Post-Season Practice Planning by Adam Spinella
Four Tips to Prepare Your Team for the Playoffs
The postseason is a unique animal. The moment you clinch a spot in the postseason, whether it is the conference tournament or a safe at-large bid, all attention is turned onto preparing your team. The regular season is not meaningless basketball – you can prepare your team to play the best it can and build good habits that extend into the postseason. But the regular season is very different than postseason play. When a single loss ends your season, your team has to be energized, sharp and together in order to advance as far as your talent will take you. Here are four tips to keep in mind as you prepare your team for the final push.
Post-Season Practice Planning Number 1. Refurbish, don’t rebuild
Being prepared for the postseason starts with practice. Your team should feel that the postseason is different than the regular season but not that the regular season or any of the stuff you built was meaningless. Coaches cannot change too much during the week or so leading up to a postseason tournament because it risks losing the players. Seeking to rebuild your rotation, offense or defensive schemes will cause your players to question the direction you have led them – the last thing a coach can afford at this time of year.
Instead of making major changes, this is the time for minor tweaks. Revisiting the original schemes and making sure they are mastered is always crucial. If your team is not very good at defending the ball screen, putting in “ice” may be too complex of a scheme to teach in just a week and do effectively. Your overall scheme for planning a practice and implementing drills or plays should reinforce what you have done well throughout the season – always remember to dance with what brought you to the dance!
Post-Season Practice Planning Number 2. Ensure your team understands their strengths
Too frequently coaches want to fix their team’s weaknesses as they get a little more practice time down the stretch of a season. They see late rotations and want to drill them, bad transition decisions and want to drill them. While those adjustments are all well and good, too many adjustments can leave the team forgetting their identity and what they do best. Every team has an identity and a set of strengths. Your team should be aware of their strengths as they head into the postseason.
If you coach a shooting team, you can work on ways to get the ball into the post to expand your offensive attack. But if you focus too much on the weaknesses and expanding your game, you run the risk of losing your strengths. This isn’t just on a team level, but individuals. Some players are best not playing in a certain offensive system and must be able to go one-on-one. I like to give them freedom to feel empowered to make those plays down the stretch of the season; they’ll be more aggressive, engaged and feel like their role on the team is positive – that the team is molding around their skills, their skills aren’t molding around the team.
Post-Season Practice Planning Number 3. Ease your team into opposing team’s scouting reports
Too much information all at once is a bad thing. It is a common tactic for coaches to spend the beginning part of the week-or-so leading up to the postseason focusing solely on themselves. But saving your opponent (or potential opponents) until the last day can give the feeling that you are cramming at the last minute and runs the risk you may forget about some of your own emphases.
Past programs and coaches I have worked with have found it prudent to spend time all week preparing for opposing team’s best plays and offensive sets. This is especially important in a tournament weekend, when you have the potential to play three different opponents. Yes, the majority of the time should be spent on your first opponent, but you do not want to be blindsided on the second day of the tournament without ample time to prepare.
One trick I learned was to run the most common set from each team in a 4 on 4 format. If you devote 15 minutes on two days during the week leading up to the tournament to working on their actions 4 on 4, you will be more prepared to face them on game day, and the scouting report will make more sense the day before the game.
We would split our team into three groups, each of which learned an action of one of our opponents for 3 minutes at the start of the practice. It was very simple, just teaching them the basic movements and where they should look to score. That group would then be responsible for running that offense live against the other two groups. We would give each group four minutes of continuous defense later in the practice, where they get as many stops as they can in that period of time. The other two teams would rotate in using their offensive actions they learned at the beginning of the day.
The second day we would try this again, this time mixing in some of our actions with our opponents’ just to keep the defense honest. It was a competitive and highly-intense way to get a lot of looks against the best offense the other teams run. Of course, accomplishing this puts the onus on the coaching staff to have film prepared and a game plan somewhat ready for how to defend these types of actions. At the end of the day, front-loading the work will allow you as a coach to be much more comfortable with your matchups come time for the game.
Post-Season Practice Planning Number 4. Postseason success is about physical and mental stamina
Sometimes the teams that make it through the postseason are simply the ones who make it through in one piece. Healthy teams are much more likely to succeed in the postseason, as are teams that make it through the season with their roster in tact. Having a healthy team does not just include physicality – it includes being mentally healthy as well.
Players need to be fresh and have enough focus to get through a postseason weekend. We all know the basketball season can be long and grinding; give players a chance to recharge their batteries for the final push. It can be difficult to fight the tendency to get lots done during the time period leading up to the tournament. There are so many scenarios and opponents to prepare for, so many things to fix for your team to make them better. As coaches it is our jobs to prioritize those in order to keep our players from feeling stressed out before the big games approach.
Some tactics you can use as a coach is to keep practice short, cut down on live drills and heavy competition and add some fun ways to compete (shooting competitions, etc.). Practice should be a time where every player enjoys it enough to give all their energy moving forward to remain playing this season.
The postseason cannot be treated the same way as the regular season, though it is also not a time to blow up what you have accomplished. Keep it short, keep it sharp and make sure your players enter championship weekend feeling like they are playing on the freshest and best-prepared team.
Coach Adam Spinella is entering his first season as an Assistant Coach at Culver Academies in Culver, IN. Spinella spent the three years prior as a Student Assistant Coach at Division III Dickinson College. The Dickinson Men’s Team advanced to two NCAA Tournaments and accumulated an overall record of 59-26 (.694) during the three-year span, with the 2013-2014 season ending in the Division III Elite Eight. A native of Bow, New Hampshire, Spinella has a keen interest in X’s and O’s, particularly in professional basketball, and skill development.
Follow Coach Adam Spinella on Twitter!!!
Click on the pdf link to download the Post-Season Practice Planning Notes:
0 Comments