Tag: NBA

Ettore Messina: On Dribble Penetration

“A gifted athlete with poor understanding of the game will be slower to react than a slower player who better understands the game.” —Ettore Messina The more dribble penetrations that are allowed, the more help is required and subsequently, more susceptible your team is to offensive rebounds. In an ideal world, each player on your …

A Conversation With Steve Nash

It’s one thing to be great at your craft. There are many — both in sport and out of it — who are exceptionally gifted at what they do. Yet, so many fail to be able to effectively articulate it so others can make sense of it. Steve Nash is an exception amongst exceptions. To …

How The Shot Clock Improves Player Development

One of the things that I enjoy about FIBA basketball is how skilled the players are. Since beginning to study and learn more about international basketball, the differences in style of play, rules, and player development structure, the one thing that jumps out is how the shot clock impacts how the game is taught, played …

The Ant Philosophy: All You Possibly Can

A simple but powerful concept from Jim Rohn… I think everybody should study ants. They have an amazing four-part philosophy. Here is the first part: ants never quit. That’s a good philosophy. If you’re headed somewhere and you try to stop them, they’ll look for another way. They’ll climb over, they’ll climb under, they’ll climb …

Obama: Be Careful What You Post

I’m not endeavouring to get into the post-Obama-speech hoopla (pardon the pun!). I will say that I don’t quite understand the rationale for parents not allowing their kids to watch or listen to The President’s message to America’s students. (Save the politicized comments please. I’m a de facto neutral entity by nationality as a Canadian. It’s …

A Letter From Isiah Thomas

Growing as a kid, I was a HUUUUUUGE(…!) Isiah Thomas and Detroit Bad Boys fan. I had pictures of Isiah, Joe Dumars and Vinnie ‘The Microwave‘ Johnson plastered all over my room. And, I even modeled my game after Zeke. My career in professional sports, in a way, followed Isiah’s path too. Like him, I …

The No Stat All-Star

Big thanks to Coach Jimmy Johnson for sharing this article with me on NYTimes.com: Money(basket)ball: The No Stat All-Star. “The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions among the team’s elements. To get at this they …

Foundation For Bigger Future Gains

Early this morning I stumbled across a blog (SquatRx) that had a quote from Gray Cook… “It is possible for an athlete to perform well even when poor form is used, but eventually the athlete will experience breakdown, inconsistency, fatigue, soreness, and even injury. It should be the goal of the training program to create …

Lessons From An NBA Training Camp

“Wow!” Three letters that sum up my trip to Ottawa for Raptors training camp. For the development coach in me, that easily was the best training camp that I’ve ever had the fortune to be a part of in all my years working in the NBA. I was able to squeeze a lot of other …