Small-Sided Games Basketball: Ideas for Your Practices

What Are Small-Sided Games in Basketball?

Are you new to the Transforming Basketball approach?

In this blog, we give you some unique ideas for different small-sided games that you can use in your practices. These work with youth players of all ages and abilities!

Credit to our members inside the Transforming Community for sharing these great ideas! Let’s kick things off with Christoph Nicol…

We love this idea from Christoph as it builds on the Chameleon 1-on-1 start, but getting lots of repetition without repetition through the different numerical formats (e.g. 1-on-1 to 4-on-4) within the space of a minute. This guarantees lot of variable decisions for your players.

You can watch Chameleon 1-on-1 below: a great activity for developing finishing and driving against a primary defender, while working on recovering from neutral and walling up.

https://youtube.com/shorts/5CrQNVhNAPw?si=EwjnT6Rn8dkOFMNc

This next activity comes from Tyler Arnold. This is a great start for your offense to work on converting advantages, and your defense rotating and getting back to neutral.

We especially love the scouting idea. Using bibs allows players to work on “KYP” and the different types of closeouts or coverages specific to each opposing player.

KYP = Know Your Personnel

This next idea comes from George Cremos. This is a good build on Tyler’s idea, with the activity more focussed on defensive rotations and the beginnings of peel switching from the help defender.

Our final small-sided game comes from Kenny Bui. This is yet another creative start you can use to work on your advantage offense and defensive rotations. The MIG stands for the most important guy or girl, serving as a more catchy term with youth players than “help defender.”

The three lives is an excellent addition to really help the players focus on the correct help and gap positioning. If a team loses three lives before the other team gets to 7 points, the game is automatically over no matter what!