Q&A with Alex Sarama and Kerri Kuzbyt

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Hello and welcome to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. On this episode, we have Alex Sarama and Kerri Kuzbyt. They've answered questions in a Q&A that we had at the Transforming Basketball Camp in Roseto. The camp was amazing and the Q&A was definitely amazing. You'll listen to it shortly.

It was great because coaches got a chance to ask firsthand some questions about something that maybe they saw at camp that they were interested in as to why we were doing it, or just a question maybe they had for Alex or Kerry for a long time, and now they had the opportunity to ask.

It was so much fun, and I learned so much connecting with so many different coaches from all over the place. And it was great to have these workshops, you know, where there would be other workshops where coaches could ask, me questions, I could ask coaches questions, and so on and so forth.

And so just a great podcast episode. I really enjoyed hearing Alex and Kerry answer the questions. So I hope you enjoy it as well.

So, and feel free to interject at any moment if you want us to build more on a response, or if you don't think it's specific enough. I do want to get to the transition pistol stuff that Adrian and I were talking about on the beach, but maybe we do it tomorrow.

And go through these, but remind me so we don't forget. And then we can go through the transition arrival spacings, flowing into pistol and ways to run the pistol. So this first question was about types of defense. And for instance, talking about how zone is effective to win, but not perhaps effective for development.

So how can you balance winning and development from this point of view? So great question. I do think that winning and development are synonymous with each other. Because if you're developing well, you have to teach players how to win. And I don't think it makes sense to be in a program where you're losing every game.

Because at the end of the day, there might be situations if it's a really young team, of course, or if you're the first or second year into a program. But I do believe that if the CLA is being done well, the team should be winning after a couple seasons just because of how much more intentional it is.

But With the caveat that that has to be done the right way. And the winning is done through developing players who are more skillful versus winning by disguising players, putting them in certain positions, for instance, a zone defense. So how I'd look at it is obviously developing them through man-to-man principles or player-to-player.

I don't think it makes sense to even call it man-to-man nowadays, but whatever it is, it's like winning through intense ball pressure, winning through having great Positioning a MIG, great rotations when you do concede dominoes, having excellent coverages in triggers. And it's like that, of course, takes time and it's harder to do than just putting in a zone.

But obviously it's so much more impactful in the long term for all players. So when I think about things along this like development versus winning kind of spectrum, I think a few other things would be just playing a very short team. Like maybe playing 7 players versus developing a rotation of 10 players or even 11.

So that to me is something I really believe in. And I still think it allows you to win by doing that because you make everyone better, it makes the practices better, etc. Another thing would be just thinking about not disguising the weaknesses of your best players, but putting them in the situations where they're actually encountering those things in game.

So I'll give you a specific example, maybe A player, maybe one of your best players, is just really not efficient in pick and roll. So you go away from pick and roll and do other triggers like solos every time, because you know that if they do a solo every time, it's going to be dominoes.

But yes, it's good to a point, but it's going to hold them back because at the end of the day, the pick and roll will become a rate limiter and they get to a certain level where there's a faster defender, a more athletic defender, and the solo isn't going to work.

Now they need all the stuff you emphasize with pick and roll or other triggers, and they haven't got it. It's a delicate kind of continuum, and I think it's just something always to be wary of as a coach. Kerry, I don't know if you wanna build on that.

Yeah, just 2 points of it. Winning does matter because it's sport, it's competitive, but it's when. And what I mean by that is, are we in a development year or are we actually now in outcome success? And that's where we're at as a team.

So you have to define winning. As a coach, as a team, a culture, what is winning to you? Alex mentioned it. Could it be winning with a min? Could it be doing that? So it's not really winning the games yet, but that could be how you define winning and success for you in that first year.

Winning now in second year looks like a few games, but we're still going to stick to our style of play and our game plan. So it's How we win is the win for us, not the actual physical outcome.

And to Gary's point, I would never talk about winning with my team, even a pro team. I just don't talk about winning. We don't talk about winning with the Cavs. It's more processes. Even at that level, it's processes and taking care of what the intentions are versus being like, oh, let's win this game.

I just don't really think that stuff means much to the players. I think it's, you know, obviously at under-12s, So I'd never be too about winning with the players. Yes, of course, at those younger age groups, you can be more skewed towards development.

But at the same time, I think it's trying to find ways where you're making the players competitive so they want to win. Because I don't think that is a desirable trait to be, you know, even under 12s and not want to win. And I think sometimes it's— I've been in some countries where it's too far the other way, where they like don't care at all.

And I don't think that is very productive because at the end of the day, it's sport. And with the best athletes in any sport, of the ultra competitors. So I think it's under 12s. How can you develop winning behaviors, make them want to win without talking about it?

Yeah, it's a manageable level of challenge as well. So if you're going into a league and you're always getting pumped and you're always getting rocked, of course you're not going to develop confidence. You're not going to want to explore because why? You're just frozen and you just want to win.

So you have to now find the league age level. Where yes, like you have to buy into that. It's going to be some wins, some losses, but it's not, again, same thing with the task activity. It can't be too easy, but it can't be too difficult.

You need to have that manageable level in there. 'Cause I remember as an athlete, like if we were going down to the States and AAU and we'd get put into like, okay, like Division 1, all that sort of stuff, and we'd just get rocked.

Well, now we're scared. We have no confidence going into nationals and everything. So it's, that's why those boxers always want that like sugar fight. Right? That feel-good fight. So now you need to have that kind of good level, I would say, like lead, because again, Alex said it's competition at the end of the day.

We've got 14 minutes left. Question 2.

That's a heavy one. Question 2. What's the relationship between a specific skill, like a drop step, in and out, et cetera, and CLA? Specific skills like that, or techniques, only really emerge when we interact with the environment. And how we respond to it.

And so specific skills or moves. So for me, like I always, you've heard me saying movements over moves. Okay. The drop step in and out, that will naturally emerge as a solution to a defender right there. And without a defender, that is what will tell you if it's functional or not in that moment, in that situation.

That behavior will emerge. If we could design the environment through CLA, Where they'll find that solution because CLA is essentially giving them kind of those boundaries, but like we're really kind of pushing them and guiding them to like, yeah, it's over there. It's over there with how we, yes, challenge them, manipulate it in a way where they could actually pick it up.

So we see it and we say, okay, like they just have to get there. It's there. But when they're not picking up, when they're not seeing it, that's them communicating to us.

Okay.

They don't see that just yet. So how can we manipulate to make it a bit more obvious for them without still giving them that answer?

Yeah.

But then we give them that time. If they're still not, now we could start to go in. But with specific skills, they'll emerge if we could manipulate and design that environment appropriately.

I think there's a big difference too with like the drop step. We did it last week in one of the sessions, a whole session on using the post as a trigger in conceptual offense for youth teams. And it was really fun. And it was, we just did things like the right constraints, one-on-one, gold medal, 3-second shot clock, and then guided it where the defender had to shade to a side, baseline or middle.

And sure enough, drop steps sort of emerged. And I've got no problem. We didn't even need to talk about what a drop step was because the players were just doing it. But I have no problem attaching names to some common, I don't want to call them moves, but movements like things like a Eurostep, a power layup, a floater.

But the difference is we're not calling them like, we're not breaking down 10 different types of floater or 10 different ways of drop step. We're not talking about Put your foot at this angle, bounce the ball here. It's more you could drop step loads of different ways, and then you might have to counter drop step.

You might have to do a fake before. You might have to finish inside or outside hand. So like that's the biggest difference. You can talk about some general things, some loose movements, and some concepts to exploit, but without having like oh this is an inverted in and out cross or whatever it is.

Yeah, and even to build off that, it was like just a few weeks ago I was teaching athletes like the Pinoy step. So that's slow step. So I would say you're going to land on one and then on the defender's movement is then now whether you're either going to continue or you're going to now change your direction.

It's Tai Jerome from last season.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's one extremely invaluable skill that's even like emerging a lot more within the space and players and really just that That slow decel. And so it was a great way. And the next one was once they show the ball, then now the defender moves and then now you're reacting off that.

So they're teaching that, or with the Euro, you have to take a long step in one direction and then you have to take a wide step in another direction.

I think the biggest thing with that too is it's, there's still so much variability when, so we're not teaching that 1-on-0. It's like doing it a different way every time, a different angle, different footwork, different fakes. Finishing differently. So that's a key difference.

But I think if you don't do something specific, it's never going to emerge. So the constraints do need to be right, but it's different how you go about the moves or movements. All right, next question. How to use the CLA with absolute beginners?

Very short. Equipment scaling must have smaller balls, lower rims, and just going all in. Task simplification is the most important thing. So defenders holding a basketball using one hand, not jumping, Maybe not stealing the ball until it's in the paint, playing more numbers advantage.

Just gotta go all in.

All in, not underestimating them because they are more creative than you. And at the same time, overexaggeration. That's what will allow them to actually see that.

Question 4.

Yeah.

How you use DL in passing defense and layups. So DL essentially is radical variability. So we are essentially throwing movements at them that we don't know if they're gonna hit or not for that athlete. But DL is really kind of just you coordinating yourselves within versus passing, defending, layups.

I was talking with Alex, ball manipulation, ball handling. Yes, you could do DL, but that defender is going to give you a lot more of those behaviors and skills to emerge versus when you're shooting. It's an individual, you have to individually coordinate yourself.

In that intra-individual coordination tendencies versus inter where you're interacting with the environment, the defender. And so that's where, yes, DL could be in passing, defense, layups, any skill, but it is really a lot more obvious and a lot more output for the input in shooting.

Because again, it's only your body, your limbs coordinating. But Alex made the point, the defense will essentially allow you to Coordinating those ways?

No, I think it's just, it's easier to use CLA activities for things like passing, finishing. You can have somewhat like DL-like variations within the finishing stuff anyway. And like things like the traveling finishing game, that's almost like DL, but it's CLA. Why? Because it's live.

So it's, it's anything with a live opponent we would class as CLA, but there might be some constraints, which if you didn't have the defender, it could look like DL. But when, as soon as you have a live opponent, it becomes CLA. DL is anything without a live opponent but with exaggerated variability.

And I just think a lot of the passing stuff and finishing, it's just, you know, it's easier to just have some type of body there for functional perception-action couplings while constraining them. But if you do that in shooting, the problem is you suddenly get far less reps, and it's not good to have everything heavily contested.

So I think also too, just to do with practice stress, I love DL shooting for breaking up a practice. It makes sure low day stays a low day. low day or a moderate day stays a moderate instead of becoming high. Let's move on to the next question.

So question 5, how can you involve more than 2 players in your offense? That's usually what happens in my team. So I think most important thing is all the cutting stuff we've emphasized these 2 weeks at camp. Like if players understand, even if you have 2 players who your best, we call them target players at Transforming.

So within the Transforming conceptual offense, the idea of a target player and a converter. So a target, those are the players who initiate dominoes. So handlers in pick and roll, handlers in gets, handlers, even if it's an off-ball screen, who's making the pass.

You can even be more specific to have pickers and designate who the pickers are, not just having the big kids. You can mix it up. But I think you got, if you want to be really specific, targets, pickers, converters. And a lot of players might be pickers and converters.

Whereas your targets, it's quite a responsibility to be a target and it's That's traditionally your point guards because it's who can command the floor with a leadership voice, who can interpret patterns and spacings, like getting the team into those known spacings. We talk about a transforming side, rob, clear, you know, identifying neutral, calling the trigger.

And I just don't think everyone can do that. You might allow a target player to initiate the first trigger and then everyone, anyone could re-trigger. Or you say that it's only the target players who can even re-trigger. So that's, you know, the call you've gotta make.

But I think even then, even though the target players are the ones who initiate, as long as you are really nailing the dominoes and they understand that their job is not to score, but it's to create the dominoes for the team. And then if we're getting the cutting principles, the zero seconds, the floor is lava, then it could be a converter who is your top scorer.

And the target is just getting the ball to the right people at the right time in to start the domino sequence.

I think it's also emphasizing the importance that they still have the advantage when they don't have the ball, and they actually have more of it when they don't, because everyone goes towards natural tendencies looking at the ball. So the importance of off-ball movement, spacing, and then those cuts essentially will have their small advantage become a bigger advantage.

And you could even also express to the team and establish the culture of Within a possession, there's only one ball, there's 5 players. So majority of that possession, you will not have the ball in your hands. Majority of the time you are moving and playing and finding advantages without the ball.

So we need to start to train and emphasize and have athletes understand you could still score and be a threat without it. And when everybody on the team and culture knows that, then you're gonna eliminate the Or once I pass, I'm not seeing you the rest of that possession.

And last thing in terms of the cut timing, because that is very important, the details. So how I view it with the cuts is the different types of cut reactions. So you got the drive reactions, which is when the ball breaks the 3-point line.

So that's our cut slide, slot cut, push pull if you're single gap away. So those are drive reactions the moment the ball goes inside the 3. And then you've got off-ball reactions, which the ball could be outside the 3, but you see your defender is maybe not watching you, sense a chance to go, you just go.

Then you've got your short roll reactions, which could be if the ball goes to a player on the short roll, typically cut slide. That's what most teams do now. So those would be how I group the cutting things. And I think if you play with the post at the youth level, the senior level, it's just not efficient analytically unless you're It's a really unique player, or you're posting a really poor defender like a guard.

But the cut reaction through a post-up would be the same as the drives, AKA player catches it, goes middle, cut slide, goes baseline slot cut. The exact same. So that's how I'd group the cuts and teach the timing of it. So like short roll, the moment the player catches it in the pocket in the short roll, that's the timing of it.

The moment we break the 3-point line, the drive cuts, that's when we go. Being really detailed with that. You wanna take that one, Kerri?

Oh yeah.

5 minutes we got.

Yeah.

Good sports to incorporate into basketball practices. All of them. Okay. Because it's all movement. It is all very unique in that sort of sense because it's a different coordination. It's a different learning context experience that you're gonna expose that body to that, yes, may be very radical within a basketball context, but it could then be just within that situation.

Like let's say for example, a baseball pitcher. Okay. Baseball pitcher puts his knee up. Okay. Who is the famous person who really made that retired and was always shooting like that?

Dirk.

Dirk, right? Yeah. So you had Dirk doing that. Now it's blocking again, athletic movement, but that's one there. Okay. Kevin Love taking it out of bounds and doing this. What sport does that look like?

Football.

Okay. So any sport, again, because it comes down to a movement, it's coordination. And how we coordinate our bodies in all the infinite ways that it can. It doesn't matter how it looks, just has to be functional, get it there. So all sports.

And to that point, it's funny, I think a lot of people see the warmups we do, especially like some of the stuff we did at the Cavs this season, they think it's just fun for the players. But yes, of course it is. And it breaks up the monotony of a long season, but the real value of it people miss in terms of you're opening up degrees of freedom.

So If a player's doing touch football a lot in practice, or pickleball, or whatever it is you're doing, you're getting them moving in ways that they're never going to do during their traditional routine-based movements, which every pro team does. I think it was really interesting.

There was that video of Joe Mazzulla this week talking about Jokic playing handball— sorry, water polo. But how I was thinking is, obviously, we can't put kids in a— take them to the swimming pool and just start playing water polo. But handball, it's the same thing.

It's like—

Yeah.

Playing with a lighter ball, you can get all those flicks and fakes and all of it. So I looked into this a lot. I think it was the researcher Sam Hides at Sheffield. I asked him, what are the best donor sports for basketball?

And he said netball, which you could just play on a basketball court. So it's basically just, you can't dribble. So just play basketball, don't use the backboard.

There's no backboard.

And, and you basically have to pass and catch. So it's awesome because you have players who travel a lot, get their footwork going and their passing. Great game for that. Handball, I think, would also be a really good one. But then, as Carrie says, supplementing those 2 as the most relevant donor sport for basketball with other things.

But I think that's key.

How to best correct nonfunctional solutions without giving direct instructions? It's really good because essentially the first of 4 things to effectively apply CLA is we want to destabilize them, aka making them Very uncomfortable and revealing, this will not work. So if you have a defender hands up and they want to do an overhand layup, okay, nonfunctional there.

And we want to get them to experiment. We are really destabilizing them. So now, because the body just wants to be stable, it wants to have that stable, consistent outcome. And when they don't have that, now they're going to start to search for something new.

And then when they're starting to search for something new, now their body's going to try and coordinate. Hey, I want that stability feeling again. I, I don't like This, I don't like how it feels. And so now when they explore, now they're going to find that functional solution, but you have to actually put them in a situation design environment where you're pretty much proving that, no, this doesn't work.

And so we use the principle of exaggeration so that now they could learn. So again, it's getting them to get their bodies DC-wise, and then now they're gonna find that functional thing.

And just on that point, I honestly don't think it's a pro— I, I think Kerri's answer is also, because that's it. If it's nonfunctional, the feedback should be in what happens with the outcome.

Yeah. And the standard too.

But I think there's no problem for you to give direct instructions. I think that's a big kind of misnomer with CLA. The difference is you'll not say you, you must do this instead. It could, your direct instruction could be you saying, that's not working.

You've done that 3 times in the last 2 minutes. And it's not a good solution, you need to find something else. That is pretty direct, and you guys have probably seen I'm very direct coaching-wise. I don't just let them do anything, but it's— the difference is that I'm not prescribing one solution over and over again.

But with principles of play, I am quite restricted, especially at the beginning. Like, now we're being more free today. You know, we started with solos, the only thing they could do, and very rigid spacing things. Because they needed maximum repetition at repetition in that scenario, because still quite a lot could happen.

But now, obviously, on the 3rd day, it's more open. We've got solos, and not just the north-south, but reacting with teammates in different spacing locations for cuts. Then we've got whip-it passes for stampedes if they see defenders overhelping. Then we've got blast cuts.

So it's like, I think you have to start very constrained with things like conceptual offense or principles of play. And you need the direct instruction for them to really understand that. I do feel.

I will say the last point to that is you give them enough time and people always say, oh, how much until you like come in and give them that? So you, you wanna give 'em time to explore and problem solve.

Yep.

Then when you step in, maybe after 2, 3 reps, maybe 2, 3 minutes, then you could say, hey, maybe you still guide them. You don't give them the direct yet. You guide them, see if they maybe pick up on that hint and those cues and then figure it out.

And then after that, maybe now it's okay to now give them the answer because you've given them the time versus you've robbed them of the time right from the get-go. All right.

Great. Last question. We got 1 minute.

Sure. Do you have athletic goals in the PDP? Absolutely. That would be an individual constraint. If they are small, if they don't have as much muscle yet to get stronger, more powerful, because If you're stronger, if you're powerful, you can now unlock more movements and then also more skills because of that, then yes, absolutely.

So if you are like, say like Chet, right? You're so long and lengthy, but you're getting beat up on the post. Yeah. It may be in your PDP, your athletic goal is you need to put on some muscle mass. You still keep your length.

Okay. But absolutely, I think athletic goals, 100%, there's no reason why not to be in a PDP.

Yeah. And the key thing is if you're fortunate enough to work with a performance coach, strength coach, whatever. They have to understand. You have to describe to them what the rate limiters are from a basketball perspective, because if they set athletic rate limiters which are siloed to the your rate limiters from a basketball perspective, it's not going to work.

So for instance, what I mean by that is if they say, "All right, you just have to get to X body mass," or "You have to get this number on a force plate," or "Reach X vertical," to me that means nothing. It's more you tell them the rate limiters from the basketball perspective you identified.

So like, all right, they're really inefficient creating advantage and pick. Now they have to do the deep dive why. And yeah, it could be they're just not attuned to the performance, but it could be athletic capability issue in terms of maybe they just can't explode suddenly to reject, or they're not able to separate off a pick and roll and create an advantage in a 2-on-1, or maybe they can't roll behind the drop defender and they can't accelerate behind them.

So that's where then the strength coach needs to be armed with that information and design the activities which will Solve it in a basketball context versus just doing random things like we see at all levels of basketball. They just do their own thing siloed in the weight room and it never aligns with the basketball piece.

So it's like the rate limiters you set have to be communicated with the whole support staff, and then they have to work entirely to that vision with everyone working together instead of just doing their own thing separately.

Yeah. Another example, especially for females, would be the ability to absorb and initiate the manage contact. So that's getting them into lower positions. So yes, it could be more squats or it could just be a lower, more dominant strength in the body for that power.

But also, yes. So can you absorb it a bit more? But I would say that would be the equivalent of kind of your rate limiter in that example.

So.

Great stuff. Let's save anything. I'm gonna save the other questions for tomorrow and then any questions that come up from tonight or Because tomorrow is really our last day of practices before we get to the 3x3. And then Friday morning will be the 3x3 tournament.

Everyone's going to coach, so everyone will have a chance to coach, which will be fun. Everyone gets a team. And we've set— I think I want to set constraints for each game of 3x3 so everything doesn't go out the window that we've done this week.

That'll be good because like the— we have the 2 sides of hoops, but we only have 20 girls. So there's 5 teams. And it's going to be awesome because it'll be just like that team in the middle.

So it'll be good. Thank you guys.

Thank you.

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