Friday, July 20, 2012

Mens_Rea Teaches You Things About Basketball pt. 3 - Play Development and Analysis

Introduction


In part 1, we examined how offensive players move on the court and how that movement impacts other players on the court. In part 2, we looked at the options defenses have available to make scoring difficult and the consequences of the choices it makes. Now we're going to try to put the fundamentals we've learned into a more complex system that takes into account both elements - the full basketball play.

A successful basketball play contains three elements: (1) appropriate and realistic identification of the rosters strengths and weaknesses, (2) efficient application of those strengths while minimizing the weaknesses in our play, and (3) proper execution by the players on the court of the play.

We're going to begin by discussing those three elements then we'll take a look at some sample plays and critique them.

Monday, July 2, 2012

Mens_Rea Teaches You Things About Basketball pt. 2 - Defense and Its Consequences



Introduction


Last time we took a detailed look at the type of movement offensive players make on the court to increase their chances at scoring. This time, we're going to look at the other side of the court - defense. Just as we described the offense's main goal as scoring points, we can just as simply characterize defense's main goal as preventing the other side from scoring points.

We'll start by looking at the different types of defensive schemes, then we'll see how screens affect how the offense and defense interact with each other, and we'll finish by comparing our systems.