Improving Team Defense with Goal-Setting

How can goal-setting be used to set tangible actions for improving your team’s defense? 

Utilizing stats and KPIs (key performance indicators) helps evaluate overall individual and team performance, as well as identifying areas for improvement and tracking progress (or regression!) over extended time periods.

Let’s begin with reviewing the art of setting effective KPIs. This is the most important part, as if the goal makes little sense or is completely unrealistic, then this process fails to effectively educate the intention of the players. For instance, setting the aim of contesting 50% of all the opponents’ shots is an achievable goal. Percentages can sometimes work better than sheer numbers based on the context of the KPI. For instance, stating “let’s take 40 3PT shots” means little as it can be impossible to always predict what opportunities a specific game will offer your team. 

When it comes to presenting KPIs to your players, not everything should be shown in one go. Often picking one KPI that you can keep hitting your team on during timeouts and half-times is a great way to maximize their attention. For example, perhaps your emphasis is placed upon “winning the possession game.” In this instance, you may be heavily focussed on something like defensive rebounding, offensive rebounding, or forcing turnovers. The feedback you give to your team may then focus on one of these areas. 

Even though you may only give one or two KPIs to your team, it is useful to keep track of key numbers from your games. At Transforming, we have developed custom KPIs which align with basic analytics and the principles of play we advocate for (see more in the “Transforming Basketball” book by Alex Sarama). These are useful for coaches to keep track of for practice planning and to check progress throughout a season. A very basic version of this is shown below from my Portuguese academy team at the start of the season:

Want to keep learning with Transforming Basketball? Access our FREE small-sided games book to learn more about using constraints and small-sided games in your practices: https://transformingbball.com/small-sided-games-book