby Knight loot Olson they will talk about spacing you'll see it in the 90s you'll see it in the 2000s but they they just didn't take it you know like compared to where we are now it's night and day so it's very funny because you'll hear them you'll hear them talk about like um okay stop practice your spacing is all wrong and I'm if you're watching this from a modern time you're going yeah you have three guys in the paint and the coach will go your spacing is all wrong you need to be two steps higher I need you one step outside the elbow you need to be one step over on the Block and it's like you guys were thinking about it but in this very telescopic way so it was I will give a lot of old coaches Credit in the sense that I think a lot of the principles conceptually were there they just they just didn't they didn't see the forest through the trees if you will you know they're still talking about the the old like a lot of old ideas are really fascinating to go back and listen to coach's uh lecture and things of that nature but it's like they didn't go all the way they didn't really realize that if you just vacate the space completely it changes the entire Dynamic of this well and and often they thought the offense was the solution right the structure of the offense was the solution rather than what we know now is the decision-making within whatever you do I mean basketball decision to supersede basketball plays we know that so that's the I think the beauty of the modern coaching is that we're empowering players to be able to make decisions within those structures yeah I love that I love that keep keep doing what you're doing please it's just it just makes for beautiful basketball to to watch and break down Ben this has been awesome has been a treat for me and everyone that'll listen so uh thinking basketball I mean it's all over the place but uh let's let coaches specifically know where they can find your work and where they can get smarter from following you uh our YouTube channel is is called thinking basketball we have started another YouTube channel or our second little child YouTube channel called more thinking basketball because we realize from all our Scouts we had too much we couldn't we couldn't get it all out in sort of the same polished way so when we have little extras or shorts or we want to go more hardcore on a concept from a game more thinking basketball thinking basketball podcast and then this season as Chris mentioned and we're talking about in the NBA app we'll have videos regularly throughout the season uh just kind of like breaking down players or concepts or last month we had smartest plays in the NBA app so that's basically it if you want to support us directly patreon.com thinking basketball we have a million NBA stats up there that I use daily but I don't know how helpful and how helpful that is if you're not a not an NBA coach right now that's brilliant stuff and that NBA app stuff I cannot thank you enough um and and again Testament to the NBA understanding the value of educating people to that deeper level uh in terms of that it's just great stuff and I can't wait for you to produce more of those thanks so much