Wes Miller on Pressure Defense, Daily Station-Work, and Learning to Win {Cincinnati}

Inside the Episode

“As I became a head coach, it was really important to me because I was projecting my own playing career on coaching. That the guys that played for me felt freedom and comfort to go be themselves and make plays. We want guys to play within their strengths and who they are. So if we have a great downhill player, a guy that’s great at attacking the basket, if he turns the ball over, going downhill or attacking the rim or misses a tough shot and that’s his game, I probably care about that turnover less than anybody in college basketball. If you’re doing something aggressive, that’s what you do, I don’t care, but I really care about how you respond to it.” – Wes Miller

It was another terrific week on the podcast as we were joined by Cincinnati MBB Head Coach, Wes Miller! Coach Miller is entering is 3rd season at the helm in Cincinnati and sat down with us to discuss a number of great topics including:

• Building a Pressure Defensive System: Coach Miller discusses teaching on-ball defense, pressure zones, lane denials, and much more when it comes building out a defensive system.
• Daily Station-Work: Within our conversation about building an elite defense, Coach Miller discusses their use of of daily stations and what goes into them.
• And we talk Learning to Win as a young Head Coach, and the Baseline Runner Series during an always fun “Start, Sub, or Sit?!”

Chapters

0:00 Suffocating Defense With Coach Wes Miller

8:42 Defensive Philosophy on Three-Pointers

13:43 Strategies for Defensive Switching in Basketball

25:48 Developing a Program’s Identity and Values

30:04 Building a Basketball Program

36:26 Finding Offensive Fit and Screen Angles

43:45 Defensive Strategies and Coaching Philosophy

51:33 Coaching Insights and Finding Balance

Transcript

Wes Miller: 0:00

As I became a head coach, it was really important to me because I was projecting my own playing career on coaching. That the guys that played for me felt freedom and comfort to go be themselves and make plays. We want guys to play within their strengths and who they are. So if we have a great downhill player, a guy that’s great at attacking the basket, if he turns the ball over, going downhill or attacking the rim or misses a tough shot and that’s his game, I probably care about that turnover less than anybody in college basketball. If you’re doing something aggressive, that’s what you do, I don’t care, but I really care about how you respond to it. Hi, I’m Dan.

Dan: 0:42

Krikorian, and I’m Patrick Carney, and welcome to Slappin’ Glass exploring basketball’s best ideas, strategies and coaches from around the world. Today, we’re excited to welcome Cincinnati men’s basketball head coach, wes Miller. Coach Miller is here today to discuss guarding the ball, pressure zones, denying lanes and important considerations in building a suffocating defense, and we talk learning how to win as a young head coach in the baseline runner series during the always fun start, sub or sit. Costa Rica, spain, italy, australia, south Africa. We’re excited to announce our newest partnership with the world leader and international sport tours. Beyond Sports Founder and former college and pro basketball coach Josh Erickson and his team of former athletes have built the go-to company for coaches looking to take their programs abroad. From the travel and accommodations to excursions and service learning opportunities, beyond Sports does it all. For more information and to learn why more than 650 universities have trusted Beyond Sports, visit beyondsportstourscom and tell them. Slapping Glass sent you. And now please enjoy our conversation with coach Wes Miller. Coach Miller, thanks so much for making the time for us. We know it’s a busy time of year. We’re looking forward to talking to you today.

Wes Miller: 2:19

Thanks for having me. I’m honored to be on, guys, mainly because I’m one of your biggest listeners. I think you guys really do a service for coaching because you bring so many different perspectives from so many different walks of basketball and, as I was telling you before we got on, I’m not sure why you invited me to come speak, but honored to be here. I get a lot out of listening to all your podcasts.

Dan: 2:38

Oh, thank you, coach. We appreciate that and we’re really excited to have you on today to talk about a bunch of stuff on the court, off the court. We want to dive in with this. As we’re recording this right now, it’s preseason and you’re just beginning to get ready to start practices and kind of put in the foundations of offense and defense. We want to start and focus on the defensive side of the ball and your thoughts on early season building out your defense and what concerns you and what you think about the most here in the early stages of the season.

Wes Miller: 3:07

It’s interesting now because we get the time in the summer. So I start thinking about building our defense. We start thinking about that in our summer practices and everything. For me with teaching. We try to put the whole thing together in a broad sense and then we try to come back and teach the parts and then we try to kind of put the whole teaching method and a lot of people know this, my background being under Roy Williams at North Carolina and had a chance to spend some time with Dean Smith, that’s a very famous part of the teaching method that they practiced. And so, like all of us, most things we do we’ve stolen from somewhere, and I certainly stole a lot from them, but we do try to throw it together. To start out, guys, and we did that this summer. But to be specific, it always starts for us with defending the basketball. The first thing we teach is how we defend the ball at different parts on the floor, in the back court, in the scoring area, in the middle of the floor, on the slots and then on the sidelines, and we start with defending it with no advantage. We talk about how to defend it in a closeout situation, and somebody once told me I think Larry Brown has been a great mentor. He said this early on when I started talking to him about basketball if you can defend the ball, you don’t have to do a lot else off the ball. You don’t have to be put in rotation, you don’t have to help. So everything for us starts with on ball defense.

Pat: 4:22

You mentioned on ball defense. Depending on where the ball is on the court and different parts of the court, you’re going to defend it differently. Could we just kind of go through those, starting from the back court to, like you said, if it’s in the middle, if it’s on the slot, it’s on the baseline, and what changes and what you’re working with your guys?

Wes Miller: 4:36

Everything we do defensively starts with the foundation of who we are in our half court man. So I’ll kind of start there. It’s not that intricate guys, it’s pretty simple. And if the ball is in the scoring area we kind of define the scoring area. If you drew a line parallel the half court and my guys have the exact measurements, four or five feet from the top of the key, everything in there for us we define as the scoring area. And when the ball is in the scoring area we have to have ball pressure, we have to be disruptive. Obviously, certain players can do that differently than others. Somebody that’s smaller and doesn’t have as much size and length, they’re going to have to get up underneath it to be disruptive. Somebody with a lot of size or length maybe can do that with a little bit more space. But the idea for us is that we are always making the ball handler uncomfortable in the scoring area, in the middle of the floor. We’re going to play more head up. We say you could never get beat inside the elbows. We don’t want to give up any direct drives, right, we’re going to get beat off the bounce when you pressure a little bit. We always kind of have some pressure points that we try to send the ball in the middle of the floor. You just can’t get beat inside the elbows. And I’ll kind of go from the middle to the sideline. On the sideline below the free throw line we are super aggressive, at least we’re supposed to be. So we’re going to really come over and help and get not just on the midline but two feet over the midline with that lowest guy, and so you know you’re going to put yourself in position to have a difficulty with a skip Because of that. We want to get extra aggressive on the sideline, really get on that top shoulder and kind of load up to support on a baseline drive. You know there’s a lot of people that are cutting the floor in half. I wouldn’t say we’re that aggressive or doing it that extensively. But when we’re on the true sideline for us, below the free throw line, we are as aggressive as we can possibly be and we try to get geared up to rotate baseline if need be. And then, if you talk about from that sideline position to that middle, third, everything in between, you’re kind of splitting the difference right as you get up into the slot. We’re not quite as aggressive. We are on the sideline but we’re a much more aggressive to take away the middle than we would be in the middle.

Dan: 6:37

Third, I’d love to shift just slightly, to transition and scramble situations or rotations and so, obviously, if someone this year does happen to get beat off the ball, what you do next and just your thoughts on how you want to get back and get set Any rules or philosophies with your team on how you want to do that in transition.

Wes Miller: 6:57

We’re okay with the ball being driven. We just don’t want it to be direct and we don’t want it to be to the middle of the floor. We’re okay with it being driven because you feel like if you’re pressuring the ball and somebody’s got their head down, they’re driving it into areas you’re ready to rotate and help. To be clear there with transition we really do define the difference between our defense being in a transition situation and our defense being set, and that’s not always in the sense like transition coming down the floor. That’s just one instance. But when the ball is in transition, coming down the floor, or we’re in a rotation or a scramble, we are trying to take away comfortable threes. And I think if you look at our numbers, not just here at Cincinnati but at Greensboro, we’ve not just defended the three in terms of percentage but we’ve defended how many threes we allow people to shoot. That’s been a major emphasis here. But we’re trying to take away comfortable three point shots and then we’re trying to contain the basketball. So when we’re in transition, it’s about getting the ball declared first, getting obviously the basket and the ball declared and then the next closest passes. We always say if we’re going to make a mistake. Let’s make a mistake loading to the ball. We’re never going to make a mistake in any transition situation away from the basketball, when we are not set, we’re going to make a mistake. We’re always, as we’re kind of getting those next closest guys to the basketball, we’re always running the gaps and people think of our teams, they always think about our denial. But in transition situations again, transition in the open floor, a rotation, a scramble, once we’re getting the ball under control because we’re running so hard to the three point shooter, we’re also trying to kind of run into those gaps to help contain that drive. And then, once the ball is under control and our defense is set, then we really do try to build out to denying one pass away in the scoring area and getting to the proper help position if you’re not one pass away.

Dan: 8:42

Coach, I just wanted to, before we got away from it too much, go back to your philosophy on taking away the number of threes attempts per game and your philosophy behind that, why you’re so wanting to just take away the actual attempt on that three point shot.

Wes Miller: 8:56

Somebody will go fact check this and it may not be accurate but it’s how I got to it. Talk into a guy that was working for an analytics department for an NBA team and I won’t throw that team or name out and this is probably six, seven years ago and they were telling me that the NBA at that time that over 82 games like a huge that that’s why the NBA numbers are so much more interesting to me than ours, because you really do get a real sample size, but that the teams that defended the three point line the best over a whole season were the teams that didn’t give up three, so like they allowed the fewest three point attempts the time coached at UNC, greensboro for 10 years before I got the job here at Cincinnati and at the time the Southern Conference was like the number one ranked three point shooting league in America and a couple different three point categories. So you know you had Wofford. Mike Young was at Wofford and they had some terrific three point shooting teams and Furman they’re doing a great job there still has terrific three point shooting teams and you kind of keep going throughout the league. Dan Earl was at VMI, who’s at Chattanooga now. There was just great shooting and great coaching throughout the league and we were trying to figure out how to guard the three point line better. Some of it was just trying to figure out to be competitive and when I heard that, we started talking a lot about let’s not just worry about percentages, because we have a smaller sample size in college basketball with only 30 some games let’s just try to take people off the line, and we had a lot of success with that really changed how we talked about closeouts and the types of things we valued and have court possessions and that’s kind of how we fell into it and then found success doing it and we’ve carried that over into our time here at Cincinnati.

Pat: 10:27

How has it changed your closeout or what are you emphasizing to make sure you’re taking away the attempts?

Wes Miller: 10:32

Everything for us. Defensively, we try to make it very simple. Maybe it sounds too simple to some people, but we close out to take away any comfortable three. So if somebody can shoot and this is for the average player, right, of course scouting always comes into play a guy that’s not a shooter, you’re going to close out a little shorter. A guy that’s a lights out shooter, it’s a little different. But for the average player we close out to take away any comfortable three point attempt in the scoring area. And then, second, we take away any director middle drive and we call it direct drive, the same as a middle drive, because if it’s that direct it can get snaked back to the middle. But we are crazy about it. If somebody shoots a comfortable three in the scoring area in a fair closeout situation, that’s a major no, no or a non negotiable here.

Pat: 11:13

The second step you said is that direct drive, I guess. So the footwork where you want to run I mean I’m similar to running to the three point line get feet on the three point line, but what kind of angle? How do you help them, taking away also the three but then not allowing direct drives?

Wes Miller: 11:26

Again, it kind of goes back to how we were talking about guarding the ball. But if you’re on a side of the floor really trying to close out to the high shoulder, you are going to give up some angles. Right, you are going to give up some drives. We want people driving it toward the sideline or towards the corner. We never say force baseline because we hope we don’t ever get beat that bad, but we don’t want to get beat middle. We really do try to close out to that high shoulder.

Pat: 11:48

I think the better question for you is they close out, they take away the shot. Is it a push, step slide. Is it a turn? Your hips will run, I guess, if they start to drive. Is it player specific? What do you guys try to hone in on it?

Wes Miller: 12:00

kind of depends. If you’re one pass away, you’re denying. Again we’re going to deny in the scoring area. One pass away, you’re in a closed stance. So even if we allow guys to be players, you know one pass away like we’re not going to just close down and give up a huge driving lane. But Even if you support one pass away or help, we try to keep that stance closed so that it’s a quick push off without having to turn your hips. Now if you’re in a long close out from a health position where your hips are open and this kind of goes back to everything we do. We really work on turning and running. We do it in the back or guarding the ball. We work on turning our hips and running with the ball, and I think that applies to close out situations. I think if you break down elite players moving on a basketball court defensively, you see a lot less sliding. You watch people’s hips turn and move, and maybe we don’t have the greatest terminology for that. We work at that mechanism every day in a lot of the drills that we do.

Dan: 12:57

Coach, before move on a different part of this defensive conversation, I love to ask about working maybe one step past all this stuff. So if you have a philosophy of taking away threes, denials and all that kind of stuff when it comes to how you’re going to defend a ball screen and with the prevalence of a ball screen in basketball in general, how aggressive, non aggressive, switch, not switch and I know it’s scout specific for games but how that plays into how you might want to guard a ball screen knowing you don’t want to give up threes and be denied and all that.

Wes Miller: 13:24

Some of it’s personnel based. When you look at our front court, like a lot of people in basketball, if you can switch now, I think there’s so many advantages there. I mean, we’re spending so much time now guys trying to figure out how to attack switching and I always think when you’re struggling to really figure out a score against something you know, you should probably start thinking about how to introduce that into your defensive scheme. So when we can switch on the ball, we like to do it, but we don’t like to ever just pass off switches like we like to switch aggressively, meaning we’ll try to do it, meaning we’ll try to fight through everything but switch if we can’t fight through, if that makes sense. So we’re more aggressive with any kind of goes to consistency in our defensive schemes, we’re going to be more aggressive with the guy guarding the ball to try to fight through it and then we’ll be a little more passive to switch it in emergency situation or that guy gets hung up a little bit. So there’s kind of like a cover situation for the guy setting the screen. So we’ll switch if we can. If our bigs are more mobile we will try to get up to the point of the screen. I love to send things down just because, again, we’re taking away the middle of the floor. So our positioning on the floor is already built to kind of jump to that high side and send it down. So we’ll try to send things down. But how aggressive we get and the slots and on the sidelines and a down coverage is really based on our personnel in the front court. Years ago and spend four or five years now we had some really mobile bigs and we hedged a lot and I miss doing that, but it’s just been hard. We’ve had some good rim protection the last couple years. We’ve gotten in the habit of kind of keeping those guys and drops or ice coverages or down coverages just to kind of keep them around the basket. One thing we hedge everything in the summer. So in our summer practices and this is probably a little counterintuitive to some of the things we do, but we do get out and hedge and trap everything in the summer, at least aggressively flat hedge just to make our guys learn how to move and cover more ground and rotate better. And then it’s a good to play against that because we’re going to be in some more drop stuff like we’ve been the last couple of years. It’s good that we’ve practiced against some other kind of defense in the summertime.

Dan: 15:25

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Pat: 16:28

I love to follow up about your down defense and, specifically looking at the guard on the ball and, when he’s tasked with icing that screen, keeping him out of the middle. If I throw a couple situations at you in terms of how you keep working with him to keep that angle, keep him out of the middle with guards that are good to maybe not overreact in that baseline drive where he shoots in front and now the screen comes and you can get middle, or if they’re trying to flip it, or if they’re trying to pop the big and go to a handoff. You know all these ways teams try to get middle. How do you work with your guards, knowing that this is going to come? And this is what we still want you to hold this angle. Don’t concede the middle.

Wes Miller: 17:01

The first part for us. We use the terminology ice for down in it. The first thing for us is communication. If it goes back again, everything starts with us on the ball. So we should have in the scoring area, we should have good pressure, so we should be close to the ball in general, like we should never be three or four steps away, which I think can be really hard to send it down or ice it when you’re off of the basketball. So the way we try to defend in the scoring area, we should be close to the ball, regardless of who you are. And so then the first thing is the communication. We want to try to communicate continuous and loud. We try to get them to say it three times If you’re defending the basketball and you hear ice, it’s not trying to jump. Everybody’s doing it, I think, understands this. You’re not trying to get to the screener, you’re trying to really engage that high side and stay connected. So like we really want to hear it, we want to react to it. One thing we talk about with our guys a lot is talking is saying something, communication is saying something and your teammate reacting to that. So we want to hear it, we want to react to it and we want to get to that high side and be engaged and attached to the basketball and then at that point we’re trying to send the ball down, as we talked about. Once the ball attacks space, we’re trying to get back in front of it. But we work with them a lot on if somebody’s kind of probing with the ball to like not take the bait there, and then it’s really attacked with two bounces, we’re going to try to get back in front. If somebody flips it and re-screens, we try to come up and actually get aggressive with that, maybe flat hedge it to try to give that guard, because to me that’s when the guard really needs some initial help with his teammate so it doesn’t get back to the middle. We’ve been technical before with a lot of rules and that hasn’t helped our players as much. It sounds good when we sit in coaches meetings or we kind of do walkthroughs. The main thing we do is we give them some very basic rules and we drill it to death. We do a ton of 2B2 live when we do ball screen defense and we do that daily. You get into more than just the concept we’re talking about. You get into when you emergency switch and beer back. You get into how to box out. Does the guy go in the ball, does he get back in front and contest and the guy that was in the drop then box out the roller. Does the guy in the drop emergency switch and contest and you beer back to box out the roller. Does the guy in the pop and throw back to the handoff. We drill that stuff a lot and we do have specific teaching points, but it’s probably not as cool with all this great verbiage as it is, that we just drill it and value it.

Pat: 19:27

Why have you found being simpler in defense has been more successful or effective for you and your teams?

Wes Miller: 19:32

Playing for Roy Williams. He’s been so important to me in life and especially in coaching. I transferred there after my freshman year in college and the first thing I realized was he made basketball simple. He certainly understands it at the highest level mentally. He made it very simple and it just made sense. It was one of those aha moments as a player that it was great that all the pieces to the puzzle fit together. There was consistency, there was accountability, terminology was very simple. I love that we’re talking about defense, because that’s certainly what we’re going to identify with first at Cincinnati. It’s what I identify with first as a coach. It’s been a process over my 12 years as a head coach to figure out how to be demanding there and try to teach and coach it really well, but how to make it very simple and easy for our guys to understand so that they can communicate effectively on the floor to each other. We spend less time teaching them a bunch of concepts and more time working on the basic concepts that we value.

Pat: 20:29

When you think about having it make sense over the course of what you learn when you’re in a coach’s meeting. Is there something you think about? Maybe let’s say if I can hit, these things is going to make sense, or is it? You just got to go out there? If the guys are confused, you come back. It didn’t make sense, let’s try something. We got to change it up or we got to tweak it somehow.

Wes Miller: 20:46

We’re very organized and we have every principle in our defense written out, every teaching point. We have a defensive dictionary. I think you want to make sure your defensive principles match each other right. Sending the ball down on the ball screen fits with keeping the ball out of the middle of the floor. That just makes sense. Years ago we were same rules on the basketball, same rotation rules, but then we would flip our hips and send it to the screen and we had success doing that and I liked it, but that part just kind of didn’t make sense. Trying to figure out how all the pieces make sense is important to us. I do believe this. Guys, this is what I love about our summers now is we just kind of throw it at them. When you throw a bunch of concepts at guys and say go play, it’s not going to be pretty, but they will teach you things. I’ve learned that a lot as I’ve matured as a coach. When you just let them play and you give them a couple basic concepts and you don’t stop it and correct every possession, the guys will teach you what they need to be coached and some of the things that they may get. Naturally. That’s really helping us. We’re in our preparation right now, going into our fall program, and there’s stuff that we’re not going to spend as much time on that I normally would, because the guys had a good grasp for those naturally. Then there’s things that I would expect high major college players in the Big 12 that just naturally understand and they showed us this summer they don’t and we’re going to focus on those areas. I kind of like the idea of throwing it together early to see what’s natural and what’s not and then kind of coming back as a staff and craft and applying.

Dan: 22:08

Coach, I would just be remiss if I didn’t ask you this, because we’re on the street and what we’ve heard is that you have some of the best if not the best great defensive station drills. Someone comes to your practice. Your daily station work with defensive drills is great. I just have to ask what goes into making those great and what particularly you like to get out of those kinds of breakdown drills? I don’t know who you’re talking to, but they’re lying.

Wes Miller: 22:31

You must be talking to my assistants because that’s when I let them be head coaches. They like it because I shut up and let them coach. But that’s kind of like the part method for us defensively is we have 15 or 16 defensive stations. Some of them we only do a handful of times just for teaching. Some of them we’re doing daily because it’s not just teaching a concept but drilling a concept. We usually break the team into thirds and we do three stations. Each assistant has a station, usually three minutes or four minutes each, and we rotate and it’s very simple stuff. How do you guard a pin down? How do you guard a back screen? It’s actually the same station together. It’s working on our baseline rotation and sideline defense together. It’s working on our positioning, whether it’s a help positioning drill, whether it’s a deny positioning drill, whether it’s a drill. We’re trying to combine those things working on how to defend the post, working on how to contest the ball within six, seven feet. That’s one we do almost every day and we do some different scenarios there. We have different drills for how we defend the ball than how we support the ball. So we break down a bunch of different scenarios that help teach and build habits, and we do defensive stations every day. Again, some of them will just teach concepts. We get more out of just working on that stuff through our shell work, and then some of them you’ll see, even if you come back and watch in January and February.

Dan: 23:47

Coach, great stuff. Thanks for sharing all that with us. On the defensive side, we want to transition now to a segment on the show we call Start, sub or Sit. Those may be listening for the first time. We’re going to give you a topic and three choices around that topic. Ask you to start one of them, sub one of them and sit one of them, and then we’ll have some fun discussing your answer from there. So, coach, if you’re already, we’ll dive into this first one.

Wes Miller: 24:09

This is like the hot seat thing. I’m always curious how people answer these when I’m listening, so let’s go.

Dan: 24:14

Okay, sounds good. Coach. This first question has to do with your path to winning as a young head coach, and so, as you’ve mentioned earlier, you became a head coach very young in your career. I kind of want to paint a picture here for you before I ask this question and as we’re doing our research and going through all of your past your first few seasons as a head coach at UNC Greenboro, you guys had a losing record and then, after the 2015-16 season, the 16-17 season next one you went from 15 wins the season before to 25 wins the next season and then you were 20 plus wins from there on out. And I wanted to ask you about what you learned that season, from 15, then to 25, and then winning basically what you’ve learned as a head coach back then that you carry to now and so start a subject question here is your early years learning. Was it learning players and who you wanted to recruit to your program in those early seasons? The second option is learning from opposing coaches, or learning from the teams in your league and how to beat them and how to coach against them in your conference. And the third option is just at that point, you figuring out yourself from a style and philosophy standpoint of how you wanted to play as a head coach.

Wes Miller: 25:27

All were important in my personal development as a coach and continuing my personal development as a coach. But I’d start first kind of figuring out I think you said the word style, I wouldn’t necessarily say style, but figuring out the things that I really value in our staff, really valued as a coach, really identifying them and deciding what we weren’t willing to bend on. I think early on at Greensboro we recruited at a really high level, we accumulated talent but we didn’t have an identity and we didn’t have a set of values and principles that guided us every day and we were kind of lost as a program because of that. So I think once we defined what our identity was, the things that we valued, and then we were able to then let the rest of the program follow. So I’d start that. The second thing, I’d sub players, because once we had an identity and a value system, we were able to make sure that our recruiting reflected that, when we reflected the type of people that fit into what we were doing and would buy into what we were doing. And then the last thing was other coaches and, I think, opponents. I would sit that it did shape some of the things that we did, but the other two things are extremely more important to our development.

Dan: 26:37

I love to follow up with your start. You mentioned some really good stuff. I just wonder how you got to that point where you finally decided what was really truly important to you personally.

Wes Miller: 26:47

I was so fortunate guys because got an interim head coaching job like 27, 28, I think I turned 28 during that interim year. I had no idea what I was, still don’t know what I’m doing, but at least I’m aware of that. Now, right, I thought I knew what I was doing and didn’t know, and we kind of caught lightning in a bottle and made a run when I was the interim coach and that team will always be so special. We went 10 of 11 to finish the regular season and got a piece of, at that time, the North Division of the Southern Conference. They were forced to hire me after that, right, we made a big run. It was one of those things I got thrown right into the fire and found out very quickly. Making a run which has value and there is something to, that’s not necessarily easy is much different than building something sustainable, like building a sustainable day after day program. That’s much different than when in a couple games in a row and I’m not trying to devalue when in ten of eleven, because that’s one of the neatest memories of my coaching existence. But building something sustainable is very different and we fell flat on our face there my first couple years. I mean you mentioned, we went from fifteen to twenty five. It wasn’t what we learned in between that, it was actually we learned. Those first couple years we were really, really struggled and then we started implementing some things and it didn’t happen right away, but it, over time, started to happen and then the results started to follow over the next couple years. But I think the first part to answer your question, guys, is I always had core beliefs of how I wanted my teams to play, how I valued game being played also basketball junkie since I was two years old. But you gotta make sure the things that you’re value in emphasizing the people you’re bringing around, you reflect those, and so we really have just kinda get together and define how do we wanna play, where we want our teams to reflect, and we kinda work backwards. What are the things then that we have to make non negotiables to reflect those? A lot of marnex, and I think it’s mentality stuff, a level of work, ethic, level of competitive edge, a love and passion for basketball and what we’re doing, a willingness to want to be a part of the team and sacrifice, buying into one day at a time, growth and not focus on results that we can’t control and then understanding that everything we’re doing as much as we love basketball is we’re in higher education is about educating young people, like there’s a bigger picture to this and I think once we define those things, it allowed us to start recruiting to those things, hiring to those things making coaching decisions on the floor, to those things making discipline decisions off the floor. I think that really helped us start evolving to find the right people and make no mistake about it to me, guys, people is the most important part of what we do. We were able to find the right people until we kind of define and identified what we value.

Pat: 29:25

I’ve been on a recent kick when it comes to recruiting and asking coaches. Now you’ve identified what you want and you’ve kind of built your identity, your core. When you’re having conversations with your recruits, what is maybe a question you like to go to that helps you find out if they will be that fit, if their personality lines up with what you believe in in your programs about I don’t have like a great interview question.

Wes Miller: 29:46

I should think about that. I might ask my staff what should be our go to question. But I think the one thing we try to do in recruiting is first break the ice so that we can get young people to feel comfortable talking to us and really try to get them to be honest and genuine about what makes them tick as a basketball player. We are over the top eight up with basketball. That’s not always healthy, but we’re junkies. That’s what I mean. Guys, I’ve listened like every one of your podcast and, by the way, coaches that are coaching in a second language are so much better than we are, but I will listen to any basketball that we’re junkies and so we’re looking for people that have that same passion for basketball in our recruiting. And I don’t have some great line, but I think getting guys to really break down the walls and their communication with recruiting and tell you what they’re really about, what really drives them, that’s kind of a feel thing and we talk about that all of our recruiting meetings you mentioned people being the most important thing and we talked about, in the sense of players.

Dan: 30:43

Also, just throughout your career, understanding the types of people you want to put around yourself from, like saying, administrative or an assistant coaching standpoint, and people that different areas or different views of the game and maybe how that’s help push you, or whatever it is throughout your career that you know as you sit here now think is important for me, it really starts first with people that care sounds cliche but we talk about.

Wes Miller: 31:06

We care a lot here and I want people that care a lot about our program, that care a lot about building relationships within our staff, that care a lot about our players development on and off the floor, that care about representing since and at. We want people with a high level of care. I’m looking for that first. The second thing is we’re looking for people that have a passion for working. We work here and everybody does it the highest levels of basketball. I don’t think you differentiate yourself just by working, but there’s a certain type of edge to how we want people to work here, and that’s what I mean. The first thing is looking for people that are looking for better and making their staff members and making better, and I think we just hired josh leftler. He’s been a division three head coach for the last six years. He’s built a program. He thinks about basketball different than me, so he’s a great example. There’s a lot of times we sit into a running a room and he’s much more intelligent than me in certain basketball areas. I just relish that and maybe as a young coach I don’t know if I was secure enough with myself to want to be around people on a day-to-day basis that may know more than you, and I’m fortunate now I got Chad Dahlert, who’s the OG, on our staff here. He knows so much more than me about coaching and about especially coaching at this level and everything that goes into it. Josh Loeffler has been a successful head coach. I got guys around me that are smarter than me and bring a different approach and a different perspective than I have. I do really value that as well.

Pat: 32:43

Talking about your, staff and being comfortable with having guys in the room that maybe challenge you, and you mentioned when you were a younger coach. Did you struggle at all with the balance of control versus freedom when it comes to your staff, when it comes to your players, when it comes to how you played at all when you were coming up being a young head coach?

Wes Miller: 33:00

Certainly, I think it kind of goes back to how we coach on the floor. Your question we all played right. Most of us fell in love with the game, playing the game I wish I could still play. I loved to play basketball, but one thing as a player that I found very difficult was looking over my shoulder playing basketball, especially offensively, and so as I became a head coach it was really important to me because I was projecting my own playing career on coaching. The guys that played for me felt freedom and comfort to go be themselves and make plays, especially on offense. So in our program we are extremely demanding defensively. We kind of want them looking over their shoulder a little bit. Defensively. They don’t have to be perfect, but we expect a certain mentality every possession defensively and offensively. We want guys to play and certainly we’re not going to let somebody and this is what happened early on because I wanted that freedom offensively we probably allowed it too much. We let guys have that freedom in all areas, not just in the areas that were their strengths right and that could look like we had a lack of discipline on my early teams, where now we haven’t lost the essence of what I’m saying, but we want guys to play within their strengths and who they are. So if we have a great downhill player, a guy that’s great at attacking the basket, if he turns the ball over, going downhill or attacking the rim or misses a tough shot, and that’s his game, I probably care about that turnover less than anybody in college basketball. If you’re doing something aggressive, that’s what you do, I don’t care, but I really care about how you respond to it and how our team responds to that, and so I do believe that we want staff to have freedom to be themselves and express themselves. We want players to certainly feel that and I was mentioned on the offensive end but it’s got to be within the framework of our team structure and it’s got to be within the framework of who you are as an individual player or staff member.

Dan: 34:48

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Pat: 35:25

All right coach moving on, we’re going to go back to the court but we’re going to look at the offensive side of the ball here and, watching your film, we noticed you did run a baseline runner series to set the picture for people listening, with the two guard front, the screeners down below and your shooter kind of using the screens to come off for himself. So our question has to do with this baseline runner series, the toughest thing to teach in terms of the execution of it. You’re having you know it be effective, so tough to teach. Option one would be the cutter patients or the shooter patients knowing that he can use multiple screens and he’s not just running out of the one begging for the ball. Option two would be the screeners’ angles and locations. And then option three would be teaching kind of the next play mentality or playing off of the shooter when it’s not exactly a direct catch and shoot, if he’s curling, if he’s flaring or if he just comes out and gets it but continuing to have his offense flow off of playing off of him.

Wes Miller: 36:21

Great question and you didn’t ask. The most important thing is making sure you have a really good player in it. Yeah, I had a guy named Francis Alonzo at Greensboro. That was incredible in our runner situation because what I like about the diamond set that you’re referring to and everybody reacts to the cutter and we fell into this with this player, francis Alonzo, who was an incredible player. He’s still playing professionally in Spain, but what we found was at this time I’m sure he is a pro if he’s listening he’s evolved. But as a young player, if you told him we were going to run a couple misdirection passes and action and then he was going to get an isolated pin down from the corner, he was awful. He couldn’t set the cut up. He was terrible. But if you told him he could stay out of the basket and he had pin downs on both sides and he could lose his defender, he was unbelievable. He always reacted to the guy guarding. He was hard to run an isolated pin down. He was such a great shooter but it was hard to run an isolated pin down because he always wanted to react to his defender. He didn’t always want to work with the screener, so we kind of fell into running that years ago to fit into his skill set, because he began great shooter, great Playmaker, off of the screens and when he could just lose his guy and then it allowed everybody else to play off of him. So it’s interesting. The question you asked, I’d say number one, is the cutter and his ability in that situation and that set, to create some kind of separation From his primary defender. The second thing is the screeners. Those guys, when that separation or advantage is created, have to be able to make it a bigger advantage with their screen angles and their ability to kind of read out of those screens. It’s a great question, because where are those screening angles? A lot of it depends on how people are defending it. Like we would talk about screening a lot lower and people were locking and chasing. We would talk about Screening a lot higher when people were trying to take the short path and whip it, and then we would kind of be in between when people were mixing up their paths. And then the third thing and this is what made it fun Is you teach everybody else on the floor to play off of what happens with that catch. Right, the catch and shoot. Simple, you crash and it’s a very simple set, but what I liked about it was when you did get a catch and shoot, you were in great offensive rebounding position and then it was really easy to kind of teach the if. Then, if the ball drives middle this is everybody’s read if it drives baseline, if it hits the pocket, we would drill that stuff frequently, especially in the days that we were running that we still utilize that set now. We did it more frequently with Francis Alonzo because it was playing to his strength as an offensive player.

Pat: 38:59

I’d like to follow up with your sub on the screening angles and you mentioned. When you know kind of the coverage Then you can position the locations. The angles maybe are a little bit easier to work with your guys. But when they’re mixing it up, how are you helping, especially in the college game when illegal screens are so quick to be called at times? How are you helping your screeners Maybe adjust when you’re putting them more in that middle and we got to read what coverage they’re going to do?

Wes Miller: 39:23

in that situation and the diamond set. It’s easy because they’re all just watching the primary defender. I always was frustrated with players when they would struggle to screen appropriately in that set. You should be working early and we always talk about doing your work early here, but you should be working early With your feet to try to square that defender off at the right angle. People probably have way better teaching points and talking points than me, but we would just drill it and try to hold them accountable. We would kind of teach how to hit and hold screens and then how to slip out versus switching or to kind of find the pocket and a curl, or to kind of pop behind or find that kind of release behind On a fade or find that pocket. So I don’t know if we had any great teaching other than trying to get their feet working early, try to anticipate the path of the defender and then we really work on being set, because in college they just love I don’t love the rule. They always talk about how to make offense better in college, but they love calling illegal screens off the ball in our game. Yeah, we’ve noticed. Yeah, I’m not on the rules committee and, like it’s in coaching, it’s always easy to tell everybody else what their teams aren’t doing.

Dan: 40:29

I’m not too judgmental, but I do wish they’d let us screen 100% coach just a bit of a overview of all of this, zooming out from this series for a second. But you mentioned, you know, francis Alonzo and you found that this was really good for him Going back. This is preseason. You’re just starting to be able to get back in the gym and how you and your staff think about finding a good fit for players Within a system or a set or an alignment, and maybe how, through practice or playing you mentioned earlier about you know the players will kind of teach you stuff and how you get to find things that really work for somebody’s offensive skill set.

Wes Miller: 41:03

That’s what we’re doing right now. We’ve been doing that since we finished our summer program the last week of July. As a staff we’re going to come in and always put our base offensive system in first guys, so who we are and transition. You know who we are and like what we would call our secondary break, who we are when the offense breaks down or our flow, the play after the play. We’re going to come in and do that right away and then just let them play. We’ll put a couple sets here there in the summer, just to, you know, give them some structure on dead balls or if we want to slow it down, and that stuff doesn’t change a whole lot with us year to year. It’s part of our identity. We’re going to play really fast, you know. We’re going to give guys freedom to play within themselves. We’re going to value spacing, going to value putting pressure on the rim, a lot of the things that everybody values in today’s game. But when we put together the set plays that we’re going to run out of our secondary alignment or out of specific sets. You mentioned the diamond set or the runner set. We do try to play to our best offensive player strengths. We spend a lot of time on that as a staff and we especially now we have seven newcomers and with all the turnover in college basketball, it’s harder to figure that out, but that’s why the summer has been fun and important for us. They’ll show us, we’ll put everybody in ball screens in the summer, we’ll put everybody in off ball screening situations, we’ll put everybody in isolations and you’ll kind of see who’s natural at things and who’s not, and we’ll start to craft Some of our offensive schemes around that.

Dan: 42:24

Well, coach, you’re off the start subberset hot seat. Thanks for going through those. That was great.

Wes Miller: 42:29

So you’re off that seat I love listening to it more than I like talking about it, but thank you, coach.

Dan: 42:36

Well, coach, we got one last question before we end the show, before we do. This was really great, so thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.

Wes Miller: 42:43

Yeah, no thanks, guys Enjoy doing it.

Dan: 42:46

Coach. Our last question we asked all the guests is what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career as a coach?

Wes Miller: 42:51

This is an easy one for me. It’s the people that I’ve coached and coached with and it’s not even close. I think, like all of us, we’re so passionate and we’re so competitive. We’re so passionate about basketball, we’re so competitive about winning, and that’s going to drive us every day. It’s like chasing a drug. That’s what’s one of the great parts about our profession, but the longer that I’ve been fortunate to do it, the most meaningful part is being a part of watching Young people grow up and feeling like you are some small part of that. It’s given my life meaning and purpose and helped me through some of those really tough times in life and in coaching. And so it’s the people, the players, specifically the other coaches and what I found is that all the, the investments that we put into those people, it gives back tenfold to us over time in lots of different ways. So easy answer for me.

Dan: 43:45

Pat, as always, are so enjoyable to sit down with some of the best minds in the game. Coach Miller just appreciated his time fun talking to a little bit before and afterwards as well Just a genuine person and somebody that we’re lucky we get a chance to have on, and so let’s get into it right away here. We went back and forth on what this first 25 to 30 minutes we wanted to focus on and all the feedback we’ve heard about coach Miller and obviously in and you know Watching film on his teams is just how great he is defensively on all parts defense and we thought you know right now we’re recording this preseason and getting into his mind as to what he’s thinking about to build this out for this Upcoming season. So thoroughly enjoyed it. We’ve had way more defensive conversations lately on the show, so it’s good for us get our vegetables, yeah, yeah exactly jumping right into it.

Pat: 44:32

I, like you brought it up, defining in the half court just different parts of the floor that are the scoring area, the more dangerous areas, and how they want to defend within there, with the overall idea that they want to be disruptive the minute the ball gets into the scoring area, and I mean shades of forcing baselines. We obviously tailored or shaped the conversation around this idea of building blocks and early season thoughts. So it was cool to just look at how if he’s going to determine what are scoring areas and how they don’t want to defend in the Areas and then building out from there and what he alluded to later when we got into the ice and down defense and keeping it simple and having things make sense. You know it’s okay if we know how we want to defend in these scoring areas or how disruptive we want to be where you know that’s going to then determine what we got into is lane pressure, getting into gaps, denials and how we want to guard ball screens as well and just making everything kind of have continuity throughout 100%.

Dan: 45:22

It was exciting for you because I know you’ve had that follow-up question for about a month and a half that you wanted to ask a Coach about beating ice and defending some of those actions.

Pat: 45:31

So when he took it there I saw your eyes light up it was a start-sub-sit question I’ve been sitting on and I kind of basically posed him a hidden start-sub-sit question within within the conversation. I gave him the three scenarios that I want to address on all of them.

Dan: 45:44

Yeah, so it was like a DHL question for me. I just, yeah, I had to point that out there how excited you looked on zoom, yeah. But I think to follow up on all the stuff you said, there’s a couple of quotes I wrote down and I think probably didn’t write them completely correctly. But you know you talked about making all the pieces fit and I think you got that sense through that first 25, 30 minutes about the defenses. You think so deeply about making sure everything fits from a A strategic standpoint, from a foot angle standpoint, from a communication standpoint, from a teaching standpoint, from a station work standpoint. I mean you just keep going and going and everything fits together. I really just kind of pulled that out of this whole conversation in the beginning here from him, actually just his whole coaching, you could put that down as but I enjoyed how deeply he kind of thought about that. And then I think on top of that, how deeply he thought about how to make it simple for his players so that they could play. You know we’ll get to the freedom versus control stuff Maybe later that we asked and start to subset, but him wanting them to play freely, to play hard, play with intensity, and so all of these things that he talked about and he did builds into the fact that then they can go on the floor for 40 minutes he can both demand, and that they can feel comfortable playing the certain way that they want to play defensively.

Pat: 46:58

So I just kind of took that out of that whole conversation personally, yeah, within the keeping it simple, I think we also followed up with how he thinks about having things make sense. I like too, on that note of putting them in these certain situations and he said you know, they’ll show you, he’ll learn as far as what they grasp, what they don’t, what they need to work on in terms of thinking about how to get stuff to make sense of these players. And sometimes they just the trial by fire type, like just throw them, let them play through it and they’re going to show you. I really like his answer to my follow up there on just thinking about having it make sense within this conversation of keeping it simple.

Dan: 47:33

He threw a nice little nugget in there about how much he enjoys the summertime right now, with being able to try some things. But I liked when he talked about how they’re hard hedging everything in the summer and the reason behind that is that then it forces you to play aggressive, it forces a certain intensity on defense, it forces those rotations more likely to be faster and tighter, because if you’re putting two on the ball then you’re likely going to have to rotate. And I do think this is true that in coaching if you come out and just practice being kind of soft or in gaps or contain, and then all of a sudden in November, december, you decide we need to turn up the heat, it can be harder to go from that soft or whatever. It is neutral, defensively Easier to dial it down and ratchet up 100%, especially because preseason is so much about identity and who we are and how hard we’re going to play, and it makes sense to just start with that intensity and then, if you need to, you can go more drop or ice, like we talked about, but I just like that as well within all this.

Pat: 48:33

Yeah no, it is what’s nice about the new rules and having your guys in the summer, because we’ve talked to coaches that do in the preseason for that very same reason, like to just hard hedge, trap everything because one helps get them in shape, and also it’s just like we just want to read the rotations I can see. On the other side of the coin, it’s well we have such limited preseason and if you don’t really think you’re going to be a hedge team, do I want to spend time on a defense because I want the benefits of it but we’re not going to really run it Right? It can’t be tough to really justify it at times for coaches. And it’s nice with these summer breaks where, yeah, they can do stuff like this to build habits and again going back to like just give them concepts and they’ll show you. So, come preseason, it’s like all right, we know exactly where we need to start and we can just go.

Dan: 49:16

Last little nugget, his thing on communication, making them say it three times, I thought was good. We don’t need to go down another rabbit hole. But difference between communicating and talking and how they kind of talked about that within their defense, I thought was really good. But let’s flip to start subset and I’ll kick it back to you on either one of them, takeaways or back story wise.

Pat: 49:36

Yeah, I’ll start with your first question on past winning. When he was a young coach coming up and when he talked about when he was that interim head coach and they won town 11, they had like a real good hot finish. But he really said there was a huge difference between winning some games and building sustainability. Mm. Hmm, I thought that perfectly framed the whole conversation of not mistaking like short term success, for that it’s always going to continue or be long term and you got to have like the vision of what’s sustainable. And that’s how he arrived as identity. I thought was a really good point he made kind of within all this.

Dan: 50:09

I think we both were excited to ask him this question because at this point he is a very young still head coach at a high major university with tons of success and all that, I think, when we were researching his path. It is always interesting those first losing seasons when you become a head coach for the first time and all of a sudden when it starts to flip and then, like we talked about, he’s had great success since then and he mentioned it too that he started to really figure out what it was that was going to win, even though they were losing earlier on and just having the stick to it. And I think he was very excited to ask him about the player’s, the opposing coaches in the conference, him personally as a style, I mean, I think all those things probably played into it, like he mentioned. But I think what he went back to the core of him, really truly figuring out what he believes in in those early years, led to the success later down the road. And it makes sense because once you figure out who you are and whatever the style or philosophy you’re going to be, you know you’re going to be able to get to the top of the line and then you understand who you are and whatever the style or philosophy, however he put it, then you know the kind of players that you want, you know the kind of staff that you want and then you understand how maybe you want to scout against certain opponents and all that and it starts there. So it was a really interesting question to ask and I think honestly, you and I had an interesting conversation just ourselves before and after about it, just personally, like what would be most important for us too. So a fun question to pose and I thought he was great.

Pat: 51:33

Yeah, he did reference at the beginning when he was with UNC Greensboro and playing against teams that could really shoot the three is why he really wanted no comfortable threes. He kind of adopted that mentality. So again, you know, tying it back to the start subset just in terms of how I felt, you know him kind of playing in that league shaped how he thinks about defense and I think, specifically I wanted to follow up maybe earlier when he did mention the no threes and even in the start subset, when you are playing against teams that are great three point shooting teams, what is it that’s giving you trouble in the defense event that you got to think about to take away those threes? You know, is it just that they just have pure shooters? Is it they’re running them on an off ball, like where is the breakdown coming that you find with teams that shoot really good threes? And probably a conversation that we had with Henderson, but it was on the other side of the ball because they were in a lead three point shooting team last season A couple of seasons ago.

Dan: 52:23

It’s out to go to state yeah with Coach Henderson, the other one, the baseline runner series. This came from you and I watching some film from last year and honestly it ended up in a different place. We thought and it was really fun to kind of hear about his past players and putting them in it and sort of like the next level two of why and how you discover things and sets and actions to run for your best players, and this was fun for us. So I’ll kick it back to you, since you asked a question on any initial takeaways from that one.

Pat: 52:52

I’ll keep it simple and my thoughts is what you hit on is I really liked the story he gave and that his shooter struggled just off of a single isolated pinball and before we came on I was talking about. You know, we of course enjoy the and he mentioned that the set where it’s like a weave or then they veer into an isolated all of this fancy action. But then he had a player who just struggled to read it and couldn’t read his man and wasn’t reading the screen and he eventually just settled on I’m just going to put him head under the rim and two screens and then all of a sudden, the simple Simon set is just unlocking everything for them. So I mean always the beauty of the game, you know, it’s all these fun sets, this decoy action, this fall stuff, and then it’s still tried and true diamond sets, flex action is still as successful as ever. So I just like that story. I thought it framed the question really well and obviously it was why he started reading. The cutter having patience and his ability to read screens, and then this case is man to get open was the most important, which makes sense, Of course.

Dan: 53:49

For sure, and you and I, right before we hopped on here to say I think we both talked about how we enjoyed, despite the sort of technical, tactical details of screening angles and set up your man, all that stuff which obviously is important. But here in his thoughts on finding that fit between actions and players and going back to I think even he said something earlier on about they will teach you things I wrote down as far as just putting players in actions and not overcoaching it right away, but kind of just letting them play through it, and I think here in his way of trying to find which set might be good for certain players and he mentioned, you know, having a bunch of new players this year. So they’re in that process, like all of us are right now too, and so always interesting to hear you know a great coach and how they try to find that perfect balance between action and player. Because, to your point, everybody’s coming off the summer, we’re going to clinics and watching videos and have a million ideas in their head and it’s all good. But what’s the best thing for your team and really what’s the best thing for your best players at the end of the day, and what actions can I find for them that will create an advantage and bring a success, so I liked hearing him talk about that whole thing.

Pat: 54:54

I agree, and just hearing you talk too, I mean remind me of this Pablo Lasso’s conversation. And we just got into, like the floppy action. You know an action that’s been around forever and you watched all of his great Real Madrid teams. They’re just kind of bludgeoning into death off of floppy.

Dan: 55:07

Yeah, exactly, or Gordy Chieza. And I know Flex sometimes gets hate on social media, but we’ve seen a lot of teams run great Flex stuff at the highest levels right now and it’s just so simple. But Gordy Chieza a couple of years ago said, hey, I can’t explain it, but the Flex just always works, you know. So it’s just simple stuff at the end of the day, and this isn’t a miss for me, but you know, for someone that play for Roy Williams and it’s so tempting to just go head first down that rabbit hole for a long time and maybe someday for Lucky, we can ask more stories or teaching points about Smith and Williams and playing for them. And you know he won a national title as a player at North Carolina. So I think those are things that just would be great to pick his brain on. It’s funny you mentioned that.

Pat: 55:51

I guess this wasn’t a miss, but when we were talking about him being a young head coach we’ve had this conversation before. You obviously learn from the coaches you work with, but then it also becomes important you have to coach who you are and treat yourself. So when you come from such a high caliber, hall of Fame coach and you take over a squad, was there any pitfalls? And just you know how? He again goes back to his identity and his coaching philosophy of anything.

Dan: 56:12

I think, probably like all of us, when we first start coaching the people that had the biggest impact on your maybe playing career, who you played under, you maybe try to beat them for a little bit and we’re not saying Coach Miller did this but at what point do you feel like you truly become more your own coach and you understand the teachings and the philosophies of the people that you played for or around you? But you’re also just wholly your own self and I’m sure that was part of the process of his first few years, as he’s going through it, like everyone of just who am I really as opposed to who I played for?

Pat: 56:45

Yeah, I couldn’t frame the question well enough for me to want to ask it and stumble through.

Dan: 56:51

Well, everybody, thank you again for listening. Coach Miller, best of luck this season. Can’t wait to watch them play. And Pat, there’s nothing else, we’ll wrap this up. Sounds good, thanks everyone.