Plan B or C?

Some of you are not quite as stubborn as I was. We made a commitment to playing one defense and that was man to man or player to player. We never switched. If our defense was struggling, the reality was we were going down with the ship playing man to man or player to player.

Over the years, I did at times, (yes, it was seldom) invest some practice time teaching another defense. Now if we are going to be completely honest, when I did put in a different defense we seldom or never used it. It was like having a back up generator that you never used. Some of our players soon doubted my level of devotion to this plan B defense. We (the coaching staff) spent so much time and effort "brain washing" our players into believing the ONLY way to play defense was man to man that they found it hard to believe there would ever be circumstances in a game that would necessitate our using another type of defense.

We were know in our area as a team that had two traits. First, we would not be tall and second we always played only one kind of defense. Things, however, did change because the last few years I coached we somehow got some height! It was around the time teams starting playing more 4 out 1 in and 5 out types of offense. This approach on offense by our opponents concerned me because of how we would have to match up. I did not want our 6'7" post players to have to go out on the arc and defend. So I bite the bullet and seriously installed a plan B defense. I did not want a vanilla type of zone defense so we installed a match up defense. We did use it at times and it was effective. (One of the limitations I found in our match up was

we still could end up with our center having to go out and defend the corner!) Maybe we should have used the Syracuse 2-3 zone?

"Somebody has to explain the rules to Grandpa!"

Now for purposes of full disclosure, the match up defense may have been effective because of its "shock" value. Most of our opponent's could not believe we would play anything but man to man.

I do not remember EVER playing more than two defenses in one game. My philosophy was the more defenses you play the less effective those defenses will be. I also believed I was not an effective coach if I had to teach more than two defenses. In fact, I was fortunate if I could teach one defense!

I do think there is merit behind having a plan b on defense just as I also felt it was worthwhile to have more than one offensive system to run against man to man or player to player defense. We used as our plan b attack vs man to man or player to player defense a continuity ball screen offense. I used several different types but all functioned about the same. Our regular man offense almost never included a ball screen so I thought our second offense might be more effective if we included action that we did not normally utilize. The ball screen offense could also be used as a delay game or more of a tempo control offense. It served us well.

I must confess the title of this blog post is deceptive. My coaching philosophy was based on the belief that you can either do a few things well or many things not so well. We did not have a plan c, or d or whatever.

I have witnessed coaches who will play 3-5 different defenses and run a whole lot more offense than I ever used and some did it well. But I saw, in my opinion, far more coaches attempt to run multiple defenses and

multiple offensive actions that failed. There is some merit in the old axiom .... keep it simple stupid! (KISS principle)

I knew a high school coach who had a system in place that was very successful. If his team scored, he played one type of defense. If his team

failed to score, he played another defense. If the opponent had the ball out of bounds on the sideline, he played another defense. We all know there are

many ways to be successful. You have to decide what you can teach and

how much of it you can teach. Some times less is more. Do you want to do a few things well or many things fairly well?