This week's drill is a great, quick one person workout for the summer - to help you build your stamina and finishing around the rim.

Start with a chair at each elbow, and a ball on each chair, plus another chair or cone set approximately six feet behind the three-point line. The player is under the rim with a ball in-hand.

 
The player makes 19 in the Mikan drill (alternating pivot and hook shot around the rim, no dribble).  On the 19th make, the ball gets placed down, the player sprints around the cone, collecting the ball from the chair on a "catch and shoot" rep.

We run through until we have 10 made jumpers from each chair.

We think this is a challenging, quick off-season workout!  Give it a go and let us know how you get on!


​Alternatively, if you'd like to book a ONE2ONE Basketball Coach to work you out, get in touch or you can buy our Drill Bible or Session Plans from our webstore.

I am not a Spurs fan.  So for the longest time, I considered their basketball “boring”… and then I watched again, noticing all of the little things that went into the Spurs playing “the Spurs way”, and realised I was VERY wrong.
 
In a similar vein to the New England Patriots, every player simply did their job.  They shared the ball, they talked on defence, they worked hard, they laughed and joked with one another on the bench – and then the cameras rolled and inevitably Tim Duncan was interviewed, or worse – Pop – and it went back to boring.
 
That was, for the longest time, what the Spurs boiled down to… they were all beholden to an inside joke that we simply weren’t party to.
 
Tim Duncan was the bedrock of the most consistently-successful franchise in the league for almost two decades, and so was the face I associated with that monotony.  Then I started coaching, and I started paying more attention to the ruthless efficiency with which Duncan operated on the low block, his knack for hitting cutters and shooters in-stride and grabbing rebounds at key moments.
 
Being a fundamentally-polished seven-footer certainly helped things, but there’s plenty that any player can learn from Tim Duncan:
 
Style points don’t affect the scoreboard
One of the few stats not available on basketball-reference is for bank shots, but if I had to hazard a guess at the career leader, I’d suggest it would be “The Big Fundamental”.
 
Shaq blessed him with that nickname, as well as anointing him as one of the “family” of all-time great bigs.  Shaq summed up Duncan’s grasp of the fundamentals superbly in saying:
“I was probably 80% talent and 20% fundamental.  Tim Duncan was 80% fundamental and 20% talent; and he got five rings and I got four.  That still bugs the s*** out of me.”
 
Duncan’s bank shot from the left block was a trademark, but in-fact, he was money from pretty much every angle.  He was as much a low post master as he was some sort of genius savant of geometry.
 
This mastery of angles is not a coincidence.  It comes with hours of focused practice.  It did not, however, result in a dunk contest win, clothing line, series of posters, etc. In all honesty, I was shocked to even find a bank-shot highlight reel… as it was so very un-highlight worthy.

I would bet my house that Tim Duncan, upon walking in the gym, gets close to the basket and begins his shooting routine close to the basket – he’s not casting up three’s, trying to get an Instagram video with #JellyFam or trying some other random trick shot, he's mastering the angles… and that’s something that any player can adopt instantly.
 
 
 
Know when, when not and how to communicate…
I rarely saw Duncan raise his voice.  He was always focused and played with intensity, but was the complete antonym of his contemporaries at the four, Kevin Garnett and Rasheed Wallace.
 
On defence, whenever Duncan was on the floor, there was a constant friendly (but competitive) chatter – like a group of friends around a poker table, with Duncan at the hub of it all, throwing an arm around the shoulder of the team-mate who needed it most in any moment.
 
His calm demeanour spread along to his team-mates, who never seemed to be panicked on either end of the floor either.
 
Bruce Bowen – a longtime team-mate of Duncan - said of him “He’s funny, interesting, opinionated.  But he wasn’t going to put on a show if he didn’t know you.  If there is anything that anyone of stature could learn about his success, though, it’s how to keep your world private.  After the cameras and nonstop access, he understood how important it was to have something for yourself at the end.”
 
Bowen added, “You talk about a guy that made it about team as compared to self, that’s what T.D. did. It was always about team for him. Even in a day and age of promoting the individual, he didn’t allow anything about himself to take away from the good of the group.”
 
He was a quiet leader, who stuck to his strength as a quiet leader throughout.  He also understood that he needed downtime away from the spotlight, not more spotlight.  Even now, there’s no sign of a verified twitter or Instagram account from TD.
 
One of the messages here is to be yourself - but the best version of yourself - to the benefit of your team.   In the other message, consider what you need to post on social media… if anything.  For aspiring athletes, the “wrong” post could cost you more than a few likes or follows, it could cost you a scholarship, or even a career – Duncan’s route (of ignoring social media entirely) is an option more and more people are taking solace in.
 
Excellence is a habit…
One of the knocks on Duncan is that he didn’t have a standout season – there were no two-month regular season runs of 40 points, 25 rebounds… just a constant 20-25ppg, 10-12 rebounds and a couple of assists and blocked shots.
 
His page on basketball-reference has a slight “Groundhog Day” feel to it.  Pick almost any of his seasons through age 32 (after which Pop cut his minutes to prolong his career) and you’ll pretty much see that stat line.
 
Throwing that out there as a “knock” against Duncan is almost beyond arbitrary at this point, it’s almost like looking at the Sistine Chapel ceiling to see whether Michaelangelo “missed a bit”. 
 
Duncan averaged the dream stat line for most bigs, while shooting >50% from the field and a hair under 70% from the foul line.  He was consistently excellent from night-to-night.
 
He holds the career record for playoff double-doubles, and you just knew that when the Spurs needed him most, he’d come through for them.  Not since Bill Russel had the league seen a big man able to survey his team, notice it’s holes and simply plug them as if they hadn’t existed.
 
In the “Book of Basketball” Bill Simmons compares Duncan to Harrison Ford – noting that after a fifteen year run everyone suddenly realised that from 1977 to 1992 Ford had appeared in three Star Wars movies, three Indiana Jones moves, Blade Runner, Patriot Games (and more)… only realising his stardom when he carried The Fugitive to on-screen success.  As with Duncan, Simmons posited “there wasn’t anything inherently compelling about him.  Ford only worried about delivering the goods, and we eventually appreciated him for it.”
 
When Duncan retired, he was coronated not only as the greatest power forward of all-time, but also as one of the greatest leaders and team-mates.  The author Jon Gordon often reminds his followers to simply “show up and do the work”, knowing that the rewards will come – and indeed, in Duncan’s case they did.
 
When the NBA is celebrating another far-away landmark season, some kid will look up Duncan’s stats and come to the conclusion that Karl Malone was better – and they’ll be wrong.
 
The stats don’t show you how Duncan won titles further apart than anyone in NBA history (except Kareem), how he anchored a defence, was the team’s emotional leader, their smartest player, crunch-time scorer and most competitive player – his impact could not simply be measured in individual statistics (however magnificently consistent they may have been), but can be measured in the rings he won (one more than Shaq, and a whole handful more than Malone), the way his team-mates felt about him and the impact he left in San Antonio – not to forget the best winning percentage over a 19 year spell in NBA history at .710.
 
What the stats do show you though, is that Duncan showed up every day ready to go to work, and be the best version of himself that he could be – and that’s a lesson we can all learn from The Big Fundamental.
 
If you’d like to book a ONE2ONE BASKETBALL coach for a workout to work on your post finishing (or anything else), then please get in touch!  We also offer group teamwork and leadership minicamps, and have session plans available to purchase and download, if you’re not based in our area.

I’ve been obsessed with the NBA since I was 10 years old, and have always been a fan of the history of the game.

It’s clear how much the league has changed over just the past ten years – as players at every position now handle the ball and shoot the three and coaches worldwide understood the true value of different shots and great spacing.

Watching games from ten (or more years) ago almost look like a different sport, as teams tried to force the ball into the post for a contested fadeaway, played iso-ball, or generally clogged the lane and got into their own way.

There's still a ton to learn from watching older teams.  While all fans have a habit of focusing on the teams which won the Championship, that is inherently flawed... as probably the biggest factors in separating a championship-winning team from an also-ran remain "health" and "luck".

Instead, I'd suggest focusing on teams who led to the evolution of the game we love, and I'm going to focus on one of those today (as well as diving into a widespread conspiracy theory about just how they fell short from a title)...

In the 00’s, the “Seven Seconds or Less” Phoenix Suns were considered revolutionary for their pace and space – but they’d be at below league average pace (and three’s per game now).

Earlier this decade, Coach Pop’s Spurs played a “European” style of basketball, focusing on drive-and-kick motion, great ball movement and a preference for shooters at each position. 

As the Spurs took a backwards step, Golden State’s “Lineup of Death” struck fear into opponents every crunch time, but with the majority of teams in the league now playing at a similar pace and in a similar style, the ‘fear’ has dissipated (even if the Warriors have the name recognition and rings to show they’re still the team to beat).

While the Suns, Spurs and Warriors have been credited for changing the style of the NBA, another team set the tone, stylistically, at the turn of the century…

When the NBA moved to Channel 4 in the late 90’s (and then onto Sky), games were on most nights.
This was in the days before “League Pass” and on-demand viewing.

It was pre-Youtube.

The best we could hope for was that the VCR allowed us to schedule a recording and didn’t accidentally record the kung-fu movie on Channel 5 instead.

So what could I do to feed my NBA habit?

​Like a lot of fans, I’d try to go to bed early, and set my alarm earlier to catch the games live.  While I’m (still) a Celtics fan, the Eastern conference at that time didn’t make the best viewing, so instead I regularly woke up at 2:00am to catch a team I didn’t even support… forget about the Lakers, the Sacramento Kings were the real “showtime” from the moment that Jason Williams and Chris Webber came on-board.

Over the course of a few seasons, the Kings evolved into a contender and going into 2002 it was widely accepted that they were the serious contenders for the title.

This was supposed to be the turning point for the Kings as a franchise, for Webber as a superstar and for the league as a whole.

This was how the Los Angeles Lakers were supposed to be dethroned, by the small team from inside their own state who had been fighting for respectability and a playoff berth for longer than they’d had real title aspirations.

The 2002 Kings were a legitimately ten-deep juggernaut. A superteam created in the most traditional of ways, by a clever front office and owners with deep pockets (as opposed to friends wanting to play together and scheming to do so).

The roster was simply superb. Mike Bibby and perennial sixth man of the year candidate Bobby Jackson ran the point, backed up by Mateen Cleaves, still relatively fresh from his MOP performance in the Final Four. Doug Christie and Jimmy Jackson at the off-guard with a young Damon Jones providing depth and off-balance shooting.

Small forward spot was stocked with All-Star (and super wingman) Peja Stojakovic, backed up by future All-Stars Hedo Turkogku and Gerald Wallace. Franchise cornerstones Webber and Vlade Divac were the starting bigs and were backed up by Scot Pollard, Keon Clark and Lawrence Funderburke.

Jump this team on into the late 00’s or early 10’s, this team wins 65+ games, and that’s just on paper.

Delightfully, they were allowed to get onto a basketball court, where the pieces fit beyond perfectly, and were led by the masterful Rick Adelman, ably assisted by Princeton guru Pete Carrill. They played the game superbly, and brought the advent of a European style of basketball to the NBA before it was the “in” thing to do.

The Kings thrived on slick, unselfish ball movement - particularly from the posts where Webber and Divac competed to be the “best passing big ever” (not named Walton, Sabonis, Djokovic or Russell) - and on the perimeter, they had a drive and kick game that was simply before it’s time.

Even if we decried the trade of Jason “White Chocolate” Williams for Bibby, Sacramento replaced style with substance in that move, and played simply beautiful basketball in an era only otherwise known for Shaq throwing his weight around and Tim Duncan’s ability to make a ten-foot bank shot when the Spurs were simply considered boring.

In other words, the Kings were the ray of light that kept fans entertained AND played winning basketball.
…And then it all fell apart on May 31st 2002, in game six, when the Kings squared up to the Lakers, along with Dick Bavetta, Bob Delaney and Ted Bernhardt, who will hereby be known as the Three Stooges.

Please understand, as a Coach, I never condone "blaming the referees" for a result - particularly when we're talking about junior basketball, and referees working games primarily for their love of the sport and a little pocket money... but in the NBA?  You only have to look into the recent ESPN piece rehashing the Donaghy scandal to understand that referees have absolutely affected the outcome of fixtures.

The figures are astounding. LA shot 27 free throws in the fourth quarter alone, benefitted from multiple egregious no-calls (in particular when, with the Kings somehow up one point with 12 seconds to go, Kobe maliciously elbowed Bibby in the nose trying to get free – an act which would warrant a flagrant foul and/or a suspension, but was met with the zebras swallowing their whistles). This was the night when NBA became WWE, and according to disgraced former referee Tim Donaghy, Mr Stern was every bit of Vince
McMahon as you could imagine:
“The ideal finals for me? The Lakers versus the Lakers, there’s just something about the Lakers.” – David Stern

Read and re-read the above. There was only ever one outcome of this series.

Michael Wilbon’s piece in the Washington Post surmised it beautifully, “six calls that were stunningly incorrect, all against Sacramento and all in the fourth quarter when the Lakers made five baskets and 21 foul shots to hold onto their championship”.

When it comes to shooting, we believe "aim small, miss small".

This drill brings that maxim into focus in the scoring of the traditional "team" free-throw shooting drill - wherein players are stood around the lane, taking two shots and moving.

In this drill, we cycle through a fixed number of shots per player, scored similarly to golf...

A swished make is -1.  A regular make is 0.  A miss off the rim is +1 and an airball is +2.

At the end of the defined number of shots, the winning team is the one with the lowest score... losing team runs a sprint.

​If you'd like to book a workout with a ONE2ONE Basketball Coach, get in touch with us.  Alternatively, you can purchase session plans or our Drill Bible from our webstore. 

Vertical jump and explosiveness are both very important areas within the game of basketball.

They can give you a big advantage over your opponents, for example in the rebounding battle, blocking or altering shots and finishing over defenders.
 
There are a number of exercises that can be used to aid performance in this area by strengthening the leg muscles and improving the stretch reflex. Below are a few ideas for you to try and implement into your next workout...

Squat
This is a great exercise to strengthen the quads, glutes and hamstrings while also challenging your core stability.

Standing up straight with you feet positioned at roughly shoulder width and toes turned slightly out, break at the hips sending your bum backwards.

At the same time bend your knees until your thighs are parallel to the floor. Your knees should be tracking out over your second toe keeping your feet flat on the floor and weight pushing through the heels and outsides of the feet.

Make sure to keep your chest up and back straight looking ahead throughout the movement. Then reverse the movement and explode up, squeezing the glutes and standing up straight being careful not to hyper-extend the knees. 


Hex Bar Deadlift
​Another great exercise targeting the same muscle groups is the Hex bar deadlift, a hybrid between the squat and deadlift.

Standing inside the hex bar with your feet hip width apart and toes facing forward, grab hold of the handles, setting your shoulders back and down and chest up, back straight. Squeeze the bar off the floor, and imagine pushing the ground away with your feet. Stand up explosively, squeezing your glutes, shoulders back, standing up nice and straight. Reverse the movement to lower the bar back to the floor, ensuring your back remains straight.

​Bulgarian split squats
This exercise really targets the glutes and quads and is tough on your balance too, so good for the core and stabiliser muscles equally. 

To perform this exercise, place one foot on a bench with your laces down, hop forward with the other leg so you are in a nice wide stance.

Then bend the front knee until your front thigh is parallel to the floor, not allowing the knee to roll in and keeping it tracking in line with your second toe, foot flat on the floor. If your knee goes forward of your toes then take a slightly wider stance. Reverse the movement to return to the starting position and then switch legs after the set.

When performing the reps try to keep your torso as upright as possible, avoiding leaning forward or side to side, keeping your core engaged. 


Kettlebell swings
A great exercise to target the posterior chain, (Back, glutes, hamstrings) and work on your explosive power!

Grab a Kettlebell with both hands by the handle, taking a shoulder width stance.

Set your shoulders back, chest up, back straight with a slight bend in your knees.

Hinge forward at your hips keeping your back straight and chest up, sending your bum back keeping just the slight bend in the knees.

Explosively reverse the movement swinging the kettlebell up to eye level keeping the arms straight with the power coming from your posterior chain as you push your hips through, squeezing your glutes and standing up straight. Then let the weight swing back down sending your bum back and keeping the chest up and back straight repeating the movement.


​Plyometrics
These last exercises develop the speed and power that the muscles can exert.
Two effective examples of this type of training are vertical jumps and depth jumps.
 
Vertical jumps can be performed on court under the basket and consist of the player jumping to reach as high as they can on the rim or backboard repeatedly, landing and exploding up straight away for the next attempt.
 
Depth jumps are performed with a player standing on a box and stepping off, when they hit the ground they immediately jump up onto another box that’s a different height from the one which they stepped off from.

"We don't have the time to prepare for EVERYTHING."

It's a common lament heard from coaches worldwide.  Indeed, it seems that no matter how much time you get with your team, you wish you had a little more.

One of the areas which is most commonly overlooked by coaches who are especially pressed for time is "special situations".  After all, when you've only got a couple of hours a week with a team to fit in getting your shots up, making defensive adjustments, implementing a scouting report and adding a new layer to your offence, how on earth would you make time to establish what to do when you're up/down four points, with 1:20 to play and no fouls to give?

As such, one of our favourite things to do with teams is to use the scrimmages to put them into specific situations (like the one mentioned above), or taking free-throw practice (with the aim of missing the free-throw and grabbing the offensive board) specifically for those moments later in the season.

While it's easy enough to simply tell a team "you're up X, no fouls to give, one timeout" - and it's a tool which has its' merits - our favourite way to prepare our teams for the chaos that comes late in tight games is to start from an unknown score...

Once the teams are set, we have each team call two flips of the coin.

The first coin flip is for fouls to give.  The second is for timeouts.

If the team wins their coin flip, they get one, if they lose it, they give one to the opponent.

For example:
Red calls "Heads, Heads", the coin comes up "Tails, Heads".  The other team has a foul to give, but Red have a timeout. 
Blue calls "Tails, Tails" and it comes up "Tails, Tails", then Blue adds another foul to give (giving them two), and has a timeout as well.

We give the teams 30 seconds to discuss their approach - to simulate a long huddle/short timeout, and  from there, we have a clock set at two minutes, and the teams begin to play - while the fouls and timeouts are available to the teams, the clock does not start until there have been nine points (or more) scored between the teams.  

This gives a suitable "random" sample between the teams in terms of variances of scoreline (anything from a one-point game to a nine-point game), fouls to give (anything between 0-2) and timeouts (anything from 0-2).

Once the two minute game is concluded, we bring the team together, and have the players lead the conversation about the tactics they undertook, whether they felt they were successful and what (if anything) they would change.

If there are certain philosophical points that we have to reinforce (such as fouling late in the clock up three in order to prevent overtime), then the coaches tend to lead on this until such time as the players have the "rules" down.

We think adding this wrinkle to your practices will help your team to be more poised come crunch time, but if you'd like us to come run this (or anything else) with your team, please don't hesitate to get in touch, and don't forget, if you'd to have all of our drills to-hand this season, our Drill Bible is available from our webstore.

Why did you get into coaching?
I kind of got into coaching as I got into basketball… my Dad was one of my first coaches, and he really pushed to ensure that the kids he was coaching understood the importance of the “why” that sat behind the “what”, and that's a message that has stuck with me.  On the way home from the sessions, he would be in my ear about the relevance of a certain aspect of the session, how it built towards performing in a game, and other key coaching points.  So looking back, he was developing me as much as a coach as he was as a player from day one.

From there, I was a player-coach as a junior and senior player, and as injuries took their toll, I became a coach exclusively and really fell in love with the game all over again.

Understanding the “why” as well as the “what” from an early age really helped to drive me towards coaching, and although I can sometimes fall headfirst into the X’s and O’s of it, the thing that’s really kept me motivated to keep doing it is the opportunity to build relationships, to help players to become better team-mates, communicators and leaders, and to work together towards a common goal.

Talk us through your basketball career to-date…
I started playing at 10 years-old, and by 14 I was splitting time between a burgeoning junior programme at my hometown club (Bury St. Edmunds Bulldogs) and their Senior team. 

I was fortunate enough to represent Suffolk in a tour of Belgium at 16, and captain the County the following season, but whilst on tour I badly dislocated my shoulder.  Although a lot of physio meant that I was able to play U18 and U20 National League for Colchester - and received a couple of offers to play Division 3 Basketball in the States as well as a few BUCS schools - given the state of my shoulder, as well as some other personal circumstances, I elected to stay home and start a career.

I played local league and Division 4 Men’s NBL, but had two surgeries on my shoulder along with a handful of other quite serious injuries which meant I was spending more time getting ready to play and recovering from games than actually playing.

So I stopped playing at aged 30 to focus on coaching, moving from Bury to coach at Ipswich, where we went to the playoffs a few times, and also led the Suffolk U15 & U17 Boys to success in a number of East Region tournaments.

I stepped away from Ipswich to spend more time with my family, and worked to elevate the programme again at Bury, while mentoring a number of coaches around the country, but I’ve always stayed in touch with Coach Sadler, and I jumped at the chance to join ONE2ONE BASKETBALL when he asked me.
 
What moment from your coaching career to-date are you proudest of?
While I’m very proud of my record at Ipswich and with Suffolk, and I’m a really competitive person – my proudest moment in basketball has nothing to do with winning a game…

I’m most proud of a handful of players who were – frankly – really struggling when I met them.

I'm not going to name them, or go into individual circumstances - because that wouldn't be right.  In each case though, they were either angry or in a confused place, and through building a relationship with them, working on their communication, leadership and focus, helping them to understand how to deal with adversity and helping them hold themselves accountable to the standards we believed they were capable of, they’ve all gone on to do wonderful things.

I never really thought about it until I bumped into one of them in a pub a couple of years ago – he introduced me to his girlfriend saying “this is my Coach – I’d be in prison if I hadn’t have met him.” 

Whether that’s true or hyperbole on his part, I don’t know.  But to know that years later, your players believe that your lessons helped them to make such a significant impact on their lives outside of basketball is what makes this all so very rewarding.


What film, podcast or book would you recommend to players or coaches?
The film that always inspires me the most is the 30 for 30, “Survive and Advance” which focuses on the late Jim Valvano and the NC State team who won the National Championship the year before I was born – my father always talked about them growing up, and Coach Valvano is someone I really look up to… it’s a documentary that makes you smile, cry and think – and I know that it would have made Coach Valvano very proud.

I recommend that anyone involved in the game listens to the Hardwood Hustle podcast, with Adam Bradley and TJ Rosene (the older episodes also feature Alan Stein).  There have been so many topics that they’ve covered that just make sense to me and I’ve implemented in my teams – it’s superb for coaches – but they have player-specific episodes too, and the players I’ve worked with who’ve listened to them have loved them.

For a book?  I love Jon Gordon and Malcolm Gladwell – just people who get you thinking about the everyday challenges you may face in a different light.  I’d say I’ve probably bought twenty copies of “The Energy Bus” and given away nineteen of them, so that’s the book I recommend most.  Outside of that, I'd say "Legacy" by James Kerr is superb.

What do you do when you’re not around basketball?
I really don’t get a lot of downtime between work and basketball, on the commutes I listen to a lot of podcasts, I read when I get the chance – although not as much as I would like - no matter what though, I try to learn something new every day, as I believe it's hypocritical of anybody in coaching to ever "stand still" from day-to-day, while expecting the people they lead to grow.

I really enjoy cooking, and spending time with my wife and two daughters, and once they’re in bed I’m normally watching Netflix or sport.  I'm also fortunate to have a very close, and supportive, family and group of friends, so I spend a lot of downtime with the people that matter most to me.