Slappin’ Glass is joined for a second time on the show by the President of Basketball Operations for the Boston Celtics, Brad Stevens! The trio dive into teaching in high performance environments, drills to ignite the room, and discuss building trust amongst peers and the story and real name behind the SLOB “Winner” series during the always fun “Start, Sub, or Sit?!”
Inside the Episode
“I was on a different level of edge than I was in any of those non-conference games. You could tell there was more to lose, or it felt like there was more to lose. And so the next game we went to Wright State and I think we scored like 42 points and it was solely my fault. We were on edge, we played on edge. I was complaining to the officials, I was on edge about every possession. I just didn’t handle it well and I told myself after that that I’m not costing us a game again, even if I’m feeling the butterflies. I’m going to be as prepared as humanly possible and I’m going to sit there and give the impression that I’m not.” – Brad Stevens
We were joined for a second time on the podcast this week by the President of Basketball Operations for the Boston Celtics, Brad Stevens! In Round 2 we explore a variety of interesting subjects with Coach Stevens including:
- Teaching and Leading in High Performance Environments: We always enjoy discussions about how coaches teach and lead through stress, pressure, and environments where there’s a lot on the line and Coach Stevens gives some great thoughts on how he personally prepared and managed those situations.
- The History of the “Winner” SLOB Series: Coach Stevens is well known for his “winner” series, and we had fun hearing the history and the real name of the play during “Start, Sub, or Sit?!”
- Gaining Trust in a Career: Also during “Start, Sub, or Sit?!”, we dive into what it means to build up trust in a career and the most important aspects of that in Coach Stevens’ mind.
Chapters
0:00 Teaching in High Performance Environments
4:27 Maximizing Teaching Efficiency and Drill Construction
8:47 Importance of Standards in High Performance
14:30 Incentivizing and Motivating Competitive Team Culture
19:40 Teachable Moments and Coaching Strategies
24:38 Trust and Career Growth in Coaching
29:48 Coaching Egos and Offensive Plays
33:57 ATO Analysis and Execution
39:09 Motion Offense
41:00 Wrap Up
Transcript
Brad Stevens: 0:00
I was on a different level of edge than I was in any of those non-conference games. You could tell there’s more to lose, or it felt like there was more to lose. And so the next game we went to Wright State and I think we scored like 42 points and it was solely my fault. We were on edge, we played on edge. I was complaining to the officials, I was on edge about every possession. I just didn’t handle it well and I told myself after that I’m not costing us a game again, even if I’m feeling the butterflies. I’m going to be as prepared as humanly possible and I’m going to sit there and give the impression that I’m not.
Dan: 0:40
Hi, I’m Dan 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 President of Basketball Operations for the Boston Celtics, brad Stevens. Coach Stevens is here today to discuss teaching and leading in high performance environments, drills to ignite the room and we talk the history and details of the Winner Sidelined Out of Bounds series and what it’s really called, and building trust throughout your career 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 in 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 Brad Stevens. Brad, thank you very much for making the time and coming back again, and that we appreciate having you here today.
Brad Stevens: 2:19
Well, it’s good to be here. I always enjoy listening to you guys and talking with you guys, so I’m looking forward to it.
Dan: 2:25
Thank you Appreciate that, brad. We wanted to start with this, and especially now with your experience as both a coach for a long time now managing people and last time we were on we talked a little bit about this as well. But wanted to go back to teaching and leading in high performance environments and basically in situations where you don’t have tons and tons of time to either make decisions or to teach people how to do things on the court, how you think about how people learn and how you teach in an environment where winning does matter quite a bit. There’s a lot there right.
Brad Stevens: 2:57
I think the thing I miss most about not coaching is the teaching aspect, is really being on the court and really teaching. I might have said this in our previous podcast, but my boss that I worked for at Butler for six years, Todd Licklider, used to quote Twain all the time and he said I apologize for the length of this letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one he challenged us as young assistants to learn how to make everything as simple as possible, learn how to communicate it in as simple as terms as possible so that we could be as effective as a group. So you know you’re right in that, in the NBA especially, you don’t have a ton of time with the whole group to get ready for a season, but that just requires more time in preparing to maximize those moments. And so you know, whether it is the edits you’re putting together, whether it is the drills that you’re considering doing, I’ve seen and I’ve had great assistance at both the college and pro level that come up with some of the most creative drills all summer long, and what they’ll do is they’ll put the staff through it to make sure it’s effective and communicated effectively so that when the players show up, they’re ready, or maybe, like now, we’ve got a lot of young guys here that are, you know, whether they’re E-10s or whether they’re two ways, or whether they’re roster players, whatever the case may be and maybe in August you try something that you’re interested in trying as a drill and seeing how that sticks right. But I do think that you better be ready to maximize those moments when you’re teaching and for me, less is more, but you have to get enough. So I think that that would be a thing that I really tried to embrace in every film session, in every drill, in every practice plan. I didn’t want to do one more thing than we needed to do. I wanted to make sure we were as efficient as possible, as dialed into what exactly needed to be done. Really, look at what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, if it has real application and if it can be put to the side for something that maybe has more application. I think that that would be the way that I’ve always looked at it how can you work and turn over every stone so that when it’s time to present a message or to teach, it is done in the simplest terms?
Dan: 5:14
Getting to that point where it is simpler for the players. I know all the process before that which you just spoke about is not always quick and efficient for coaches to kind of turn over every stone and to figure out how to get to the place where things are going to be simpler on the court. Did you have a process with that, or was it kind of a mad scientist, mad genius, all over the place or somewhere in between with all that?
Brad Stevens: 5:37
It’s interesting. I did have a process. When the pandemic started, I actually started putting all this stuff down like in a Word document, right Like preparing for a season, preparing throughout a season. I was bored, like everybody else. I really did have a process when I was in college. Our roster was almost always set by May, and so I would actually take May and June to really think about how we wanted to play, especially when we got a chance to work out with our guys. By the time our freshmen arrived at the end of June for summer school, I wanted to be able to do drills and do things that were going to apply to how we played and what we were going to ask them to do. So I didn’t want to waste two months of drill work so that we just restarted something different when we got together in September. And I think it’s similar here. Right, a lot of rosters are set, or mostly set, by middle of July or so, and some are set before that. But that middle of July to September first timeframe for me was that was as focused a time of work as I put in as far as preparing for a season. Now, nice part is that you can do some of that on planes. You can do some of that with your family on vacation, you can get up early or whatever. But for me it’s always been important to have that stuff prepared, like I’m not a person that could show up on September 25th, have a retreat and figure it out. That was just not the way that I was wired and so that’s the way that I went about it is. Once I knew the majority of our roster, it was really time to prepare mentally for how we were going to play. And I do want to clarify something we were talking about earlier. When you talk about putting it in the simplest terms, it’s not necessarily the simplest terms just for the players, right, it’s for the whole group. It’s for the staff. When we went into a staff meeting and again I had amazing assistance and they had great ideas we could all come in with whatever ideas and thoughts and concepts that we wanted, but we had to leave with one message, and that just kept it simple for everybody. The real confusing part is when one coach is saying one thing, another coach is saying another, the teammate next to you is saying another, and then it’s hard to play a fast-paced game with a clear mind, so being able to work, communicate, argue, then ultimately simplify and go forward with one message is probably as important as anything. But a lot of time in the off season has to go into thinking about that and I probably wore my assistance out some with random 6am emails in August that I really didn’t care if anybody responded to. I was just brainstorming with myself, yeah.
Pat: 8:07
With drill construction and keeping it simple. What components have you found over the years and in your experience that really accomplished that and helped teach in the most efficient way? Good question.
Brad Stevens: 8:18
I think number one is how does it fit into how you want to play? How does it fit into your offensive structure, your defensive structure? Is it a drill meant to ignite the room and get people to raise the spirits and raise the level? I had four or five go-tos where it would be okay. This is the third day in a row. We’re going to have to compete early so that we can engage appropriately as we move forward, especially in a training camp scenario. Colleges have it way more difficult than the pros. We’ve only got a couple of days before our first exhibition game, a couple weeks before our first game. There aren’t many practices that guys come to that they’re not ready to practice right In college. You’ve got 42 days before your first game. You can choose 30 of them. You run out of stuff. Sometimes you have to create these exciting new drills just to do them right. But I do think that if they don’t apply to your offensive system or how you would like to play, they don’t apply to your defensive system and they don’t also really emphasize whatever your identity is or what you’re trying to emphasize. Then take a hard look at whether to do them or not.
Pat: 9:28
When you were in a college season and you needed to ignite the room, what was one of the drills that you would go to and get them going early?
Brad Stevens: 9:34
Yeah, there were a few and I was fortunate enough to travel and see a bunch, but one of the ones that I like the most and we do different variations of it now and I know a lot of teams do but we used to just do like a you’re doing all your four-on-four drills defensively and I used to love, instead of just doing a traditional shell, adding actions, adding different things that really tested and ultimately built up where we could do like a progression of things. But we would start four-on-four and we’d call a name and that name had to run to half-core and touched the half court line on defense and the offense was playing four on three for however slow or fast that person was until they got back in it. But the defense had to figure out you gotta protect the basket, you gotta stop the ball, you gotta split the difference between two perimeter guys and figure out who you wanted to shoot, who you didn’t want to shoot. If you can make them take a tough jump shot or keep them off balance with a tough jump shot, it’s a win. You can get that fourth guy back in. It’s like you have three excellent defenders out there. It’s really hard and you know guys will like that because you’re playing the three or four stops. This is really hard. You had no kidding. That’s like the point. So is guarding teams, because, guess what, we’re gonna put ourselves in disadvantaged situations a lot against NBA players, because one guy is that good where you put two on him and so you gotta be ready to fly around, prioritize and figure out how to accomplish the task until we get back and matched up you mentioned back with Butler.
Dan: 11:02
you would start to really think about how you wanted to play. You would really think about things. What was like a step then of trying to perfect that for you, whether it was watching film, speaking to other coaches, going to practices, I mean, what was a process like to get an idea to the end? That’s a great question.
Brad Stevens: 11:18
I mean, some of the best ideas I got as a college coach were at NBA training camps. That was obviously a little bit late for what we’re talking about from a timing standpoint, but you kind of think about those things, how they apply to your team. Maybe you throw a drill in there that you’ve seen and then you try to build off of that, maybe that season or into the next season. One of the things about this is you can plan all you want, but you’ve gotta be flexible and you’ve gotta be willing to throw things out that don’t work and you’ve gotta be able to adopt things that you think really will work and again be able to do that pretty quickly throughout the course of the season. I do think that because of you know we’re pretty tight-knit community coaches you usually unless it maybe was in your league in college you usually could reach out to anybody and go visit them. You could go to practices, you could go to workouts. In the summer several times had coffee with NBA coaches and NBA assistant coaches and you always left with an hour to two hours full of ideas, thoughts in a notebook and again that you all are, you’re totally invigorated by it, like you’re driving home or you’re flying home and your mind is racing a million miles a minute and then you gotta trim them down to what’s really applicable. But those were always ways that I went about it and fortunate to have had a good network of people to be able to reach out to. But even as a young assistant who had played division three that nobody knew coaches were so open. Most everybody will want to talk hoops.
Dan: 12:43
That’s right. We found that from time to time, which is great. Yeah, that’s right.
Brad Stevens: 12:47
Some people make a career out of it.
Dan: 12:48
That’s, yeah, unique and absolute must the most helpful and highest quality coaching content anywhere. These are some of the comments coaches are using to describe their experience with SG Plus, from NBA and NCAA championship coaching staffs to all levels of international and high school basketball. Sg Plus is designed to help curious coaches discover, explore and understand the what, why and hows of what the best in the world are doing Through our searchable 650 plus video archive on SGTV, 100 plus deep dive newsletters, coaching round tables, private community app and, most recently, our in-person Las Vegas summer league coaches. Social. Sg Plus aims to connect coaches to helpful people and information. One drop coverage foot angle breakdown at a time. For more information and find out more about staff rates, visit slappingglasscom or email us at info at slappingglasscom. Today, coach, I’d also like to ask I’ve heard you speak before about in this context of high performance environments and teaching and leading. You’ve also talked about the importance of standards. Having and keeping people to certain standards, you know, sort of drives a team or an organization you know, forward and also personally as well. I’ve heard you speak about this and I loved to hear your thoughts on why having quality standards kind of sets the bar for an organization or team.
Brad Stevens: 14:18
Well, you just have to have a foundation to build off of. I just think that if you don’t have a foundation, if you don’t know who you are, if you don’t know kind of how you can be the best version of yourself, then it’s hard to just figure it out on the fly. I do think that we’re in a unique spot here because we have all the banners right. You know, we have all this proof of what can be done, but that’s really what it is. Those banners by themselves don’t drive culture right. The culture and the standards ultimately be the people in the room that are in the room in that current time the willingness to embrace, doing hard things, doing those together. You know, if you’ve got three or four things that you think are really important from a values or things that you need to embrace as a group, you need to emphasize those and if you do that, then you’ll probably be that it really boils down to. You know what you choose to emphasize, how you recruit to the room and who’s in the room and then go from there. Butler was I’ve said this many times Butler was just ready to explode when I joined as an assistant just because Barry Collier, the coach there had built this foundation that was rock, rock solid. You know, everything we did was recruited to that and we weren’t afraid to lose somebody in recruiting and we were more focused on who we got. And just as long as the people we get really will embrace competing and showing great competitive character and doing so for the group and the team, then we had a pretty good shot. You know the best teams here in the past, all the championship teams, all those qualities are the same. Then it’s just a matter of how you ultimately get there with your group in this given year.
Pat: 15:53
Coach within this conversation and when you recruit and now as you construct a roster, how do you think about then finding talent versus, or balancing, finding personalities that will mesh for the team to succeed?
Brad Stevens: 16:05
It’s a fine line, right. I think what we want is competitive character all across the board, and that can be defined however you want to define it, but for me, they are people that ultimately they’re ambitious, they want to do well individually, they want to do that, but at the end of the day, they love to compete to win, and I think that that’s really, really important. And so your best players have to show that. They have to exhibit that You’ve got to have the requisite talent level, especially at the top of your roster, that allows you to compete with anybody. If you want to be a contender, if you want to be in that mix of teams, and then for me it’s just about making sure, as you fill out a team and you do so with role players, that some guys are going to get a lot of opportunity and they’re going to have to play that role well and embrace that role. Some guys aren’t going to get as much opportunity. What I would like in an ideal world is for the guys that are going to have inconsistence and opportunity to be able to play but can emotionally handle not playing, and that’s hard. I think that we’ve had very good examples of that here. From a leadership standpoint. Maybe the best example I’ve ever been around is Blake Griffin. Last year he was just incredibly self-aware, an amazing leader and no matter what what was about the team and he could fluctuate from starting when Al Horford sat on the second night of a back-to-back to starting four straight games when Al and Rob were out, to not playing for two weeks, and it didn’t impact any part of his emotional investment in the team. So the idea of you can play but you don’t necessarily need to play is important. That’s really hard when you’re filling out a roster in college. You’re filling out a group of 18-year-olds come in and they all have been really, really good and now they all expect to play. But you got to have people on there that are okay, not, and that are there for the journey and that want to get better. And doesn’t mean they’re not ambitious, doesn’t mean they don’t have that fire that burns inside of them, but it does mean that they understand what the big picture is and what’s most important. Obviously, as you get older, you get that a little bit more and that’s why, again, like Blake, as good of a leader as I’ve ever seen was last year with Blake.
Dan: 18:16
When it comes to, from Butler to Celtics to now front office, incentivizing and motivating talented people anything that you’ve learned about you know within the group setting, still having them be apart, but also being able to incentivize the best players or the best in whatever it is that they can grow Within whatever they’re doing as well.
Brad Stevens: 18:36
I think everybody has a little thing that can give them a little bit more fire and a little bit more gas, right, but I do think this the most important part of incentivizing and motivating people to really compete and to really get after it Is to recruit that well, to bring that in. And when you sign that at this level or you recruit that at the college level, you can’t do it for 82 straight games if you’re not a competitive player. The speeches, the text messages, the Pats on the back, the challenges, any of that stuff fine, but again, if you don’t have that desire to truly compete, I just think it’s much more difficult. I do think and maybe that’s because I’m not like new rock me, but I do think that ultimately everybody does have something and you do have to find that for each guy. You know, I’ve been around some of the best players in the game and and I’ve been around a lot of guys who, to be honest, probably shouldn’t have played as long as they did and and some guys that maybe should have played a little bit longer. But there’s all kinds of different motivations that people have, interests that people have, and you can tell who really loves it and just try to recruit to that as much as possible.
Dan: 19:40
Coach, go maybe back on the court and you know what you term teachable moments, or moments in practice or games where there’s an Opportunity for you to teach as a coach, and if there’s anything that changed for you over the course of your career and how you handle those moments on the court, whether it’s a mistake or whatever it is, and how you kind of lead through that situation.
Brad Stevens: 20:02
It’s again all about the team that you have and it’s all about the individuals that are out there Some people you could, in a teachable moment, teach right away without much compassion. I had a few guys at Butler that you could pull out in the middle of an NCAA tournament game and Tell them exactly what you thought about how they were playing and what we needed and a couple guys here too. I do think you just have to know each individual and you have to decide when is the right time to Make your mark and really communicate and teach. I do think that coaches are often evaluated because that’s the only time people can see them. For however they act on the sidelines or whatever they do on the sidelines, 99% of that teaching, 99% of the impact, is going to be away from that game. It’s going to be in the locker room after the game. It’s going to be on the plane. It’s going to be on the bus. It’s going to be in a meeting, individual meeting, the next morning over breakfast. It’s going to be a dinner on the road. It’s going to be all those other opportunities to converse when there’s not 18,000 other people watching, because that’s just not always the best time to make sure a message gets across. Now, obviously, it’s a great time to cheerlead and it’s great time pat somebody on the back and all those things. But when you need to make change or when you need to make sure you’re communicating a hard message, then you know it’s usually better done in smaller setting just kind of on that thread.
Dan: 21:23
You were historically stoic on the sideline for the most part. Was that something you thought about as far as like how your demeanor? Was that just you know your personality or you know you being that way during the game? Specifically how you thought about that?
Brad Stevens: 21:37
my first year in coaching. We were seven or eight. No, at Butler we had just won the great Alaska shootout, beat some big schools, came back, beat Ohio State at home. And then we had one of those weekends where we had to go on the road twice for a conference in December and we were playing two good teams Detroit at Detroit, and it was always good, and then at Wright State. Wright State was probably the other Favorite to win the league with us. So we went to Detroit in one barely and but I was on a different level of edge Then. I wasn’t any of those non-conference games, even though we had played big schools and blah, blah, blah. You could tell there’s more to lose, or it felt like there was more to lose. And so the next game we went to Wright State. I think we scored like 42 points and it was solely my fault. We were on edge, we played on edge. I was complaining to the officials, I was on edge about every possession. I just wanted to start off league play 2 and oh, we got greedy, we were nine and oh, as a team or whatever, and I just didn’t handle it well and I told myself after that I’m not costing us a game again. By the way that I handle, you know my own. Even if I’m Feeling the butterflies, I’m gonna be as prepared as humanly possible and I’m gonna sit there and give the impression that I’m not. And so, yeah, there were times, certainly in the future, that I lost it. They were a little bit more few and far between, but I think that that was more of a conscious decision on how best to impact your team. And then you know, when you get in the NCAA tournament in your butler, we didn’t have much to lose, and so it was a lot easier for me to be that way than for a big school that at the time the Alumni and message boards are all over them for everything they do wrong. By the time we got to March, we were playing with house money, you know. I think that cameras probably caught me at a time where they determined that I was stoic and they never really changed that. I don’t know that every official would agree with that assessment, certainly not every player.
Pat: 23:26
Within this high performance environment, like you mentioned, the pressure that can mount when there’s a losing streak or a tough season, does anything change about teaching? Does it look different? And I guess maybe where I’m coming from too is the thought of control versus freedom and how you teach and when Things start to go south, fighting that urge or maybe taking more control, and how you view teaching and poor times of the season, the inclination when things are starting to go south is to sit in a room and Bitch about it and identify problems and I think that everybody can do that, we’re all good at that but those are usually the best times to find solutions.
Brad Stevens: 24:03
and those are usually the times that you look back on After the season, or even to act on a career, and then you say, man, that was the moment, that was a pivotal moment, that we decided we needed to do this to give ourselves a better chance of being successful, because it was starting to show that we weren’t going to be successful doing it the other way and being able to, just in that moment, focus on your task, coach your team, do so with a positive attitude. Don’t forget that every single guy on that roster brings a unique strength, otherwise they wouldn’t be on that roster and find solutions. The more time you spend complaining, the less time you’re spending Really diving into how we can fix it. And then, ultimately, I’ve always referred to those moments as Trampolines you’re at the low point, but you’re ready to just explode, because you do in the lowest points Maybe not as you if it continues, but at the low points you do have everyone’s attention in the room, and so there’s an opportunity there to go up from there. It’s fragile, that can leave pretty quick. If you don’t take advantage of it, do you have a negative attitude towards it? But again I go back to the Todlick player. He had a great line called me in. We had lost a game we shouldn’t have lost, maybe early on when I was an assistant, or maybe two in a row. And he just said you don’t get paid to ride the wave, you get paid to coach, and coaching happens. Right now I was making about $25,000. I certainly have learned a lot from that, but those are some of the most defining moments for me and coaching and helping to coach a group and lead a group and those type of things.
Dan: 25:42
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Brad Stevens: 27:38
I’d start the last one, but I would do it with the caveat that social and emotional skills has to be attached to a super strong work ethic. That’s really important, right? I just think you have to be able to again pivot, you have to be able to prepare, you have to be able to do all that stuff, but I do think that that’s probably the most important. I’d say battle tested is the sub, and then the specialty would be the sit. I think they’re all important, but I think every single, especially the coaches, that you know my son’s a high school player. I see great high school coaching. I watch all the college games as a scout and, you know, watch all the NBA games. Every coach has at least a few things they do really, really well. That’s not unique. I don’t think everybody always realizes it or recognizes it or gives them the credit for that, but I learned something on film from every coach I ever coached against, so I would say that that would be the least unique of the three.
Dan: 28:35
Pat and I have been having an off air discussion for a couple of weeks about just certain coaches that build trust amongst their peers because they’re just good off the court as well, like maybe they’re just good people and they become more trusted. And what have you seen or felt from people that just do a good job as they progress at building true connections with people, whatever their record is on the court, what they do off the court?
Brad Stevens: 28:58
Billy Donovan when he went on his run in Florida I don’t know if it was right at the run or right after it said I don’t want my career to include a bunch of trophies and no friends and no relationships, something to that effect. Basically like I don’t want to burn down all these relationships because I’m so ambitious I can’t see with any real perspective. My most valued relationships in the game are a the people I’ve coached and the people I’ve worked with, and then D the people I’ve coached against. That’s something that I really value. Some of my best friends are people that I’ve never worked with, never spent a ton of time with. They’ve been coached against each other, recruited against each other, and we just have this common experience that we’ve bonded over over time and I think that those things, those relationships, are super important and I think you have to work at them. I think operating out of a space where you understand how hard it is with the other persons doing to try to be successful. I think we have some great examples of that in the NBA. I could go through like a whole list of people, but Steve Kerr really stands out as a person like he is. He just started coaching 10, 15 years ago, and he’s coaching the US team and he’s won a bunch of championships, but he just has a real humble as you said social and emotional high IQ about him.
Pat: 30:17
That really stands out, coach how do you manage a coaching ego? I think we’ve all ran into coaches that have huge egos and obviously you’ve had tremendous success. You’ve coached Final Four’s, Final’s, NBA. How have you just kept grounded and managed your ego or kept your career in?
Brad Stevens: 30:33
perspective, because I work in Boston. They tell you, they remind you what you’re not, so I think that that would be the best way I’d say it. You’ve got a big ego in one of these markets. That’s not going to be a big concern. I think that, ultimately, I have an appreciation for how hard it is to coach, I have appreciation for how much work it takes and I have appreciation for the other persons doing it too. I don’t lose sight of that. I feel very fortunate to have been in the positions I’ve been in, from Butler through the Celtics. I’ve always probably been more fearful of failing than I have been of thinking I’ve got anything figured out.
Pat: 31:11
Okay, coach, our next start subset. We call this our tough to teach. We’re gonna tough to teach when it comes to your winner set, your sideline out of bounds winner set that you have been known to run.
Brad Stevens: 31:22
I never called it winner when I wrote it down on my little sheet. I wrote it down as less LeS. We didn’t even have a name for it, I just drew it up. Less was coach lick gliders. Grandfather who played a handover. We stole the first part of that play from Hanover who used to set that reverse back stream for a guy named David Benner, who was a hell of a division three player, may the best division three player ever played against, and so that’s the only Thing I ever had it written down as so, but it’s gotten that name somehow.
Dan: 31:53
It’s gotten the name. Okay, good to get the history.
Pat: 31:55
All right, coach. Well, when you would run the less three play the toughest part to teach of that action? Executing that action. Was it one? The inbound pass? Was it to the catch gather and pass from the big man or whoever was receiving that pass? Or Option three, getting the timing correct, syncing up the timing between the catch and then setting the screen for the shooter Coming to the ball the timing is not that hard.
Brad Stevens: 32:21
So that would be sit. I would say the pass is the hardest and the catch is probably second. I stopped running it a few years ago because there’s so much more switching in the cross screen. The reverse cross screen was just became a little bit more difficult. We actually just stopped. We just started throwing it over the top without a screen because the defense is to the ball, anyways. So we put smart there who was our most physical catcher. Sometimes we put Morris there, guys like that that you knew would go get the ball and then whatever the variation of action was around it. So kind of tweak that over the last three or four years of my coaching career that play it’s fun to see somebody ran in summer league against us and one of the assistants like winked at me across the floor and first time we ran that was in Maui with Butler Rodney Clark. He’s one of the best shooters that our coach, regardless of level, and he came off that thing and was wide open. We missed it but we tipped it in because it drew so much attention. Anyways, I do like watching but I do think the past takes a little bit of a riverboat gambler to throw it. I think one of the things I’ve learned is I’ve gotten deeper into my coaching career was you have to simplify those entries as much as possible because of the switching, because of the physicality on those plays, especially in the NBA. That’s why you see a lot of teams and us included where you know you have guys standing on the other side of half court and now they start their cut and then come to the ball or whatever the case may be. You just want as much space to cut as possible and as much space to eliminate Potential issues that would cause a turnover. So worst thing you can do is throw it away. It’s not worth the risk, throw it away. You might as well just throw it in and keep one up there.
Pat: 33:57
Well, you mentioned what, the switching and simplifying. Just how did you think about ATOs then, and Formations and type of screens? And I mean you mentioned creating space, but what did become important to you to executing ATOs and set design?
Brad Stevens: 34:13
I like playing against switching, for the most part because we can put who we want where if we know the matchups. If you know the matchups, you have to obviously study, you have to be prepared. We had a great system here where our video guy would get me the last, or really a team’s whole season, of how they guarded in those moments and then we would study them and then determine, okay, where can we put here? If you have a matchup advantage, how can you find that and take advantage of it? They’re a switching team. How could you create a matchup advantage with your cuts and with the interchanges and exchanges Going into every game? Like I said, that name less three. I just had a sheet that would not be discernible to anyone else, but it was just like reminders to me of what the action would be based on. What I watched heading into that night’s game Usually did that in the NBA, got in the routine. I would do that the morning or the afternoon of a game and so very rarely was it something we walked through or drew up. The way that we practiced being able to run things on draw ups was in training camp. We’d stop, play and draw up a lot just to get used to doing something new, doing something out of the blue, have a situation games where they had to go take something that was they’d never seen before and go do it, and guys that weren’t used to that from college a lot of guys were used to that from college, but guys that weren’t, or from their previous team internationally, got used to it really quickly. I thought that was the way that we kind of built that habit and then it was just about it was up to me to study and be ready for each opponent and how they guarded. I’ve said this before that was one of LeBron’s great strengths was he would tweak his matchups. He would guard the five, sometimes the one, sometimes he would sniff the play out and go and switch the matchups after guys had already matched up. Then you’re playing against guys like that. You just say, okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re just gonna keep him on the strong side of the floor and then let everything else happen over there.
Pat: 36:03
He’s too unpredictable because he’s so smart when you’re in the timeout working off of the board. How did you just think about explaining timing angles? It’s one thing, you draw the X and O, but then maybe they go out and you know we’re running our timings all wrong. I guess what was the important information you had to convey Beyond just the movements and the patterns and where you wanted guys standing?
Brad Stevens: 36:22
There’s only so many patterns that teams can run and players can run. I think it’s more about you’re taking advantage of the defenders that are on the floor and what your strengths are offensively, and so a lot of the patterns have a timing or a cadence that’s normal to what you’re normally doing. That said, if there is a timing aspect of it right If you want to hit the post and then go into splits or go into like a bill bow action or whatever you need to communicate that don’t go until that ball was caught. You know those types of things and make sure that everybody’s looked in the eye, everybody understands that and we’re all on one page. And again, you can build that. You build that over time with working on that in practice.
Dan: 37:00
At least that’s what we did you’ve mentioned Todd, like later before, and you know Obviously, now we’re talking about this play and we’re talking about the history of it and grandfather’s name. I just love to ask what he’s meant to you and your coaching career and what you’ve taken from him, because you’ve talked about him before, I think probably more than anyone else.
Brad Stevens: 37:17
Obviously, I played for great coaches, had great teammates when I was playing, worked for amazing people, but when I was an assistant for Todd, I was 24 to 30. It was a really a formative time of coaching and he just looked at it so differently than everybody else. We were coming straight out of the coaches hero, where they were the loudest, strongest, biggest personality in the room. And here’s this person who just trusted that his team would be prepared if we simplified a message, encouraged and supported them and, you know, wanted to really kind of enjoy the journey with a good perspective and, first of all, was refreshing. It was amazing to work for and I say that all and, and you know, like if I screwed up a film session, he would make me go redo it. He would watch the tape before I showed it to the team. You know An eight-minute edit at the time. Eight-minute edits were not something that you go and fix on your computer, it was three tape decks one rewinding, one playing, one recording. So it took forever to get those edits made and so you got to the point where, okay, this is how we’re gonna teach, this is how we’re gonna progressively teach, this is how we’re gonna do so in film, and you wanted to be right the first time because it was gonna be a lot of work If you weren’t. So that’s where he really held. I thought everybody to like this really great standard of work, but it taught me how to teach. He had been a teacher and a coach in high school and I wasn’t an education major, so that was really my education in that and so I’m very thankful for his impact early on.
Dan: 38:45
Well, coach, you’re off the start subberset hot seat. A successful round two. Thanks for playing and going through that. We’ve got one last question for you before we end the show. Before we do, thank you very much again for coming back a second time. Congrats on all the success and you’re welcome back anytime. So thank you very much. Yeah, thanks for having me. You. We asked you the first time what your best investment was, and so we won’t repeat that question for you. We like to ask you to close here is what are you most curious about right now when it comes to basketball, leadership, management or any of those things in your world?
Brad Stevens: 39:17
Well, I think there’s a lot that comes with kind of management and with salary caps and you know all the stuff that we Kind of try to navigate and deal with. But that’s kind of boring. Basketball wise it’s probably the same thing that I’ve wondered for years and years and years and that is just when does motion come back? When does more of the just giving in to the off the ball cutting and movement come back? Our game in the NBA, you know, again I go to Golden State. They’ve done a great job of that. I think the best teams that I’ve coached, or the hardest teams to coach against, could score in three ways they could score in isolation, they could score in pick and roll and they could score with movement and they could change it up Throughout the course of the game. And I just think that and I’ve got a 17 year old and this generation generally Hasn’t played as much with cutting and movement in real like maybe I’m like the old curmudgeon, like old school Indiana motion that our Whole state ran because if you ran anything else you’d be, you know, kicked out of the IHSA. I’ve always wondered that. But I think with the increase in shooting and the increase in spacing, increase in kids abilities, put the ball on the floor. You know, I just think that’ll continue to probably be third out of those other three areas and people are gonna be efficient that way and Maximize that way. But I do think there’s a special connection, almost a spiritual connection you get from cutting moving, finding each other playing together and Doing so in a really thoughtful but random way. I’ve always been curious about that. I would go back to coaching and I get you know, a fifth grade job somewhere. That’s probably what we will do.
Dan: 41:01
All right, pat. Well, let’s just dive right into this. Obviously was awesome to have coach Stevens back for a second time. We really appreciate him making the time to come back and with all of our part 2s that we’ve been lucky to have so far with different coaches who’ve gone two different times. The second one is fun because we just get to drill even deeper on stuff. Maybe we missed the first time and obviously coach Stevens one of the brightest minds in the sport, so awesome having them back today.
Pat: 41:28
Absolutely, and I’m with you. I enjoyed it and I think we both acknowledged we were less nervous the second time around and it made for a better conversation, so it was really enjoyable.
Dan: 41:38
It still is, to this day, just fun for you and I when you know we’re interviewing some coach and they actually do pop on Zoom at the time we discussed. It’s still fun.
Pat: 41:48
There’s no way that’s gonna be Brad Stevens on the other end of that.
Dan: 41:51
Yeah, maybe before we dive in and I kick it to you, I think we’re discussing, you know, how we got to, what we wanted to discuss with him, and maybe I’ll kick it to you on that on Teaching and leading in these high performance environments and our background on that our conversations with some other coaches and you know We’ve heard several times like, yeah, that coach can really teach.
Pat: 42:10
You know why. Why can you really teach? What goes into really teaching and you know, like, the when and how of teaching was also kind of my initial thoughts. One thing about this Conversation and then credit to you we didn’t want to be overly broad with it, so trying to narrow in, and you brought up the great point, which I think is the art of coaching and teaching, is that you’re in like these high performance environment where you’re working with time constraints and there’s pressure to win. How do you teach? How do you, you know, execute a game plan? How do you all that’s involved within this small window, these short periods of time where you have to get wins, and how does that maybe change or not Change? You know, as we got into whether you’re winning, losing is really interesting, you know, we know that coach Stevens as a whole the teacher.
Dan: 42:52
So really I’m happy with where we settled on the conversation we had yeah, me too, and I think, yeah, you and I said for a few days now, trying to really pinpoint where we wanted to go with this to your point. Coach Stevens obviously is known as one of the best teachers in the game, and so we wanted to kind of dig in on what went behind that, for sure, and then putting the little caveat on top of it of but with the stress and pressure of a season and time constraints and all that Coaches have to deal with, because teaching in general is one thing, but teaching under pressure is the art of coaching, and so that was really enjoyable. That first bucket was really great to hear his thoughts on all this stuff, and I loved hearing how he would think about the process to get to what he was actually going to teach, going back from Butler and then with the Celtics and how much you know time and energy he would spend so that when they got on the Floor, everything was streamlined and he had the answers and he had, you know, the adjustments and all those things. And even going deeper on, it wasn’t this random, just hey, I’m gonna look at a lot of film he had a process of how he got to what he was ultimately going to teach and so I really enjoyed hearing kind of his process Before he went on the floor and taught all the work that just goes into the reasonings, the why is behind everything, so that when he is on the court it’s all the fat has been trimmed and it’s just.
Pat: 44:07
This is the most important. This is what we need and teaching to that and it went into them. We asked about is drills and how he thought about simplifying drills. You know, making sure it has application to what you do offensively and defensively and, if it doesn’t, to really basically think about not doing it or changing it. And I think that’s interesting and he did talk about it too. With drills, I mean, coaches are always asking us for drills or whenever there’s any sort of drill posted on social media, they always do really well because we’re not all in the NBA, of course. Well, there’s less practice time, but he meant when you’ve got 40 practices it does get a little tedious trying to come up with drills. Or, yeah, spark guys attend Love to ignite the room drills. But just, you need some drills just to introduce some freshness and, you know, knock out the mundaneness of sometimes a preseason or when you aren’t playing until the end of the week. So that was also fun to hear just how he approached drills, making them simple and then understanding the challenge of having drills and coming up with drills.
Dan: 45:02
Yeah, we all like to see how the sausage is made. You watch someone’s team play on film or on TV and To be able to see a small part of how they do whatever they do. I mean some of our favorite pieces of content to put together on SGTV, the behind-the-scenes stuff for the inside the set. Like to hear a coach actually talk about how they put something in, how they drill it, how they get to it. I think is so valuable. And on that point too, he brought up the difference between you know certain drills to teach. I mean, everything is teaching something. But I liked his little thing about drills to ignite the room and you asked him a good fall about what would that look like? Maybe, but you know, I think most of us could think in our minds when he said that, about those couple drills that we all have that do. Pick up the energy, the competition, whatever it is to where you know, if we do this today it’s usually gonna bear the fruit of competition or just at least getting the energy up At some point during the practice. And so I like that about the igniting the room.
Pat: 46:00
Yeah another part of the conversation that I enjoyed hearing him talk about was near the very end, so I’ll skip a little bit ahead when just talking about like tough stretches, losing streaks, struggles during the season, and I really enjoyed his thoughts on. He said it’s our job to find solutions and complain less. He referred to them as trampoline moments. Yeah, hopefully, bounce back, or you can say, you can look back and now this is one way Solution to get better, to improve. And he said a really good quote from his mentor. I’d like later. I’d like later. Thank you that you know you don’t get paid to ride the wave, you get paid to coach in these moments and I really like that quote a lot about just staying positive and keeping perspective on a tough time of the season 100%.
Dan: 46:42
I really like that as well, and I think I’ll just wrap up my thoughts on this section. Also, he gave a nice story about Blake Griffin. Yeah, and players that can play but are emotionally okay with when they’re asked not to and this is not a miss by him, but, man, I think we could have talked about that for a long time we had more time just like that specific type of player and he mentioned it himself it’s usually an older player that’s kind of been through it a little bit and they really want to be part of a winning team and so you’ve made your career for the most part. Now you want to just be a part of something. But I thought that was a interesting piece and also credit to Blake Griffin about being that kind of player. But I really enjoyed that.
Pat: 47:21
I thought the same thing just quickly, that it would have been fun to follow up on emotional teaching for lack of a better word and just how you help players who aren’t gonna get big minutes, kind of work through those and understand their role and kind of teach to their emotions, rather than, of course, on the court practice Planning and all that stuff we got into could be really interesting Conversation following up with, because I think on the whole those types of players are mostly the older player who just gets it, or a younger, talented player, but it’s not quite their time yet and they’re on maybe a good team that they understand.
Dan: 47:53
Hey, my time’s coming so I can play, I can produce, but I’m okay right now because they can see that their time is coming. The ones in between or not stick here. Yeah, hey, moving to start, sub or sit. Let’s start with this. We went back and forth. He’s very well known for what we now know is called the less three ATO and you and I discussed this, that it been called the winner or winner series, different places, different names. But we were excited to just ask him about that and we were actually hoping at some point to follow up about the history and he just gave us a history right at the top. So that was the fun start subset, to start with yours on the less three series.
Pat: 48:36
So hear the history of it because, like you said, that was definitely where we’re gonna go with it. But I did like where the conversation ended up with how we thought about set design, attacking matchups, and then again bringing it back to just how I thought about just simplifying set design and ATOs there, and then, even before we came on, to just working off of the board as well and things to keep in mind with timing angles outside of just trying to draw a set on a board that someone besides yourself can understand.
Dan: 49:04
That was a good follow-up by you about the board work and sort of the art of that and how to be concise, and I liked his discussion about them, especially during like training camp preseason, trying to work off the board and so players get used to. You know how that looks from a specific coach, because certain coaches draw stuff differently or have different verbiage. So that’s good for the players and I think also really good for coaches to in practice to practice drawing on a board. If the first time you ever draw on a board in front of your players is in crunch time at the end of a game, like yeah, there could be some learning some training wheels early. So like getting that those reps in practice just be able to talk and draw, it is the art of coaching, it is a thing. So it’s a good follow-up by you.
Pat: 49:47
It’s definitely a different type of communication that, like you said, if you just kind of wait till the first game of the season to show it to your players, I think your players have to get reps to seeing how you draw and communicate on the board.
Dan: 50:00
If you get self-conscious and you can’t draw on the board, you could just yell them to play harder and blame it on them. You know, that always works too, yeah, or just slam the board yeah, slam it. Yeah, honestly, I really thoroughly enjoyed hearing the backstory on why they called it what they call it the last three from you know Hanover. And then we got to go back and find that Maui film.
Pat: 50:21
Yeah, I wrote that down Maui and Rodney Clark and then the tip in.
Dan: 50:24
So yeah, so tweet coming yeah.
We’ve been discussing this topic I think it just comes up all the time with off season and who’s getting high and who gets promoted and who gets jobs and who doesn’t, and you know, I think, just for us interesting. How does that happen? You know how some coaches always seem to be trusted, involved in jobs, and there’s a million factors that go into it. So it’s not just a straight path, but I do think that whatever circle you’re in right, there’s people that just become more trusted. And asking Brad about what goes into someone that he has seen grow in their career in the right way or the way they want to. So we were just thinking the specialty people, the people that are really great with he started, the social, emotional, and then, obviously, people that have just been through it for a while. So I’m going to kick it back to you. Since I asked a question, though, and had some of the follow ups, what was the takeaway for you there?
Pat: 51:20
For me. I like the angle he approached his answer with in terms of I think he approached it from like what would make a coach unique and that’s why he’s that kind of the specialist, the X and O guy or the one who has like a skill set, because he referenced you know they’re all very valuable. But in terms of when he watches coaches, every coach does something well, they have their niche, they know what they teach well, what they can coach, and of course they do it and so I like that approach. So to him that wasn’t necessarily something unique, but when it came to being battle tested, then of course the social, emotional part, he viewed that as something very unique and then obviously having value in that uniqueness. So that was my big takeaway. I like to approach the question I don’t think I was really thinking about it from a uniqueness standpoint. I always like asking these questions to coaches because they also are teaching us.
Dan: 52:09
Yeah, I like the caveat that he put on his start, which was he started the social emotional person that had me on that high IQ, on that or EQ. But I like to have you out of the caveat of it has to come with the great work ethic, obviously having someone who’s good with people but isn’t in their work and all the time you’re only going to get so far. I think that was valuable here, his thoughts in there on what it truly means to grow in a career, just beyond how you got to get out there and network and shake hands and meet people, because ultimately it’s about the work and about who you are on a daily basis.
Pat: 52:40
And so I just enjoyed here I’m talking about all those different things I enjoyed your follow up on that note about building relationships and networking and what he said with coach Donovan and just having perspective on your ambition, but also not just burning bridges in your attempt to climb the ladder.
Dan: 52:57
Exactly Reminding me of a couple years ago, we had Stan Van Gundy on and he talked at the end about the value of having friends, true friends, in coaching and how that’s. What makes it so valuable is that, yeah, you have assistants, you have people work for you, all that stuff, but really having friends in it is what makes it meaningful. So it kind of reminded me back of Coach Van Gundy. So, pat, a lot here today, but was there anything miswise or that we wish we had more time for other than what we already mentioned?
Pat: 53:24
Other than kind of the Blake Griffin conversation. I think we both would have enjoyed going further on. Nothing else for me.
Dan: 53:30
I’ll say for me his answer to our last question, which was what he was curious about, did spark some more interest for me of probably could have kept going down that rabbit hole of the motion and the three different ways that good offense is score.
Pat: 53:43
Yeah, I wrote that down installation, pick and roll and movement, kind of the three phases of being an elite offense.
Dan: 53:48
Yeah, so I guess he’s going to have to come back for round three. Sounds fine. Everybody. Thanks again for listening. Coach Stevens, we would thank him for coming on, wish him and the Celtics the best of luck this season. And, pat, there’s nothing else. We’ll wrap this up. Sounds good, all right, everybody, thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.