The Constraints-Led Approach in Basketball

The constraints-led approach is becoming more popular at all levels, from the NBA and WNBA down to youth basketball. Our founder, Alex Sarama, worked under Kenny Atkinson for two years with the Cleveland Cavaliers, the first NBA team to go all in with this approach (The Athletic has a good introduction). In this guide, learn the essence of a CLA and how to apply it in practice.

Traditional coaching, which we call the dominant approach, starts with coaches teaching a "correct" technique or pattern of play. The skill is broken into parts, practiced without defenders, and added back into the game later. The CLA starts from the game instead. Players practice against defenders and with teammates in everything they do, and the coach shapes what they learn by changing the conditions of the game, not by prescribing the movement. While many coaches may say the CLA has been done for years, there is a huge difference between playing live in a practice drill and how a CLA activity is delivered.

The CLA is a coaching methodology underpinned by ecological dynamics, a scientific framework that explains how human beings move by constantly interacting with their environment. Therefore, to use a CLA, you need an understanding of what ecological dynamics is.

The CLA is based on the researcher Karl Newell's constraint model: the interaction of individual, task and environmental constraints leads to movement solutions, or skills, emerging. Constraints are boundaries where players can explore and search for movement solutions.

Coaches can't change a player's height, but they control almost every task constraint. The CLA is the skill of choosing those constraints deliberately, watching what happens, and changing them again. Constraints don't cause a movement. They shape what's possible, nudging players toward some solutions and away from others.

You'll hear four common terms within the CLA methodology. Each one is relevant for the small-sided games you'll read about in this guide.

• Affordance: an opportunity for action, like a gap to drive or a teammate cutting free. Two players see different affordances in the same space: Steph Curry may read it as a chance to shoot, while Giannis Antetokounmpo reads it as a chance to drive. That's why expecting everyone to produce one common pattern is futile.
• Perception-action coupling: the link between what a player sees and what they do. Practicing moves 1-on-0 against nobody breaks that link.
• Self-organization: movement solutions emerge from the problem in front of the player, rather than being chosen in advance.
• Representative: practice keeps the information the player would find in the real game.

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Here is how that looks for spacing. In 3-on-3 Home Bases and Floor is Lava, nobody tells the players where to stand. The area inside the 3-point line is lava, so a player without the ball has 2 seconds to escape to a home base. The rule makes some positions worth more than others, and players work out the rest.

The traditional view is that skill is a technique: a correct way to dribble, pass or finish that players learn on their own and then apply in games. The ecological view is that skill comes out of the interaction of the three constraints above. A skilled player sees the opportunities in front of them and acts on them, again and again, in different ways, whatever their crossover looks like in an empty gym.

This is why we reject the term muscle memory. Players use different techniques in games as the constraints change, so there is no perfect technique to store and replay. Many mistakes in games come from players not seeing or acting on the opportunities in front of them, not just technique. In a single pick and roll, the ball handler has to read the spacing, how close their defender is, the coverage, what the screener does and where the roller goes. A pick and roll run 2-on-0 contains none of that information, which is why our article on ecological dynamics argues for keeping defenders in practice.

Within a CLA lens, the word functional replaces the idea of a fundamental. A pass is functional if it gets to the right teammate, in a good spot, at the right speed. It doesn't matter whether it was a textbook chest pass. Nikolai Bernstein described how skilled performers solve the same problem again and again without repeating an identical movement, so the aim of practice should be to do the same. Read more in why we need to stop coaching fundamentals at all levels of the game.

The biggest difference with a CLA is how coaches intentionally change constraints frequently. Instead of using the same live games over and over, as coaches have done for decades, CLA coaches change constraints at a rapid rate in response to what is emerging in front of them. For example, the Smile 1-on-1 game shown below could be played in an infinite number of different ways by changing the constraints.

In Smile 1-on-1, two players play 1-on-1 inside the smile, the restricted area under the basket, with no dribbles. The table shows what happens when you start to introduce constraints.

An intention is what a player is trying to achieve within a possession, for example to score, advance the ball or find the open teammate. A constraint may make certain affordances more attractive than others. Used well, every constraint has a purpose behind it. So before you change the game, consider the intentions you want to see emphasized, then consider which constraints may nudge players towards them.

"So you just let them play?"

No. Rolling the balls out and playing the same 3-on-3 every day is a games-based approach, and without purposeful constraints it isn't much better than drills. A CLA coach picks a constraint for a reason, watches, and adjusts. Our small-sided games guide shows what that looks like.

"CLA coaches don't coach."

A CLA coach gives plenty of feedback, and it works as another constraint: it points a player's attention and intention somewhere. "Notice the help defender" is CLA feedback. "Elbow in, follow through" usually isn't. The approach asks a lot of a coach, because you respond to what happens in real time and don't follow a script.

"Beginners need fundamentals first."

No. The process of human movement is the same for a 7 year old beginner and a 35 year old pro. Beginners learn better in environments where perception and action are coupled, with players finding their own movement solutions instead of copying prescribed techniques. What changes is the difficulty. With beginners, keep the game and the defender, and make it easier: a large head start in a 1-on-1 (for example, the defense trailing by 2 feet), a defender who can only use one hand or isn't allowed to jump, more space, an extra teammate, or a lighter ball on a lower rim. Changing the ball and rim is called equipment scaling.

These recommendations come from A Constraints-Led Approach to Coaching Basketball (Routledge), written by Alex Sarama, Alex Lascu, George Vaz Rocha and Neil Houghton.

Our CLA for beginners guide, the youth basketball coaching guide and the U10 practice plan turn this into sessions. This video shows how to keep the game for beginners.

"It looks messy."

It often does, compared with a line drill. It should be productive messiness. If players are failing every rep, the coach scales the constraints. Progress is still measurable, through player development plans that name what is holding each player back and the games that target it.

This video covers the most common misreadings of the CLA.

Running a CLA practice is a continuous loop. Work out what is holding a player back, design a small-sided game that keeps bringing it out, watch what happens, change a constraint, and then go again.

Adapt Constraints to the Player

The real value of the CLA comes when you design constraints around a particular player. What a player needs is called a rate limiter: something very specific that prevents a player from being more skillful in a highly specific context. The more precisely you name it, the easier it is to design for. "Struggles to finish when a help defender arrives at speed" tells you what game to build: a 1-on-1 with a second defender coming from the weak side. "Needs to be a better finisher" doesn't. Here are some common rate limiters and a constraint to try:

Design a Game That Brings It Out

Choose the start, the numbers, the space, the scoring and the clock so the opportunity you care about keeps appearing. One example: every small-sided game and scrimmage can be won on points, but a team that concedes two rejects (a ball handler refusing the screen by going the other way) loses. The risk is over-constraining. A two dribble limit, for instance, can wipe out solutions that would otherwise show up.

Simplify, Don't Decompose

When players struggle, resist the urge to stop and drill it 1-on-0. That is task decomposition: breaking the game into pieces and removing the defenders and teammates players read opportunities from. Task simplification keeps the live defense and makes the game easier. If you feel you have to teach something because it isn't showing up, the constraints probably aren't doing their job yet. Here are different ways you can constrain the defense:

• One jump only
• Two steps only
• One hand only
• Live, but holding a bib or ball
• Can distract but not block or steal
• Can only force a miss with body position

This full practice shows how often the coach changes the game rather than stopping it.

The quickest way to start is to take a drill you already run and give it back its defense. Smile 1-on-1 uses bursts, where one player stays on for a set time or number of reps instead of one possession and back in line.

The CLA works with a full gym if the games rotate quickly. We'd rather have three games of 1-on-1 running at once, with a bit of mess, than players waiting in a layup line. For more on full gyms, see our large group guide and the one basket practice guide.

• Karl Newell (1986) proposed the model of interacting constraints (individual, task and environmental) that shape how coordination and control emerge in human movement.
• James J. Gibson (1979) founded ecological psychology and introduced affordances: what the environment offers a person, the opportunities for action they can perceive.
• Nikolai Bernstein (1967) described the degrees of freedom problem and "repetition without repetition": skilled performers solve the same problem again without repeating an identical movement.
• Egon Brunswik (1955) proposed representative design, which Pinder, Davids, Renshaw and Araújo (2011) adapted for sport as representative learning design: how well practice represents the demands of the game.
• Araújo, Davids and Hristovski (2006) set out ecological dynamics, which brings together ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory.
• Chow, Davids, Hristovski, Araújo and Passos (2011) described nonlinear pedagogy, which puts ecological dynamics into practice through the manipulation of constraints.

For a deeper read, an introduction to evidence-based coaching walks through the theory, and where to start if you're new to the CLA is the practical first step we recommend.