1-on-1 with DP – 93.7 The Ticket KNTK - January 12th: 10:25am - How does Nebraska Basketball get better

Episode Date: January 12, 2022

High-level practice should showThey are working on everything, just not appearing in the gamesAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

You're listening to One-on-One with D.P. Sponsored by Beatrice Bakery. On 93-7 The Ticket and the Ticketfm.com. Welcome back to one-on-one-one. 927 the Ticket 402-4-6-485. You can text in, call in if you choose. Start a him in a text line and the Honda-Lincoln hotline. You can follow on the live video stream.

Got a question on the text line. What up, DP? Nice interview. Question. What do you do in the situation where team guys decide they aren't. going to run those lines for giving up offensive rebounds or taking bad shots, etc. In this age of how players have been recruited and promises made, transfer portal, etc., the coach is in a bad spot.

The coach is only in the bad spot if he made promises he can't keep. First of all, I've never had a player, and I'm sure Barry would say that we never had a player who would not run because we set forth a rule. It's a collective rule. That's leadership. Here's the rule. We set the rules in advance. Here are the expectations for how you're going to participate in the games that we play.

These are the team rules, guidelines for things that we have to have done. If you set those rules in advance, you don't have to adjust after the fact. Plus, when a rule is put in place, the players have a understanding for why that rule was put in place. Nothing that a coach asks a player to do should be hurtful to that player. You're not trying to hurt the player to get them run. We would run transition drills. That was how we got our conditioning. We did transition drills and scrimmaging.

We actually worked and played at game pace. We did the same intervals that they would play at it in games. Right. We did the free throw shooting contest for game situations where the players would run, get their heart rate up, get their win, take it away from them, and then go to the free throw line and try to knock down free throws. And it was competitive.

So if teams were doing it, we'd split up the teams and we'd do that. Or the players could make it competitive by saying, hey, look, put pressure on the shot. If we make the shot, we don't run. We stay here. Only the person who needs their heart rate up for the next shot will run. Everybody else gets to stay. And it built trust in the player because you've seen a player step up every day in this competition to see whether or not they can make this thing happen or not.

Make the three-point shooting competitive. best way to get teams to understand the difference between a good shot and a bad shot is this. We would take the teams, put them up, I'd take my best shooters and put them on one half of the floor and put my other shooters at the other half of the floor and then we would have a layup contest versus three point contest. Three point squad never won. They never ever won. So players got an early understanding that, well, the closer I am to the rim, the easier the more successful this is going to be. And yes, it's sexy and it's cool to shoot threes.

And there's value in it. But not everybody does it well, and not everybody can be trusted with that. So in those competitions, you find out whether one, who the great free throw shooters are, who the layup shooters are, who the three-point shooters are. And you see who wants to compete in order to have that ability to do so. So if I watch you shoot competitive threes all week along, when we get the game night, I've already seen you in that process. So as a coach, I would imagine that Fred Hoyberg is watching these folks shoot threes in competition, setting rules for that thing.

I'm not sure we've seen the same thing when it comes to rebounding. Look, you set the rule. And look, the rebounding drills, anybody that's played high-level basketball, the rebounding drills, that's a war zone. Like, you just put folks in and elbows fly and it becomes physical and friends become, bitter enemies because they know the battle is on and things are required. But in the collegiate level, if you have made verbal commitments to players that, hey, I'm going to play you no matter what, then you've made a bad deal. Like stop doing those deals.

Telling a player that you want him to be a starter, that you see him as a starter, it doesn't mean that you're saying that he is a starter. And players have an understanding for losing. If you are on the floor and your team is not being successful, players understand that. They know that something's wrong. Some see it more clearly than others that, hey, I need to do more, I need to do better. But that can be done in conversations, class work, film study, etc.

What I would imagine is, like for me, my first question would be, are guys doing film study? Do you see yourself being out rebounded? Not because the other person's bigger, stronger, faster. but because you didn't work as hard. And there's a huge difference. And then to do that individually and then collectively, right? So the player knows beforehand.

And it should be the player of responsibility, but if the players aren't responsible enough to get in that film study and see what happened in those games, then it is then the coach's responsibility to get them done. And we also set peer responsibility and accountability holders within those programs. So the captains can say, hey, listen, we're going to watch film together. And we're going to figure it out so that when coach brings it up, we have a one, we're not

hurt by it. We're not, we're not bitter by the fact that somebody brought, you know, showed a film of us not being successful. They understand that it's a teaching and coachable moment and you have to learn from it. You should learn from it. but anything shown or known in high repetition, you get better at. You cannot practice high-level rebounding every day

and not get better at. Like it's the same thing I said about special teams. If you can tell me that they're important, it's much easier to show me that special teams have great value to you by the work you put in. We haven't seen the rebounding work. We haven't seen the results. and I don't know what it is.

Is it fatigue? I don't know. There's one ball and I'm just not understanding how everybody, if your Achilles is offensive rebounding, then everybody competes. It's more important than the transition basket you could get by running out, by sending three, you know, two or five players on a runout. There's no value in that.

The runouts aren't going to help you win games. you defending the boards absolutely helps you win games. Some of that communication, some of that, again, you know, what the practice situation is. That I don't want to say that I know that the rebounding drills are done or not done. I just haven't seen them. Bless you, sir. BJ in Wichita says, I just don't think this is a very good rebound.

I think a lot of it is a want to, and that's very hard to teach. Um, losing is hard to teach too and accepting the fact that I would rather not work hard and lose rather than work hard to win. It's the thing Jay was talking about earlier. Look, your commitment to execution has to be an internal thing, but it has to be a loud internal thing. And it has to be a collective thing. You can't be the only dude on the team that wants to work hard and do. the things that are there. There are players on this team who play hard.

The bulk of them, right? The bulk of them play hard. The question is, do you play hard all the time? And are you playing hard even when you're fatigued? And fatigue, again, if you've ever played against somebody who was 7 foot 1, 285 pounds, they're going to wear on you just by leaning on you. So do you expect Derek Walker to be fatigued? in the 36th minute after facing Kofi for all of that time?

Absolutely. But what's required of black man, C.J. Wilcher, everybody else that's on the floor, is that you need five bodies to the board. We will figure out how to get in transition. But five bodies to the board is required. Look, give yourself that opportunity. And they do it in stretches.

They just don't do it for the entire game. Look, they shot 50% from three. We asked for adjustments, take fewer and better threes. That adjustment has been made. We asked for them to go through Derek Walker and to be able to facilitate and to get him from five shots to 10, 12, 13 shots. They've done that. Adjustments have been made.

They went from 29 threes to 12. The adjustments have been made. You asked them to get better at the free throw line. They shot 75% from the free throw line. Bravo. But there are things that have to be done. and rebound, getting better at rebounding is one of them, being more consistent in the shots that are there,

not letting chaos take over in your offensive series because things aren't going the way you expected them to. Again, the entire purpose of this offense and the very focus of this offense is that whoever gets into the paint has a, they have a point, a line on the floor that tells them once you get into this space, you have to know what you're doing. And if you do not know what you're doing before you get to the decision line,

you back it out and start all over again. But when you get to that deep level, if you go past it, you're going into deep shark-infested waters. That's the rule. And if you're going to make something positive happen when you get there, it's going to be a fluke. Why? Because you're going against a tendency.

You're going against percentage. If you get into that space and don't have the open or you feel extra pressure, the rule is extra pressure, jump stop and pivot and kick it to where the pressure came from. So if the help defender came from the wing guy, you know what, Apex make that defender give you a little bit more space.

You kick it to a shoot in the corner. Now, you have to trust that shooter or knock that thing down. That hasn't been the tendency. that hasn't been the thing that's happened most, but you still have to trust the process. And if that shooter in the corner knows you're actually going to honor that decision line and give him the ball if his defender has given him space, they'll be more ready to shoot when you give him the ball.

If that defender stays where they are, you're one-on-one. If this big man comes over and defends you, then you dump it down to Derek Walker and Derek Walker finishes. If you dump it down Derek and the backside help kicks in, there is another shooter at the opposite corner for Derek to kick to. If that guy stays home and Derek doesn't feel comfortable, because of the rotation, there's another open player at the top of the key for you to jump,

stop, and give it to. If the defender at the top of the key has turned his head and is looking at Derek Walker in that space, then the person at top of the key knows two things. one, I can step to the side, create space four or three, or when his head's turned, he's not looking at me, I can back cut towards the basket, and then we're back in business again. What happens if Derek sees the guy's eyes turn and then he wants to kick this thing out? But that shooter didn't think the way Derek did, then you have the turnover, then you have the

ball pass to the sideline while somebody's cutting, then you have all the stuff in play. look this the system has its rules this team just has to follow the rules there is a method to the madness but when this is one of my coaches when chaos happens slow down and chaos ceases to exist the sooner this team recognizes that the better they will be for the four plus possessions that they need to be better at to finish basketball games. I'll get you, Tom, stay tight. We're going to get to you on the Honda Lincoln Hotline. We'll get to the rest of the text.

We'll get all that stuff in place. We'll close out one-on-one and set up for Sean Jackson when we'll come back. Watch live on Facebook, YouTube, or Twitch. You're listening to One-on-One-on-One with DP on 937 the Ticket and the Ticketfm.com.