What Are Constraints and How Can They Be Used in Practices?

This is the Transforming Basketball Podcast, and I'm your host, Alex Sarama. This is the podcast where we help coaches and practitioners change the way we think about basketball performance. Our goal is to create the ultimate resource to help make sense of how contemporary skill acquisition ideas can be applied within the basketball world.

Throughout the podcast, we'll unpack how an ecological dynamics framework alters our perspective of the game. If you're ready to join us in our quest to transform the basketball world, then this is the podcast for you. Welcome back to the podcast. In today's episode, Adam and I are going to cover what constraining to afford means and the practical applications of understanding, you know, why we actually looking to use constraints and how we can actually change our practice environments to amplify certain affordances within the practice environment.

So Adam, I guess let's start with constraining to afford. What do we mean by that term?

Well, let's just take 2 of the 3 words and break those down. Constrain, which is a certain boundary that will channel what's available to you. And afford, meaning an opportunity for action. So essentially we're just creating some sort of boundary that will shape what opportunities for action are available to you in whatever activity we design.

When we are using constraints, I think one of the key things is that we can't just be doing this blindly and thinking, okay, let's start this small-sided game. I don't really have an intention behind it. We're just going to keep playing this game.

It's going to be the same every time. Boom. And that's it. But that's not what we mean by using the CLA intentionally, and we're definitely not constrained to afford. So, you know, I think how we actually start, if coaches want to start thinking about doing this, they actually have to understand maybe principles of play and actually understanding their players and thinking about, okay, within this specific player, He or she is not attuned to these particular affordances.

So what could we do within this small-sided game where maybe we, using Rob Gray's, you know, we make this affordance a bright pink envelope? That's basically what we're getting at here, right?

Well, I just like, the thing is, what was coming into my mind as soon as you said like constrained to afford and you're like, oh, like you have to be intentional with it. You don't have to. I mean, like—

You could just see what happened. We did that at prep when we just wanted to experiment and see what they did.

Yeah. And like, and the thing, it's overarching and that probably, you know what? Yeah. That it should be a separate episode is like going into the aspect, like they are self-organizing no matter what you do. Yeah. There are inherently constraints within the game.

There's constraints they don't even know about that you probably forget about, whether it be their emotional aspect of their game stuff. They don't, certainly when it comes to former life, like psychological aspects that they probably are definitely not aware of and why they're behaving in certain ways.

Yeah.

They're always being constrained. It's just a matter of like, are they intentional? Are they aware of these constraints? And are these being implemented purposefully in order to improve behavior or have different behaviors emerge?

So let's give an example. I think that's the easiest way we can keep kind of improving on this subject. I'm thinking of a good one where we played Olympia Milano's youth team last year with Prep. And we lost by like 20 points. We started really well, but we were not adaptive and we didn't have good solutions to their pressure on defense.

And they were really kind of pushing us up the floor, being very physical. And when we were initiating triggers, we just weren't in kind of good advantage creating positions. So what that led to was picks were very high. They were kind of pushing us.

So our screening angles weren't at a nice kind of crack angle. Yeah. All this stuff, and a lot of the time what they're doing is really kind of denying and pressuring our passing lanes. So what we did in practice is we spoke with the guys after we used all the video, and we said, "Right, we've got to actually recreate this pressure so that then we can actually figure out on offense how we can find solutions to punish this."

So I think that's a good example here because we didn't go into that. saying, all right, this is the exact solution to what we're going to do differently within our offensive principles of play. What we did instead was we tried to use constraints to actually create that same kind of those defensive principles, that same pressure intensity, and then we just saw how the offense adapted.

That's one example. And I think practically, I think just trying to think what we did, didn't we do something like we awarded Or it wasn't points, it was wins, where we started only for a whole week, I think we did defensive stops won games.

So as opposed to just scoring from offense, it would be like the first 6 points in a scrimmage or small-sided game, but that one point would be earned through a defensive stop. And then obviously what we saw was recreating that same pressure intensity.

So would you say that's a good example? Because then obviously what we were doing was affording new opportunities for the offense to figure out how to counter that.

Yeah, I would say that's certainly an example and like a way you could take it. Like what I was thinking in my head was obviously you can't necessarily train the anthropometric features of people during that time to recreate perhaps a larger size team.

So you can potentially shrink the space that's available for a player or shrink, not even, you don't even have to shrink the spatial demands. You could shrink like how much time they actually have to have have the basketball in their hands once they're in the half court.

Therefore, thus, they have to be much more precise with their actions. That could be another, like, a temporal constraint that could shape that behavior and recreate that more or less intensity. Because again, you're trying to think in terms of, like, what is the key aspect that shaped that struggle that caused them to have trouble adapting to that environment?

Like, what are the key variables that really did that, and how can we recreate that?

I started with a very macro one, which is, you know, that's the kind of head coach lens which I just have. And I love how you went more looking on an individual focus in the small-sided game. I guess another good example could be just how we exploit space.

So for instance, we noticed that our players weren't that efficient exploiting space with their dribble. So what we sometimes did is, yes, we did a lot with time pressure, but we sometimes would play maybe a 1 against 2 with not many dribbles at all.

And players had to figure out how could they actually adapt and be afforded with new ways to dribble within the constraints that we were using to afford those situations. So for instance, we might player 1 against 2, and they might start at the half line, and we have 1 defender there.

We might have another defender in the 3-point line, and we might give the offensive player 4 dribbles to shoot a 3 or a rim finish. And what we're doing there is obviously we're constraining, but new movement, new dribbling solutions will be afforded in that context.

And, you know, what did we see? Well, we saw things like push-out dribbles where players would really throw that ball out and run and take like many steps in 1 bounce. And we never had to teach that. You know, it just, it emerged as a result of the constraints we were using within that specific activity.

We got any other examples we can think of?

Sure. One I just thought of that I just literally just discussed with Linus yesterday, cuz he said like the only offensive thing he wants to work on is getting his shot off against like taller defenders. And what I suggested was, even if it's not a taller defender, start one-on-one.

I think I just said that the step back to essentially get off jumpers easier. Yeah, I did say that. Sorry. Yeah. Was just basically start out like Well, one-on-one, 2 dribble backs, but you're starting literally basically chest to chest. So you have to work your pivot and that defender knows he only has 2 dribbles.

You can explicitly say, no, I'm only gonna shoot jumpers. You can still get it off. You may struggle initially, but over time you're gonna figure out when do I sidestep? How do I sidestep? When do I step back? How do I step back?

Or can I literally just pull up right now in his face and not even step back?

Yeah.

What do I need to do in order to do that? And obviously you can tweak around with the dribbles and whatnot and see what's super effective, what's not. I certainly wouldn't start out with 5 dribbles, cuz again, that's just, that encourages a lot of exploration.

But if you really wanna focus in on that aspect, what's the key constraint is that like, as I was discussing before, like against taller, perhaps more athletic players, you don't have as much time. So there you go. Limit your time with the 2 dribble limit.

Yeah.

Great. And I, I think kind of key takeaway here as we wrap up is If we feel like we have to teach players something because it's not emerging, it means that we're not constraining to afford well enough. And that's kind of what I want to leave coaches with because a lot of the questions I get are, well, how could this emerge within a CLA environment?

And then I just show them the example. So for anything that you think would not emerge within the manipulation of constraints, Think deeper and try and really think creatively. There's always gonna be a solution. Now, the one thing is, it's the solution emerges.

It might not be the textbook model that you have in your head, and that is what you have to be comfortable with because players are gonna solve things in different ways. Because as we spoke about in our episode on affordances, players are all perceiving affordances in different ways.

And the biggest one I had in the summer was a coach in Poland asked me about a Eurostep and getting into some very specific. specific finishing moves. And, you know, I just showed one type of constrained one-on-one where I constrained to afford the possibility of a Eurostep emerging, but it wouldn't be the only solution.

So sometimes it might have emerged, sometimes it wouldn't. And critically, when there was an affordance to Eurostep, obviously based on things like where the defender was positioned and all of that, the Eurostep would be different every time. And I think that's kind of a key message that we want to leave you with.

Constraints are a 4, but be prepared to see different things emerging with all of your players. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Transforming Basketball Podcast. If you would like to learn more about the work we do, head to www.transformingbball.com to access our free resources and help spread these ideas throughout the basketball world.

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