Tag: basketball

Fav Basketball Books on Torg Stories Pod

We list our favorite basketball books on this week’s Torg Stories Podcast. What did we miss?

What are your favorite books

about basketball?

The Jordan Rules Sam Smith Pat Conroy Rick Pitino Wooden Sprawlball A Season on the Brink
Torg Fav Basketball Books

Kent Chezem and I list and discuss our favorite hoops books in this episode of the Torg Stories Podcast, March 8, 2020 edition.

In preparing for this pod, I realized that I have read a lot more basketball books than I previously thought, probably at least 100.

I came up with nineteen books I thought were worth mentioning.

First, a commercial. My book, The Coach’s Wife has a lot of basketball in it and is on sale via Amazon for less than ten bucks.

  1. Season on the Brink by John Feinstein. 1986.
  2. The Losing Season by Pat Conroy
  3. Born to Coach by Rick Pitino 
  4. The Jordan Rules by Sam Smith
  5. Sprawlball by Kirk Goldsberry
  6. Wooden, A Coach’s Life by Seth Davis
  7. The 21st Century Basketball Practice by Brian McCormick
  8. Coach Wooden and Me by Kareem  (I met Kareem in the St. John’s locker room at Madison Square Garden)  AND Becoming Kareem by Obstfeld 
  9. When the Game was Ours by Larry Bird and Magic Johnson with Jackie MacMullan (appears on ESPN’s show Around the Horn)
  10. The Legends Club by Feinstein
  11. The Last Amateurs by Feinstein
  12. My Life on a Napkin by Rick Majerus
  13. Sum it Up by Sally Jenkins 
  14. The Last Seasonby Phil Jackson
  15. I just bought Seven Seconds or Less about the Suns by Jack McCallum. 
  16. Lebron INCby Brian Windhorst. He also wrote Return of the King. 
  17. Showtime by Jeff Pearlman
  18. Basketball, A Love Story. 
  19. The Book of Basketballby Bill Simmons

In doing this work, here are the books I’m going to look into reading: 

  1. Geno: In Pursuit of Perfection
  2. Assisted by John Stockton
  3. How Lucky Can You Be (Meyer) by Buster Olney
  4. Bleed Orange about Boheim
  5. The Pistol 
  6. Fab Five 
  7. Boys Among Men by Abrams 
  8. Seven Seconds or Less Jack MaCullum 
  9. Basketball on Paper Dean Oliver 
  10. A Coach’s Life by Dean Smith with John Kilgo and Sally Jenkins

Questions for Discussion:

  1. Which of my favs overlaps with yours?
  2. How did you rank these books?
  3. What do we get out of reading these books?
  4. What are these books about that we can talk about? Three point line. 21st Century Basketball. How would we describe our college basketball practices? How have we departed?
  5. Which of these coaches have we met? How at all, have these books or the coaches influenced us?
  6. I mostly left out technical X and O books like these:
  • Knight and Newell’s pair of books, Tex Winter’s Triangle Offense, Wooten’s Coaching Basketball Successfully, Dean Smith’s Multiple Offenses and Defenses, Tim Grover’s Jump Attack

I counted 42 books on Amazon written by John Feinstein:

  • The Back Roads to March, Where Nobody Knows Your Name (baseball), The First Major, A Good Walk Spoiled, The Legends Club, Season on the Brink, Quarterback, The Last Amateurs, A Season Inside, The Last Dance, The Punch (about the Rockets), Forever’s Team about Duke 78, A March to Madness about ACC

What are your favorites? Which ones are we wrong about? We hope you’ll join the conversation!

 

 

 

Podcast: Appalachian State University Women’s Basketball Coach Angel Elderkin

App State University Women’s Basketball Coach Angel Elderkin on the Torg Stories Podcast.

Angel Elderkin Appalachian State University Women's Basketball Coach
Appalachian State University Women’s Basketball Coach Angel Elderkin

 

Click the audio player below to listen to the podcast or download it via the podcast app on your iPhone.

 

Coach Elderkin’s Appalachian State women’s team is coming off a 22 win season during which they won the the WBI post season tournament. My conversation with Angel was in part guided by a project I do with my students in the writing across the curriculum courses I teach at App State. The students study discourse communities of their choice, and I ask them to interview prominent members of the discourse community. In this case, the discourse community is that of basketball coaches. One of the features of a discourse community is that there is a set of common goals. I started off by asking Angel about the short and long term goals of the women’s basketball program.

Angel Elderkin and Bill Torgerson Appalachian State University
Coach Angel and I standing proud in front of the big “A” at the Holmes Center

Youth Basketball Workout Day #2

I’ve been sharing some of what my daughters do for their basketball workouts with hopes to create a community of people who discuss ideas for youth basketball development. I’m sharing what my daughters ages nine and twelve do with hopes that some people will let me know what they are up to.

Currently, we have three on-court workouts we do. Afterwards, we go home for some strength and agility work. We work out three days in a row and then take a day off.

First, here’s the PDF document that lists what we did for the workout: Youth Basketball Workout #2

Below is a video that gives a brief overview of the workout:

Back in the Zone / Back to OKC

Was that a zone defense Golden State played in Game Five of the NBA’s Western Conference Finals?

Was that a zone defense Golden State played?

zone defense, Golden State, Warriors, Steph Curry, Steve Kerr, OKC, Thunder, Westbrook, Durant
not a zone

Watch along the baseline in the clip above. #40 Harrison Barnes chases Durant to the corner. If defenders chase the man they are guarding to a different part of the court, you’re looking at a man-to-man defense. If defenders point to each other and pass off offensive players to each other to guard, then you’re probably looking at a zone. At the end of this play, it sure looks like Golden State is in a match up or 2-3 zone, but they aren’t.

Extra note: In Golden State’s man-to-man defense, usually everyone not guarding the ball has a foot in the lane. They are really packed in, and when you combine that with the fact that sometimes the Thunder players don’t move (happening less in the playoffs) it’s easy to think that Golden State is playing zone.

zone defense
match up zone defense 

In the clip above, watch ponytailed #12 Steven Adams in the blue for the Thunder. When he runs away from Golden State’s Bogut in the paint, Bogut just lets him go. He points to Curry to pick up Adams. Switching every screen has a lot in common with playing a zone defense.

In a zone, you match up with the person in your area. Theoretically, this means Golden State could have someone like their center Bogut match up with Durant when he tries to post up in the lane but have someone faster and more mobile like Draymond Green defend Durant when he is on the perimeter.

I remember Coach Bob Knight saying that the offense’s advantage versus a zone is that they get to pick who they want to attack. Want to play your little point guard on top of the zone? How about we put Dirk Nowitzki up there to shoot threes over your little guy? The defense’s advantage is that they get to pick where their players play.

zone defense, Golden State, Warriors, Stephen Curry, OKC, Thunder, Durant, Westbrook, NBA, Western Conference Finals
looks like a zone

On TNT, Chris Webber sounded like he was in disbelief that Golden State went to a zone. I tend to agree with CW’s assessment that this is indeed a zone. The aspect of this play that gives me pause is when Golden State’s Andre Iguodala seems to beat a screen and chase Durant to the top of the key. I think A.I. probably abandoned his post for a second so that Durant wasn’t left running free or else Kanter came down and tried to pin him inside so Durant could get free for a shot.

It might be interesting to see if Golden State tries to play more zone in Game six.

Yeah, Golden State played some zone, but Curry was back in the zone as a shooter

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Curry back to his old MVP self

In the upper right hand corner, first Curry goes back door off a down screen. Then he runs off a down screen on the other side of the court to the perimeter. Adams can’t decide if he should chase him or not. This is the kind of play where the defense pays so much attention to Curry that the screeners are left open.

Although Curry’s percentage was below average, he was 10-10 from the line, making circus moves around the hoop we are used to, and scored 31 points.

What do I mean the screeners get open?

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#12 Bogut screens for Thompson

 

It’s most impressive when the player with the ball realizes the screener is open and find him. In this case, this is most likely a set play out of a timeout. Pay attention to #12 Bogut. He is heading to screen for Thompson, a fantastic three point shooter. When everyone runs out to the shooter, Bogut gets free for the dunk.

When Ezeli hits two, you know it was Golden State’s night

Festus Ezeli, Golden State, Warriors, Curry, Steve Kerr, OKC, Durant, Westbrook
Swish, swish!

Festus Ezeli shot 53% from the line during the season and 42% in the playoffs. Here, near the end of the third quarter, he makes the both. Game six coming right up on Saturday night in Oklahoma City!

What to Watch When You Watch Golden State on Offense

There are only a few teams in the NBA that I’m interested in watching on a regular basis because they do something interesting with their offensive attack. Golden State’s open-post motion offense is one I pay attention to. I’ll use the video clip below to help explain some of what has caught my interest:

Four things to notice:

1. No player is in the lane.

I call at least this alignment by Golden State “open post” because no player has a foot in the yellow lane area. You might be right to argue and say it’s 4 out motion with a post player playing high. What this alignment does is allow all players space to cut to the basket. This works great for Golden State because when you start worrying about their shooters coming off of screens, everyone (shooters and screeners) has room to cut backdoor to the basket.

2.  Players weave with the ball.

What’s the weave? Watch how a dribbler heads to their teammate, the teammate goes behind, and the dribbler flips the ball to their teammate. After a dribbler gives it up, they can cut to the edge of the floor and come back for another handoff. Golden State mostly uses the weave to get the defense moving before they do the thing on offense they really want to do.

3. Players have choices.

Part of what appeals to me about the motion offense is that players have choices. Instead of telling players exactly where to go when, they can set screens and cut and decide what they will do based on how the defense plays. If you’re watching Golden State and Oklahoma City in the 2016 Western Conference Finals, look to see what the players do on offense without the ball. I think you’ll notice a lot more movement from the Golden State players. One way isn’t better, but if I’m playing or coaching basketball, I prefer the kind of team play I grew up watching with Bob Knight’s use of the motion offense or Phil Jackson’s triangle. As a player, I hated having to go stand in my spot and wait to run the coach’s play. As a coach, I hated yelling, “Set it up.” I prefer to empower players to use what they know to make decisions on the fly.

4. #23 Draymond Green’s Down Screen

The action in this video is worth watching multiple times. Check out the screen Green sets for Thompson. I especially like the way he heads toward mid-court to get a good angle before he heads back toward his basket to get the screen.

A Few More Plays from Warriors Offense

Golden State, Warriors, NBA, OKC, Thunder, Western Conference Finals
Watch Curry. Rather than come off of the down screen, he cuts back door to the basket.

*

Bogut and Curry set down screens. Then Bogut screens the screener Curry.

*

Golden State, Warriors, Screen and roll, Westbrook, Curry, Bogut
Westbrook stops on the screen and roll. Did he think they were supposed to switch?