Coaching Under Pressure - Lessons from a Global Journey with Daniel Sokolovsky

You as a head coach, you're responsible for cultivating an environment and establishing what behaviors are and are not acceptable. But you don't want it to be empty action, you know? So we were coaching that every action is a scoring action with an intent to generate, transfer, and then multiply advantages.

Every time they turn it over, I said, "Get it back." You know, like not get back, but go figure out how to positively impact the new setting that we're in.

Hello and welcome to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. On today's episode, we have Daniel Sokolowski. Daniel. Like myself, or similar, is a global citizen. He's coached in various countries such as Russia, Israel, Germany, Slovakia, New Zealand, and China. Most recently, Daniel was the assistant coach for the New Zealand Breakers in the NBL in Australia, which if you haven't checked out yet, they have their games on YouTube.

You can access them. It's an amazing league. The atmosphere is incredible. Daniel, welcome to the show.

Thanks, George. Really excited to be here.

So Daniel, you're from all over the world. Is there anything that you've learned, like after you've left America, lived with so many different people, different cultures, that you now apply to your coaching?

A bit of a loaded question, but there are so many things. But I think the irony of it is, I think what I learned the most is kind of the unifying thread around people are people. You can see people taking on what life is in many different forms.

There's forms of life as a kind of terminology around the CLA and ecological dynamics, but Customs, behaviors, traditions, philosophy, all that may differ into varying degrees based on the region of the world, but the kind of core drivers of what's most important to people, to humans, things that you read about in behavioral psychology or just going back to sociology, how we build societies and how we socialize.

I think back to kind of Daniel Pink's book called Drive. It's autonomy, mastery, and purpose. These are the 3 fundamental kind of human drivers for motivation, that we have an intrinsic and kind of uniform human desire to be in control of our destiny, to have agency.

That's autonomy. Mastery is whatever undertaking we give our time to, because time is such a precious commodity, we want to be great at it or very good. Some may say everybody wants to have positive feedback from an experience and feel that they're good at something.

And purpose is that I'm investing my time, which is again in short supply, into something that has meaning and is bigger than myself. That's kind of the thread that weaves together and connects all the different places that I've been. You know, people are people.

While you cultural or language gap, you use both basketball and humanity as the 2 common threads to weave the group together and to establish meaningful connection because you're going to need to go at these guys in a professional setting and the relationship protects you.

Yeah, man, you definitely have to call people out sometimes. And I guess that leads me to my next question. How do you differentiate between having to— because you spoke about forms of life, intrinsic motivation— how do you differentiate when you need to maybe motivate them with a consequence?

So you've obviously had stints as a head coach, you've been an assistant coach. So how do you motivate players and coaching staff, people, everybody that you work with, but from an extrinsic— so like, we need the results right away— and then how do you balance that with How do you balance that with we want this long-term success, we want the team to grow, this is a long-term vision.

How do you find that balance?

Yeah, well, first thing you want to do is make sure you're interpreting whatever ill-advised or undesired behaviors you're seeing correctly. As far as you need to know that person, have spent some time in kind of individual conversation or extensive observation to know, you know, what's consistent about their behavior versus what's an outlier.

What is a negative response to the environment you're creating versus who they are, their demeanor, their body language, their resilience. You know, there are things that you need to observe before you can intervene. The vast majority of times, your first interventions, you probably want to be private.

Nobody wants to be embarrassed. I think back to a conversation I had with Coach Ryan Pannoni about coaches being very demonstrative on the sidelines during games. That is a protective mechanism for us to let the crowd know, like, hey, that guy's behavior is not something that I've taught.

You're trying to extricate yourself from the negative outcome and you end up, whether you mean to or not, putting that burden and the onus on the player. But in the process, all you're doing is creating a further divide and embarrassing the player. And kind of the core message was don't embarrass your players.

So whenever possible, you would like to have a private intervention first and foremost, unless you as a head coach, you are responsible for cultivating an environment and establishing what behaviors are and are not acceptable. If there are things that are clear deal-breakers and you need to send an early message to the group around what behaviors you are and aren't willing to tolerate, that can be a crucial moment that establishes whether your culture, ways of being, has any substance or not.

So those can be early moments within a group's forming and connection in the preseason where you're going to establish whether you're full of it or not as a head coach. And those can be make-or-break moments.

In terms of long-term held beliefs, do those change? I think generally when you go into a season, but also to your point, when a player does something that you think is not an acceptable behavior for that team, for your team, do you find yourself, you have to also be adaptable as a coach and be like, well, why does he think this is okay?

Do you as a coach like, no, this is how I want this team to be. This is the culture we're building. How do you address that?

That's a really great question because Every year in whatever role I've been, and hopefully this will be the case going forward, I leave room for my most dearly and closely held beliefs to be proven wrong. Let's say this is a Naval Ravikant idea.

Be prepared to part with your most closely held beliefs. It's like I have conviction, but it's loosely held because I am waiting for somebody to convince me otherwise. So I think what Psychology 101 says, If you saw the world the way I did, you'd understand why I behave the way I do.

So it comes back to the previous sentiment around really trying to understand the person and observe their behaviors before I intervene, or if I'm going to intervene no matter what, it's understanding what the right approach is for that particular person. Some people can handle a public address and some people will shrivel and wither in the embarrassment of being ridiculed in front of their peers.

Shuts them down in a way that whatever eloquent or brilliant or corrective message I might have, it is not going to get through. Some of those lessons are hard-earned about failing to connect with a player in a crucial moment because I approached it in the wrong way.

So I learn every year from the players and coaches that I work with. They teach me things that I don't expect them to. Some of that is intentional where they're trying to explain me something, and some of that is observational where I say, huh, Well, that didn't work.

Or, wow, that was really effective. And I had no idea why until I went in and asked them, exit interviews. And again, more private conversations where people are way more receptive to a dialogue and to criticism, from my observation.

Yeah, to your point, I remember I always go into every season like, all right, these are my coaching values. This is like, I will not tolerate, for example, a player speaking over me when I'm trying to explain something, for example. And then as I've been working, as you're in the experience and a player speaks over you, sometimes it's like, It's their way of trying to speak up because maybe I'm not giving them a platform for them to speak.

So I've had to look at that closely held belief myself and say to myself, well, how can I make it so that they can speak up? And that's like, there is a place for that rule to be broken. So that's something that may change.

In terms of working in so many different countries, how has those experiences shaped who you are as a coach and as a leader?

That is, well, I mean, every country's had a different role, and those roles have been formative in a variety of ways. I think back to my first job in Russia, the VTB League, prior to this current conflict and the implications of that on the basketball landscape, was one of the best domestic leagues in the world.

I had my second year there, CSKA won the EuroLeague. You get 2 matchups against them and UNICS Kazan and Zenit Saint Petersburg and Lokomotiv Kuban. Like, these are were some of the powers in European basketball. So kind of cutting your teeth there from a tactical standpoint was absolutely invaluable.

You see what the best teams in the world are doing and why. I worked for a very good coach and kind of, we were lower-end budget, kind of identifying creative solutions to stay competitive and identifying mispriced or up-and-coming talent from an import standpoint.

And then we needed to really invest in getting every one of those players better. So it kind of I had an opportunity to introduce a little bit of a player development framework. But again, that was very early in my career. So what I was doing then, I wouldn't do now.

But most importantly, kind of, I was in a dual role as the strength conditioning coach. So I'm 24 years old. And the strength in the weight room is kind of my space. That's the first avenue I had to give direction and to control an environment and to create a small culture of how we work in the weight room.

I'm correcting technique, creating energy for the group. I'm reading the temperature of the room. I'm trying to set a template for kind of what we're trying to achieve during the week, kind of looking ahead. I got opportunities to be team-facing. That early platform for communication, driving some accountability, that was really, really formative for me, getting quote unquote authority at a time and in a place and at a level where I probably had no business receiving it.

But the players saw that I was prepared and that my intentions were to help them get better. There were some conflicts and then there was a lot of positive response that gave me huge confidence the rest of the way. I moved on to Israel, more of an out-of-the-weight room, a player development focus.

Germany, working with a master coach in Rodrigo Pastore from Chemnitz as defensive coordinator, which was a nice title, but it was just me and him and just trying to survive the first year in the BBL, which we did. I take those lessons and I go to my first year as a head coach and that was That's the hardest thing I ever did for a variety of reasons.

Slovakia is not the most luxurious environment for professional European basketball standards. So there were wealth challenges. And then I tried to pack up that small dose of success as a head coach where we won the cup and lost in the finals where they hadn't won anything in 16 years.

Kind of returned back to a high level as an assistant working with another master coach in Modri Mohor. with the New Zealand Breakers for 2 years into more of directional role as an associate head coach. I was vested with an opportunity to support and impact a lot, you know, so that's basically some more head coaching reps.

And I want to touch a little bit more about that, your head coaching experience. But before I do, I want to ask you about— you spoke about your design, how you design practices and how you design training sessions in the weight room when you first started off.

and how it differed to how you design it now. And I just want to ask you maybe more specifically, what are the changes, the key distinctions that from start to now and what you're doing?

I think it's obviously very relevant to kind of transforming mission. Even before I was fully— I wouldn't say I'm fully now, but before I became more intimately versed in CLA and ecological dynamics and nonlinear pedagogy, It started to occur to me very early on, probably due to Alex and I knowing each other for many years when his journey just started.

The conversations around so much on-air, rote, bag work seemed illogical, and there was no reason it should have high transfer because the training environment was not representative of the practice of the competition environment. And that is just a fundamental and very obvious truth.

that we still struggle with. Why should me operating against a cone or against air have any effective transfer to a game environment where all my cues, all my timing, everything that I'm looking for, everything that I'm experiencing, it's entirely different? So just devoid of context.

Yeah.

Devoid of context and anything to perceive and then act upon. So the biggest shift was trying to make all the training environments of the skill work look as much like the game as possible. So a lot of it went away from 1-on-0 or 4 guys in a line repeating the same thing to 2-on-2, 1-on-2, coaches as guided defense, always a body.

It's a Cody Toppert-ism, bones over cones.

Yeah, I remember I was at the Transforming Camp last year and me and a couple of the coaches, I was giving the clinics there and I would do the practice plan and I would do it with the other coaches. They could ask questions and just learn.

And it's funny because I don't diagram. I'm like completely word-based. So I'll write things out like, oh, we're going to be doing this. These are the constraints we're going to add. These are the rules of the game. And then they're like, oh, this is the first time I've ever seen someone write like a practice or design a game or a drill or whatever without actually diagramming it.

So it was just my process. But just want to ask you, I'm curious now, like, so when you're designing those practices, Or even in the weight room, what's your process for designing that?

Hi, Coach. A brief interruption from the podcast to remind you of the Transforming Basketball Summer Camp taking place by the beachside in Roseto, Italy. This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for players and coaches alike. The boys' week will run from the 27th of July to the 2nd of August.

With the girls' week from the 3rd to the 10th of August. As a coach, you'll be able to spend a week with Alex Sarama and other Transforming clinicians, observing up to 6 hours of camp practices each day. Each evening, coach development workshops will take place to consolidate what you learnt in the day.

For just €850, your participation in the camp, as well as 6 nights accommodation and 3 meals per day at a 4-star hotel, will be covered. The hotel is right on the beach, allowing you to combine an incredible basketball experience along with your summer holiday.

Head to our website and click the events tab to learn more. Coaches go completely free if they send 4 players or more to the camp. Now back to the rest of the podcast.

Well, I mean, the weight room's an entirely different space where, I mean, one of the mistakes I made then was There's some fundamental logic to trying to address each of the big buckets of physical development, but I was overly prescriptive and generalized to the group where that's kind of a very individual topic.

As much as a PDP plan would be on court for a basketball player, the same thing should occur in the weight room because everybody has different physical needs. But I was actually just kind of scrolling through my phone looking at old copies of my practice plans in Slovakia.

That was 3 and a half years ago where I was already going in with a lot of ideas about kind of how I wanted to do things and what I I wanted my practice to look like. And it was, let's say, a little bit more contemporary than any of the older coaches that I had worked with before, because they were rooted in, okay, if I want us to be great in dribble drive settings, it's not going to be 30 minutes of 5-on-0.

It's going to be 4-on-4. I stole this one from Ross McManus, the Boston Celtics. From the paint, you have a kick out. You can't allow a first catch 3. So now you're forced to a hot closeout that'll create a tip the first domino.

And now the defense is getting reps on defensive rotation on baseline or middle drive. Offense is working on spacing off the drive. If it gets to the baseline, there should be a deep corner and a 45 cut. These fundamental principles. And then on top of that, we were tagging up at that time, our transition defense system slash offensive rebound system.

After the ball goes through the basket, the previous defense, new offense has 4 seconds to get it over half court. If they do, they get a point. So we were trying to stifle a quick inbounds and create, establish our shell into the full court transition.

Yeah.

Transition defense. So just think about in one possession, how many habits and topics we touched and tried to achieve. So those 4-on-4 and 5-on-5 games with constraints were definitely force multipliers. When you have, you got an hour and 45 minutes and nothing else because the youth team just finished and the handball team and the futsal team comes in after.

So this is what you've got and you better get it done. The 2-way teaching of those games is what I wanted to do coming in, and it was extremely timely and needed.

Yeah.

Because of the constraints I had with facilities.

And you had success as well, which is great. I mean, you know, obviously a lot of the times you can do the right things and not win games because of talent or whatever the case is, but you experienced some success there. I want to ask, you spoke about the constraints.

So you added the constraint 4 seconds. If the offense doesn't cross the half court in 4 seconds, it's a point for the defense, right? And so you were very intentional about adding those constraints or adding that constraint to get the desired effect of the tagging up, which was slow the other team down, make them eat some shot clock, Don't let them have those fast break opportunities.

Is there anything else during your time in Slovakia that you kind of used that you look back now and you're like, wow, this was really good, this is something I'm going to be taking forward, that you can share with us?

It was first you talk about kind of our success. When I was leaving Chemnitz, I'd call him a mentor, I guess. Rodrigo Pastore, my boss there, was saying the base of the period, Daniel, is optimal recruitment. We had success. I also had the MVP of the league, my point guard, and a good point guard will make everything— your life a lot easier as a coach.

So that's first and foremost. When I look at our skill, what we were kind of— we were able to get into the gym twice a day. So what was good, kind of stealing from the Nets and Spurs facilities that I saw, like competitive shooting leaderboards.

In the mornings, we were trying to get as many reps as we could on the things that weren't contact. We never went contact twice a day. Just from a physical standpoint. And between me and my assistant, there were situations that we were trying to simulate defense to break down kind of 2-on-2 scenarios, pin downs, off-ball screen reading, second side interactions.

So for us, we were running a flow pick and roll offense where there was a drag or a shake pick and roll and the ball goes ahead. There's a world of offense, but there's also so much work to do to get something out of the second side.

'Cause it's— Badly talking about playing on one side of the floor. That's a very space-constrained interaction. So if you're not really sharp with identifying the advantages afforded to you based on the COVID so we're just working a lot on cover solutions on the second side, that's just a waste and the ball's going to end up going back middle for the third pick and roll.

It's their best player at the top of the key getting the ball back. There are worse things, but you don't want it to be empty action. So we were coaching that every action is a scoring action with an intent to generate, transfer, and then multiply advantages.

The needle you're trying to thread is the intent to have multiple actions within a possession, but play each action with the intent to score, transferring advantages until someone can capitalize. So even the shooting drills, like I would probably, I would think, try to pivot to a little bit more contested or a little bit differential in the variability of the shots.

We were trending in that direction. There was a lot of partner stuff with a pitch and a closeout, but a lot of it was, it looked the same on every rep. And so while there was a little bit of resistance and visual disruption, it probably could, we could have found, could definitely find ways to make it even more representative.

The last time we spoke about our admiration, I guess you could say, for Thomas Isiloe, and he says that a good offense is quality interactions. So it's like about finding that quality interaction in that first drag screen. And then if you can't get it going to the second side, and then having that second ball handler, playmaker there differentiate between going for it and also being patient.

But it's just fascinating to hear you say it from your perspective.

Get on my soapbox a little bit. I'm still watching this. The amount of teams trending in this direction of the low offense, still a lot. There's a lot of teams that are utilizing this, but it's amazing how many will not catch on the second side and try to reject.

It's like this, or the speed to get back to the middle is compromising the whole thing. Like they're catching and taking a dribble towards half court. The first step that we needed to make, like something that we've addressed with the New Zealand national team, There's no handoffs on the second side because one, you can't reject the handoff.

Two, you're just seeing so many unders on the handoffs. It's really hard to find advantage besides a stop behind shot, which is probably pretty low percentage, probably a bronze medal from Alex's terminology. So it's earn a catch, try to catch it below the free throw line extended so that there's a pretty sizable gap for the point guard's defender at the top of the key to cover if he wants to disrupt, which is a cover you see a lot now.

And then try, you know, when you catch it, try to reject it every time. And the failed reject is the best setup. So now when you try to catch it and reject it, you displace your defender. That probably will trigger a slip from your screener.

Now there's a driving lane, probably get your shoulders underneath the free throw line. You get a paint touch and everybody wheels accordingly from there. You got action, you got offense.

That's the one thing I always say to coaches is like, we don't want players to just go from the first side to the second side to the third side, but it's always about being super intentional About creating an advantage, creating dominoes, right? Because as soon as that first domino falls, we focus a lot more on like, oh, let's do this.

Well, it doesn't really matter what we do so much as long as we're being intentional about finding, exploiting the defense, because the defense is always wrong. It's our job as the offense to find out how they're wrong.

Always coaching the eyes about what we want, what we're looking for. What is it? The defense will always be wrong. There's always an advantage to the choice that the defense makes, and there's a counter. Why is this kind of a little bit offense?

Sometimes I see it as conditional logic, like if this, then this. That's the beauty of pick and roll offense. Obviously, as a coach, there's only a handful of solutions that you're going to see, and you can prepare your group for each one of those, and they'll always have the answer to the test.

Yeah. And so then I want to ask you about your acronym WIN, what's important now. I think this is super important. I really want to touch on it briefly. Can you just take us through that, what it is, how you came up with it?

I'm not entirely sure I came up with it. I can't tell you where I stole it from. I think the best coaches are the world's greatest thieves. They collect small gems from everybody, and then they kind of just arrange them in their own way.

There's an adapt versus adopt mentality there. But I thought it was really poignant. To win, you need to be able to recenter and focus yourself on what's important now. I witnessed this as myself as a player, Division III college level, all way up in my kind of organized basketball career.

I was one, so concerned with not turning it over. That's the only thing I could think about, which was a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The dwelling on that led me to make even more mistakes. So it's like, how quickly can we, in any walk of life, and it's super true of basketball, the dynamic nature of that sport.

The only thing I can impact is what I used to tell my players every time they turn it over. I said, get it back. Like, not get back, but go figure out how to positively impact the new setting that we're in, you know, in that landscape.

It's constantly shifting. It's constantly changing. The team will go on a run. Okay, what's important now? Take a breath, huddle, get on the same page, some eye contact, some physical reconnection, and make sure we know what our next offense or next defense is.

Sometimes somebody's so out of it that just that physical pulling them back into the group shakes them out of their head. Otherwise, they obviously need to come out of the game. So it's like, how quickly can you get yourself back to the present and to your, let's say, locus of control, which is like what's in front of you other than what just happened.

Ray Allen, you know, talk about the best shooters in the world have short-term memory because the fact that you missed the previous 12 should have no logical impact on how and when you shoot the next shot. Why humans are the ultimate performance variable.

Yeah, and it's great. That's— I love win because it's not— basketball is emotional, super emotional. There's, you know, so many highs and lows within a game, let alone a season. But it's such a good feedback tool because you can say to a player, win, what's important now?

And immediately they're going to focus on the moment. Versus getting caught up in, like you said, missed shots, mistakes. Honestly, I love that. It's absolutely awesome. So great job stealing it from whoever you stole it from. Obviously, I'd love to have a chance to talk about everything on all the different places you've gone, but we'd need a whole bunch of episodes for that.

Before I let you get out of here, I want to ask you the last question here, the transformative tip. And that is, what is one piece of advice, one tip that you can give to coaches so that they can apply straight away and see an immediate change in their learning environments?

Probably it's twofold. It's read and question and do those 2 things relentlessly. That even when you're reading, you know, they say history is a story written by the winners. Make sure you understand that everybody is writing, is experiencing, is living from their own perspective.

And you say, okay, what led this person to this conclusion? But you also would be a fool not to learn from the experience of others. You know, success leaves clues and so does failure. Many of my previous experiences I learned as much from What not to do is what to do, which is, you know, many assistants will tell you as part of their journey.

So you want to be trying to take in as much secondhand experiential learning as possible, because there's just not enough time for you to learn all of the lessons on your own. And even then, wisdom is not really transferable through— it's not a secondhand transferable commodity.

Like, people can share what they know, and those are inputs that can help you make decisions, but the wisdom is always hard earned. Something you need to feel on your own skin. And as you're taking in that information or you're in a new setting, you know, question relentlessly but tactfully, because that can piss people off, for lack of a better word, you know.

So it's not being afraid to be contrarian. And a lot of that stimulus to be contrarian will come from, well, I've got all these new inputs, an external perspective that whatever environment I'm in, these people haven't really considered yet. So being willing to question And being relentless about your questioning, but making sure it's productive.

It's all kind of EQ and IQ skills that blend together. But when you're in that frame of mind where you're seeking what they sought, that was kind of the phrasing. You're not trying to do what the other greats have done, you're seeking what they sought.

It's the pursuit of mastery. I say the asymptote of mastery, it's a mathematical term where the curve never meets the line. Mastery is something that you're going to be you know, lifelong pursuit of, but you'll probably never actually touch if you're doing it right way.

So read and question.

Amazing. Daniel, thank you so much for your time. Just quickly, sorry I didn't ask you this. I know I was supposed to ask the last question, but just so if coaches want to reach out, anybody wants to get in touch, where can they find you?

Just let them know. And once again, thank you so much.

It's my pleasure. You know, always open to basketball communication, email, Twitter, phone number. I can share those with you or share them here. firstnamelastname@gmail.com. No dots, no hyphens. Twitter, I'm trying to get back into sharing some basketball content. 5 years ago, I was pretty rabid about this from a European perspective, sharing some NBA stuff now.

@DSOKO5244. And then yeah, happy to put my number out and you can disseminate that into the community.

Awesome. And we'll have it in the show notes. Thanks so much, Daniel.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Transforming Basketball Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about the work that we do, head to transformingbball.com to access our free resources and spread these ideas throughout the basketball world. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform.

You can also connect with us on Instagram, X, or YouTube with any questions that That you have from the episode. See you next time on the Transforming Basketball Podcast.