Slappin’ Glass is joined this week by 2023 National Champion Head Coach of DIII Christopher Newport, John Krikorian. The trio explore a variety of interesting areas including the art of practice planning and design, competition vs. 5 on O drills, and discuss Drop Coverage and “big game readiness” during the always fun “Start, Sub, or Sit?!”
Inside the Episode
“I think all of us as coaches [after practice], we walk up those stairs or down the hall to our office and you plop yourself on the chair. For me it’s usually a huge exhale of just exhaustion. I can’t even function after practice for a few minutes and I think it’s just the feeling of ‘did we get better? Did we do something that allowed us to get better? Was I connected to my players?’ And I think that’s a really important one. ‘Are we on the same page? Are we connected? Did they buy in to what we were doing today? Did guys run out of practice or did they stick around to do a little extra?'” – John Krikorian
We kicked off November in a very big way this week as we were joined by 2023 DIII National Champion Head Coach, John Krikorian. Coach Krikorian has his Christopher Newport squad also ranked #1 in the DIII preseason polls coming into this year as well, and we had a blast picking his brain on:
- Practice Design and Planning: Coach Krikorian details his thoughts on the art and science of a good practice, and how those thoughts have changed over the years. We discuss everything from how much time Coach Krikorian spends planning practice, to the balance of competitive drills and 5 on 0.
- Drop Coverage & Difficult Actions: Coach Krikorian has long coached teams who run effective Drop Coverages, and we had an interesting conversation discussing the actions that can give it trouble during “Start, Sub, or Sit?!”. Hear his thoughts on Popping Bigs and Mid Range Jump Shooters.
- Pre-Game Naps: We also dive into how Coach Krikorian prefers to stay fresh and ready for big games during “Start, Sub, or Sit?!”, and those in favor of a solid pre-game nap will enjoy his answer here.
Chapters
0:00 Exploring Practice Planning in Basketball
8:43 Balancing Competition and Practice Efficiency
13:02 Basketball Coaching Preparation and Practice Structure
21:34 Game Planning and Adjustments in Basketball
26:00 Coaching Strategies and Film Analysis
34:19 Pre-Game Routine and Defensive Strategies
41:08 Defensive Strategies and Adjustments
50:17 Investing in Coaching and Community Impact
52:39 Wrap Up
Transcript
John Krikorian: 0:00
I think all of us as coaches. We walk up those stairs or down the hall to our office and you plop yourself on the chair. For me it’s usually a huge exhale of just exhaustion. I can’t even function after practice for a few minutes and I think it’s just the feeling of did we get better? Did we do something that allowed us to get better? Was I connected to my players? And I think that’s a really important one Are we on the same page? Are we connected? Did they buy in to what we were doing today? Did guys run out of practice or did they stick around to do a little extra?
Dan Krikorian: 0:44
Hi, I’m Dan Cracorian and I’m Patrick Carney, and welcome to Slapping Glass, exploring basketball’s best ideas, strategies and coaches from around the world. Today, we’re excited to welcome Division 3 National Champion Head Coach, christopher Newport, john Cracorian. Coach Cracorian is here today to discuss all things practice, including preparation, game planning, drill design and more, and we talk pregame naps and defending the pop during the always fun start, sub or sit. The season is here, but we know that many coaches are already looking ahead at international trips in 2024 and 25. Ourselves, along with a number of former podcast guests, cannot say enough great things about our experiences working with Josh Erickson and his team at Beyond Sports Handling flights, hotels, game scheduling, excursions, service learning opportunities and more. Josh and his team provide unmatched service and support throughout the entire trip. To learn more about why more than 650 programs have trusted Beyond Sports, visit beyondsportstorescom and tell them. Slapping Glass and Censure. And now please enjoy our conversation with Coach John Cracorian. Coach, thanks so much for coming on the show. It’s a pleasure to have you. Congrats on all the success.
John Krikorian: 2:22
Really appreciate it, dan. It’s great to have somebody that can pronounce my name correctly, so I really appreciate that, pat, and dan.
Dan Krikorian: 2:28
You know, for years, when people hear my last name, they’ve asked if we were related and for many years it was oh no, I don’t know them. And since you guys won the national title, I just said oh yeah, uncle John, he’s the best.
John Krikorian: 2:43
You get 10% of free bow jangles that I got.
Dan Krikorian: 2:48
Coach, we’re excited to jump into a bunch of stuff with you today and we wanted to start with practices. All things, practices, practice planning, efficiency, frequency, duration, all that stuff. And so just to start, simply before we dive in your overall thoughts on how you prepare a practice plan, like what goes into when you sit down to put it together, what are the things that you think about before you hit the floor and put it all together?
John Krikorian: 3:13
I think over the years has really evolved when they said coaches love practice, players love the games. I think over the last, however long I’ve been doing this as a head coach 17 years maybe it’s shifted to where I really tried to create a practice that our players enjoy. They’re really competitive. I prepare a lot less in the preseason than I used to try to keep it much more nimble and on the fly. So you know we’ll have an idea what our team strengths and weaknesses are heading in and we’ll have an idea and I might script the first three practices and that would be a lot. After that there’s just a general guide of okay, we got by the first game, we got to have this many base OBs in, we got to have this in this. In Might be a general guide but within the daily practice I’m going to keep that very fluid and I might have our first practice of the year, throw everything out and on day two have something completely different. So practice planning to me is one of the most time consuming things that I do. I enjoy it. I’ve worked for coaches that gave it to the assistants. I’ve had some that prepared it for months in advance. For me it’s. I wake up in the morning and that is my day is I’m going to carve out as much time as I possibly can to nuance the practice to reflect the pulse of our team, what our needs are, what we need to accomplish, heading into our next opponent. It’s much more of an art than a science and I really enjoy it, whether it be the nuances of the matchups. We have a blue team and a white team, keeping people fresh, maybe keeping some players on edge. Hey, you’ve been on the blue team three days in a row. I’m going to throw him on the white team just to see how he responds to that. Or he’s been playing the wing and I’m going to throw him at the four position today just to see how he responds. There’s all that that goes into it the individual components of the players and then the structure of the practice. You know, depending on the group. Our group last year won a national championship. They did not really enjoy practice at all unless we were competing and I had to be careful because they would compete so hard that they’d wear themselves out before a game. So you know, our practices got to be very short and they would be competitive, but then we would get in and we would get out. I spent a lot of time on it. We’ll film every practice, especially the first six weeks of the year, and I will go home and watch every minute of the practice, from the 510 through the end, then spend the time. It might take me two to three hours to craft the practice. We have a quarter of the day. We have our basic foundational drills that are year to year, but very often we’ll just make drills up on the fly. I’m a big messy practice guy, just like I heard Damian Cotter on here. I’ve known for a long, long time. You know if we’ve perfected a drill, it’s time to throw it out, in my opinion, unless it’s really one of the foundational ones. So, just trying to figure it out and be creative and have the guys really enjoy, you know, when they finished practice they felt like they’ve competed, they’ve played in a game, they got better and you know they feel good about it.
Patrick Carney: 6:16
You mentioned, you kind of have changed your philosophy that you prepare a lot less in the preseason. So what influenced that, or why did you kind of change that philosophical shift?
John Krikorian: 6:26
I think that it’s such a dynamic game, and especially in Division III. You know we haven’t had a chance to be on the floor with these guys. You know it’s not like we’ve done a whole lot of preseason workouts. You’ve spent a lot of time with your players. You know we’re going to walk into the first practice. A freshman I thought was going to be a star is clearly not ready. I’m going to know that maybe within by the third day you know a returner who is an all-American, tears an ACL, like what are you going to do? You might think we’re pretty quick and athletic and then two weeks in you’re thinking yeah, but those guys aren’t going to play, they’re not as good as the other guys. Certainly, I have a general sense of what our strengths and weaknesses are and will start in a direction, but I never want to be tied to anything. I want to be nimble and prepared to go with the strengths of our players and that’s been my philosophy since day one is I’m going to recruit the absolute best players I can and then it’s my job as the coach to put them in positions to be successful, not to recruit players to assist them and then try to force feed. There’s only so many great players, let’s get as many as we can and let’s put them in positions to be successful. And you know why would I try to force players into a certain offense or defensive style if it wasn’t allowing them to be the very best? That’s getting myself off the hook. Why don’t I just change the offense? That’s my job.
Dan Krikorian: 7:46
You mentioned in the beginning about spending two to three hours of your day prepping for the actual practice. And of all that time that you spend, what do you find yourself spending the most amount of time thinking about?
John Krikorian: 7:58
Probably the pulse of the team is the greatest. I want to make sure we’re in a really good place to have a really good practice. It’s a blessing and a curse. We’re pretty lucky we practice in the middle of the day. Here we have a lot of evening classes. Like every Division III there’s gym constraints, so we’ve figured out a way to go in the middle of the day 12 o’clock, one o’clock most days. It doesn’t mean that I’ll have a player to leaving early or coming late, you know, like a lot of us do. So you know I got to factor that in as well. So each day I’m looking at, okay, who’s going to be here during the practice, and then we’re talking about the pulse of the team and so I’ll talk to my assistant coaches. They might have had breakfast with the players or had a study hall the night before and gotten some feedback generally how players feeling doing. I might get the pulse of the teams really tired. Might be a point in the season where we’re kind of hitting a wall or it’s feeling a little bit like a grind, and it’s going to be that way after about two weeks when these guys want to play somebody else but we’ve been grinding and we might go in and play Wiffleball. We’ve done that and then they love it. I mean, they love it so much, got him in the other day and wanted us to play the first day of practice. That could be a problem. Really, are there certain players that need to be challenged or tested or be given a little bit of a break because they’re carrying such a huge load. I might make John Hines, for instance, all American. He’s so competitive. If he’s practicing he’s trying to win. I might make him a sub on one of the teams and really he gets very few reps that day, just so he doesn’t burn out. So there’s definitely a lot more probably about the pulse and the players and the matchups, because we’re very matchup driven. Very quickly it’s all about our next opponent and I know we’ll probably talk about some of that in scouting and preparing, but very quickly it’s like okay, we’re going to play such and such a team and they’re going to run the Princeton offense. So this is about time to throw in a little three on three action, where we’re defending a split cut a couple different ways and making it competitive. And how do we want to do that? I might have players that can’t throw the pass might have the coaches throw the pass. We’re going to try to make it as efficient as possible and plus, we’re limited in time too, because we’re in the middle of the day, we might have to end at three. So I got maybe an hour and 45 minutes or two hours of good time, and I got to get it in when looking at the pulse of your players.
Patrick Carney: 10:10
You also mentioned that sometimes maybe you got to keep players on edge. What are the factors that go into determining that these players or this player keep on his edge, and how do you look to go about doing that in a practice?
John Krikorian: 10:21
That’s so much of a feel for all coaches. I mean you can easily point to players on your team that maybe you’re not practice guys, maybe they’re not given 100% in practice for whatever reason. Maybe they’re just not mature enough yet, not old enough. Maybe they’re young guys, maybe there’s guys that were in certain roles, but we know we’re going to need them to be in much bigger roles. We know what’s going to come with that. You watch the practice film and you see which guys are taking off plays. I’ll call them out on it. Then I’ll stick them in a drill and I’ll let the drill really be the teacher. For instance, rebounding is very important to us. If we see that a player maybe is not consistently going to the glass and that’s his job or not consistently checking out a body and going for rebound with two hands, that might be the day for a little two on two or three on three rebounding drill where I’m pretty certain that he’s going to get exposed, and then we’re going to keep him in there for a little while until he starts to feel it and his teammates see it. They realize, hey, this guy’s got to step it up a little bit. We did it the day before the championship game against Mount Union we stuck a guy. We called it the Gauntlet. We kind of just made it up late in the year. We stuck him in the Gauntlet because we knew it. I mean, we had no chance of being Mount Union if we couldn’t rebound the ball. And this particular guy we felt could give us more and we stuck him in there for six straight minutes to rebounding and just to make a point. And he got the point.
Dan Krikorian: 11:40
On a little bit of that note as the season wears on, or just maybe even preseason, doesn’t really matter. Five on O versus competitive drills, and when you kind of say the slice of the pie, how much do you prefer to be competitive, whether it’s five on five, four on four, three on three or whatever you love to do versus on air type of stuff to teach? Where do you try to find that balance?
John Krikorian: 11:59
Yeah, again, I really think the team they take it a little bit in terms of what they’re going to respond to and what they’re going to learn from and what can be effective. This has been my shift. I used to spend just countless hours on five on O and three on O and all this stuff and it’s shifted to be much, much less because I mean, the players don’t really want to do that unless you’re a timing team where you’re just bang, bang, bang, everything’s crisp. That’s not really how we play. So I would much rather have a shorter practice and have it be competitive and physical than a bunch of five on O stuff where they lose interest. There’s times we have to do it, but even now I’ll throw anybody I can even like some dummy defense in there just so they can see some bodies and have to make some decisions. You go to a division, one practice and you see they got five graduate managers out there doing the same thing. I think that any way that we can create decision making, even if it’s a little less than ideal, it’s still better than a lot of the five on O stuff that we do. So now a lot of the five on O is just kind of conditioning, getting up and down. So much more of the competitive nature. And one thing that we’ve always done is the day before a game is a competitive day for us. It’s not long, but it’s body on body, it’s physical. We’re playing the game at a high level the day before the game. I know some coaches make that a lighter day. That’s just not how we’ve done it. Our lighter day will be two days before the game typically, but the day before the game we’re going to get after it a little bit.
Patrick Carney: 13:26
On that note that you want to get quicker to being competitive, maybe shorter practices and efficiency. How do you think about the warm-up? And you mentioned the five-man weave. What role does the warm-up play and how do you think about using it within the framework of an efficient practice to get quicker to competitiveness?
John Krikorian: 13:43
So our structure is typically some sort of dynamic warm-up with the ball to start the practice. Now again we have guys coming in earlier. They might do some individual work, get some shooting. But when we start as a team, a lot of times it is like a five-on-no, five-man weave to a secondary break where we’re going to get up and down for five or 10 minutes. Certain days I’m at my buster chops about the passes, other days I’ll just play the music and let them go Again kind of the pulse of the team. So once they’re we say they have a good lather, once they’re kind of lathered up, we’ll come together for a very brief talk usually and then they’ll stretch for five minutes, maybe a static stretch, and it’s as much for the stretching as it is to get their minds right, because they know as soon as they come out of that stretch it’s going to be on, and so we’ll come right out of that and we’re going one on one and two on two, three on one. We’re going to build right up through a very competitive practice and so that’s kind of how we grow and work into it and then we’ll get to five-on-five when we usually finish. And one thing we’ve done the last few years it’s kind of been easier as a coach and it’s really helped us because it’s been more fluid. We’ll just throw three or four minutes on the clock and play, and then maybe after that one we’ll switch the teams and play again and we get some great end of game stuff in there. It’s always the end of the game. It might be an hour into practice and we’ve got 45 minutes left and that’s all we do. The rest of the way it’s like okay, three minutes, 60 to 60, tie score, everyone’s got three files and go and we’ll just play it out and then we’ll talk about it, then we’ll change the matchups and we’ll do it again. And or they might, you know, sometimes the guys they want oh, we’re going to run it back, you know. So I’ll let them run it back, I don’t care. You know, as long as they’re excited about playing. There’s a lot of good teaching opportunities there.
Dan Krikorian: 15:24
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John Krikorian: 16:19
I go back and forth on this, but a lot of my teams recently and I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but I could run a play 100 straight times 5 on 0 and then put defense on there and they would screw it up and they would all of a sudden forget where to go. So it’s like why did I waste all my time with that? Why didn’t we just put it in 5 on 5? So a lot of times now, if I want to put in a little quick hitter entry, I’ll just do it in that three-minute scrimmage and I’ll know that day. Okay, I want to try out a few things, because it looked good on paper, it sounded great in your podcast, but and then you do it 5 on 0 and everything’s great, and then you put it in there and you’re like actually, I don’t like that at all. So within our 5 on 5 scrimmaging, a lot of times there’s a timeout, there’s a dead ball. I’ll call a team over, I’ll draw it up and take a look, see how it goes, and then, if we liked it, maybe we’ll try it again now that the defense knows what’s coming. And then we’ll talk after practice and, hey, did we like that? Did we think that, okay, yeah, all right, let’s, we’re going to call that whatever, and then we might run with that for a little bit. Same thing with base. You know we’ll have our staple baseline out of bounds. But really throughout the course of the year we’re constantly throwing some things in 5 on 5 to see if we like them, if it matches our personnel, if the defense is caught off guard, if we can get 2 on the ball. So I spend much less time doing that stuff. 5 on 0, you know, unless it’s a real staple and if there’s something. Okay, we know we’re going to be this type of team. We do a lot of that with our five man weave and then the backside of that is our transition. We’ll rep that because it’s important for us to get a ball reversal and a paint touch. But maybe we’ll do some 3 on 0, 3 on 3 to teach it one specific decision. Okay, on this play we have a split cut and so we’re going to wear this thing out for 10 minutes today for two weeks because we think it’s going to be a staple. We might do that.
Dan Krikorian: 18:07
Coach, I’d love to pinpoint one specific part of practice that we talked about a little bit beforehand, and that’s prepping for an opponent. Right now, I guess we’re kind of talking about your overall team flow and play, but when we get to the season, you need to start preparing. What does that look like in a general practice, when you got to prep for someone?
John Krikorian: 18:24
It only takes about what, a week or two to start, and then everything’s about our opponents. Honestly, we have our non negotiables, our staples, the things we believe in. A huge part of our culture is game planning. Our players know it and they’re excited about it. They bought in. I think having a culture of game planning is as important as having a culture of switching or whatever it is that you believe in. The guys know like, okay, all right, coach, what are our options? This game, what are we doing? And by the second half of the year, as we walk them through a game plan okay, we’re playing so and so they do this, this, this and this. What are you guys thinking? Oh, coach, it sounds like we should do what we did against Virginia Wesleyan. It sounds like a very similar game plan. So you nailed it. Okay, this is what we’re going to do Trying to have them have the buy in and the empowerment and the engagement to really believe in what we’re doing. So, very early, it’s going to be about who are we open up with, and we’ll use our two scrimmages or exhibitions as trial runs. They could teach us a lot, because the goal for us by the end of the season is to have as many game plans in our bag of tricks as possible so that we can pull out the best and the best parts of those game plans. So we can’t get enough competitive opportunities. Like we’ll play our alumni game. That’ll be very serious because we’re going to try to get something out of that from a game planning standpoint. And so very early on two weeks in, we’re going to be looking at our first opponent, maybe our first as a staff. We’ll be looking at our first several opponents and making sure we have some things in our bag of tricks in terms of game planning, and this could be as simple as matchups and making sure we’re putting guys in different positions and guarding different positions. We are ball screen defense. We’re not going to play a lot of zone, but we’re going to morph our man to man into a lot of different looks in order to try to do something. Every year. I think I’m like probably most coaches. We’re going to go up tempo and we’re going to press a little bit and we’re going to have all these possessions and we’ll probably do that for a little while and then scale back as the year goes on. Play a lot of guys early. I think that’s important, though it might cost us early, but we’re going to really try to play a lot of guys early to see what they can do when the lights are on, because we’re going to need those guys at some point later in the year in all likelihood.
Dan Krikorian: 20:28
Coach, if I could follow up about the planning stuff and just for an example, if a team you’re going to play, let’s say, run’s a great stagger away series, something like that, and you want to rep that in practice, so your guys are prepared, how do you think about repping it five on five, three on three, whatever it is, so that they get the reps in those actions?
John Krikorian: 20:47
I’m probably a little more over three on three than a four on four guy. A lot of that is our defensive principles are not the old shell principles where we’re running a guy over on the baseline to help or to the middle. We’re very much a one-on-one team. We’re really not trying to require a lot of help. We are really really focused laser focused on not bringing two to the ball if at all possible ever. Which then means if you can’t guard, you can’t play here. It’s very, very hard. A lot of the actions then become really two on two or three on three, just to guard the specific action. Because you’re trying to get us to bring two to the ball and we’re trying not to do that. How are we going to guard this stagger? A lot of times it’ll be out of a three on three. Maybe we’ll throw it in a four on four. We’ll definitely do it out of five on five the day before A typical scout. If it was a normal Saturday game on Thursday, we would put in all of what we believed. Again, it’s not necessarily about your actions. It might be about your actions, it might be about your personnel, it might be about your defense. But if we think it’s about your actions. If we think that’s what your strength is and what you really want to do to hurt us, then two days before, we will wear that thing out but we won’t talk about players yet We’ll wear out that action so that every player has had multiple reps at all those positions to know exactly what we’re going to do with plan A and then, in likelihood, plan B. Okay, we’re going to do it the way we do it, which is, we call it ride the hip, you can call it trail it or whatever step off the screen, switch if necessary. All right, we’re going to do that. But then we might also beat the screen or top lock whatever you want to call it to not let the player come off the stagger. That’s going to be our plan B. We’ll go through it. So everyone knows all those things. And then the next day, when we install the personnel, now we’ll say okay, dan Cracorian, elite shooter, this is him coming off of this. We just did it yesterday. All right, let’s go, let’s try it, and we might do it out of five on five more the day before the game.
Patrick Carney: 22:43
With your preference to really avoid having two on the ball. How do you think about then defending bad matchups when you’re going into opponent that just has a superior matchup advantage?
John Krikorian: 22:53
That’s a huge part of our culture, our DNA. The time we talked about spending and preparing is making sure we don’t have an awful matchup, but you will have some players that are great players, that one-on-one. You’re going to have a really tough time, so that’s the fun part. Now we get into the game planning. We get Gordy Chesa. He’s my go-to. Once a year I’ll call him and you know how did you guard Jordan? And he’ll remind me how they did it here, there and everywhere. He’s unbelievable with great player defense, and so we’ll have all those things in our package. And then it becomes all right. What is the risk? I mean, it might be that we’re going to give this great player 30 and have nobody else play better than their average. And that’s the game plan, because we feel we have enough guys to throw at them. At least make them only moderately efficient. Or we might say, no, this player is just too good with the ball in their hands, so we’re going to have to double them in certain ways, deny them the ball and have a game plan that way, knowing that, okay, within their schemes and within our rotations, their fourth leading scorer is going to be the one taking all the shots. We’ll have a game plan to do that. You know we did that in our first final four in 2016 with Coach Towers team at St Thomas and his fourth or fifth leading scorer hit five jumpers from the free throw line, which was the one thing we were going to give up, and he made him. I think this is the fun part of game planning and culture with the team. You can’t take away everything. You’ve got to be prepared to take some risks and your team has to be bought in to know that we trust the coaches, we trust the plan. If they say we’re only going to give this thing up, then we’re going to give this thing up, and it doesn’t always work. You know we played a guy in 2012 named Dequan Brooks From Western Connecticut in the first round of the NCAA. He was the leading scorer in Division 3. He was the ninth leading assist guy in Division 3. We had nobody that could guard this dude, but we had a lot of decent defenders at the time and we said, all right, we’re going to let him go off, he might get 30. He might get 40. And we are going to just shut everybody else out. And we held Dequan Brooks to seven points in the first half he ended up with 52. And they beat us so it doesn’t always work.
Dan Krikorian: 25:00
Before talking to you today, a couple of your colleagues and people I know mutually have said one of the great things about using coaches is your ability to adjust mid game, like you’re one of the best coaches at just seeing what’s happened on the floor and adjusting to it. And within this conversation we’re having right now about game planning, and you’re talking about option A and option B. How does that now flow to the game when, between your players may be telling you about adjustments and your staff letting you know about adjustments? I mean, how does the whole thing work when you feel like you might need to adjust to plan B or C?
John Krikorian: 25:29
That’s a great question. It’s something that I’ve improved on a lot over the years and that’s from being around really good coaches working for some, and I think in this scouting as detailed as I try to be in the analytics of scouting it’s allowed me to really learn from the coaches I’m coaching against and realize how good they are, and I’ve competed against the best in Division 3 and you walk away ago. Okay, I just learned something from that guy and I think it’s something I’ve improved that I don’t know I’m sure there’s many that are better. My uncle, who is a huge influence, he coached and played a lot. I’ll never forget. He said there’s always a way to win the game. You just need to figure out how, and obviously this is all thanks to being somewhat equal talent. The high school team is not beating the Lakers, right, but if you’re in the general ballpark of talent, he’s right, and I didn’t really understand this till recently. There’s a way to win the game. It’s just a matter of if you can figure it out in time. Every time you lose a game as a coach, what do you do? You debrief with your assistants and you go. Oh man, assuming it was a close game if we would have done this, we could have won the game. So can you figure that out beforehand? That’s the trick, rather than wait till after the game. Can you figure that out during the game? Can your players respond? And I think that requires simplicity. Buy into those types of adjustments, culture and your willingness to take risks, which is hard. There’s a lot on the line. Are you willing to look yourself in the mirror after the game and say I just gave that dude 52 points because of this game plan? We just lost the game that I think we could have won because I mistakenly made this adjustment. It’s a lot of pressure, but if you and your team believe in what you’re doing and you can be open-minded during the game and you can allow some player input during the game, it can be a really fun way to play. So I think we’ve kind of done that. I think the simplicity is key. Mike Dean, a long time division one coach. I got to know him when he was back as an assistant at JMU. He’s quite a character and a great guy and was a heck of a coach. He would always say when you think, you stink. And we use that all the time. I think other people say, if you think too much, it slows your feet down, or some version of that. But it’s so true, and so we try to keep our schemes and our stuff so incredibly simple that adjustments are as simple as saying Pat, you and Dan are just going to switch this action now For the last four minutes of the game. We haven’t switched for 36. We’re going to switch it now. Farmingdale State. We should have lost to Farmingdale State in the first round this year and we were dead in the water and I was very stubborn in how we’re going to guard this ball screen and they were killing us and literally with two minutes to go, I think we were down six or something. We all looked at each other in the huddle and said, all right, well, we’ve got to do something or this thing’s going to be over, and so we decided to just double team the ball screen. We hardly ever double team ball screen. I don’t know how many teams you could just say that to and they would do it effectively. We had done it enough. The guys knew it was in the bag. We doubled it. I think we got two steals. We got a layup, cut it to two and, next thing you know we were able to get on top, but just very simple adjustments. Nothing complicated, nothing that we haven’t done before Although sometimes we’ll throw it in a game early in the year, we’ve never done it before and that’s kind of fun when you come out of a timeout and you throw a triangular two and you haven’t even practiced it, nobody knows what’s going to happen, right, but you know you might need it later in the year, so it’s like, well, why not give it a shot, or whatever. What we’re doing right now is not working.
Patrick Carney: 28:49
Prior to watching the practice film. You need to laugh at how you evaluate a practice and how you evaluate a bad practice in terms of what you game plan versus, maybe, the players, mentally, physically, when it comes to post practice evaluation.
John Krikorian: 29:03
That’s a great question and I wish I could tell you I had all these analytical tools that I use that break it down. I will have my assistant stat the practice. I might not get that for a few hours after the practice. We will keep regular statistics and then also several others that we’re going to focus on for that particular stretch of the season. So I will look at that before I watch the film or while I’m watching the film. I think all of us as coaches we walk up those stairs or down the hall to our office and you plop yourself on the chair. For me it’s usually a huge exhale of just exhaustion. I can’t even function after practice for a few minutes and I think it’s just the feeling of did we get better? Did we do something that allowed us to get better? Was I connected to my players? And I think that’s a really important one Are we on the same page? Are we connected? Did they buy in to what we were doing today? Did guys run out of practice or did they stick around to do a little extra? Because I don’t make them, so that also gives me a little sense. They’re tired. It was a bad practice. They didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be there. I should have given them a day off. What was I doing? So I really think it’s some combination of how I feel and the staff the look on my players face when we finish. Maybe they needed a practice to end in a way that I don’t think it’s something you want to do often, but maybe once every two months, maybe three times a season. Ideally, they leave practice on notice. We’re not going to accept tomorrow what we did today and let them know there might be some consequences to their laxadaisical effort or whatever it was, but that’s not something I think you want to do. You’ll go right to burnout if you’re doing that every day. So it’s way more of a field pat, and I try not to even dwell on it too too much until I watch the film, because I’m telling you, I think I have a pulse and I think I know what happened. And then this is why I don’t say much after games anymore Because I think I know exactly how it went down. And then I watched the film and I realized, oh yeah, no, that’s not exactly how it went down at all. It’s yeah, they executed really well. Maybe it was me that was out of my mind. It wasn’t the players, you know. So the film thing is so important to me and watching the film practice.
Patrick Carney: 31:18
Has that made you a better coach?
John Krikorian: 31:20
Oh yeah, I mean film is. Since the day I got into this business has been. You know, friend Delphi was a film guy. He had it rolling in his office 24 seven. He just always watching something and I think that early on breaking down Princeton offense when I was a pen, and having to slow it down and slow it down and slow it down and rewind and watch again and clip it up and try to find patterns, you know, just over time that’s made me a better coach. Watching my team, you know. Watching the practice, yeah, I mean I love it. Now that you got these computers, you know it’s like you just bring it home, you sit on the couch, you watch it all night long. It’s an incredible tool. Now I do think that there’s so many ways to watch film. Now I think you have to be judicious about what you watch, how you watch it and what you value. I think synergy is great, but I don’t think it tells the whole story and I think it’s very limiting in a lot of ways. So you know I was an old sports code guy, game breaker, sports code, the West Coast deal. We were on the ground floor with that stuff. It’s incredible, we don’t even have it now and it’s really frustrating to me that I don’t have it, because you can clip anything. I think clipping what you value and watching that and putting that into your brain is more important than some guy in a room clipping up what he thinks is important and then you having to decipher it.
Dan Krikorian: 32:35
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 roundtables, 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, this has been awesome so far. Thanks for all your thoughts there. We want to transition now to a segment on the show we call Start, Sub or Sit. So for those maybe listening for the first time, we’re going to give you three options Ask you to start one of them, sub one of them and sit one of them, and so, Coach, if you’re ready, we’ll dive into this first one. Let’s do it. As previously mentioned, you guys walked away last year with the Division III National Championship and you had a lot of big games on your way and I know you’ve played a lot of big games in your past. So this first Start, Sub or Sit has to do with your own personal big game readiness routine. We all know how it feels the day of a big game as a coach, and so these three options would be things that are important to you the day of a game personally. So Start, Sub or Sit big game readiness. Option one is getting exercise. Option two is taking a nap sometime in the day. Or option three is your nutrition throughout the day, what you eat when you decide to eat before a big game.
John Krikorian: 34:35
Oh, that’s good, I’ll start exercise. I know that I will be in a better mental state if I’m able to do that. I don’t always get to do that, but we’ll wear it home. Almost every game I’ll go down and just I’ll shoot free throws for like 30 minutes, you know, before the game Sometimes I’ll go for a run, sometimes, if I can, I’ll hit some golf balls. That’s very helpful to me. I have a little routine at home. The road gets a little bit harder to do that, but you know, I might just go for a walk or a jog around wherever we are on the road. So I would definitely say that I am a nap guy and that’s probably my counter to exercise on the road. Is that nap? Whether it’s on the bus, I’m one of those guys. I hit the bus. Once the bus hits 50 miles an hour I’m out. So if we’re staying an hour away from the game or whatever, yeah, I definitely appreciate a good nap, especially you’ve been up all night studying film for these games. Sub is the nap. Yeah, my nutrition during the season is just awful, so we’ll sit that. I don’t even try to pretend. It’s just absolutely terrible. I don’t know what else to tell you about that. As long as I can crank up some diet coach before the game, I can usually get back on even ground. But yeah, I’ll eat fried food. I’m a comfort food guy. Some people get stressed and they don’t eat and that’s really good for them and they lose weight during the season. I am the complete opposite. I put on weight and then I got to spend the entire spring and summer trying to get to a decent place and then it starts all over again.
Dan Krikorian: 36:04
Well, it’s good you started exercising.
John Krikorian: 36:06
Yeah, it helps a little bit.
Dan Krikorian: 36:08
Yeah, it’s always the interesting question on routine before games for coaches and obviously trying to kind of manage the stress level. And how about after the game, though, for you trying to come back down, and I know you’re going to probably watch film or whatnot, but is there anything different? I guess you do after, before going to bed at some point that night.
John Krikorian: 36:24
I’ve really had to work to shut it down. And it’s not easy and I can’t say that I’ve been super successful at it. I’ve gone through stretches where I’m not going to be able to go to bed unless I watch the film, and that’s probably my go to. Is that whenever it is that you get to the end of the night or you get home before on the bus, we usually watch it as a staff because I just want to get that box checked as soon as possible because it’s all my brain Like did that really happen? Did this happen? Did this happen? I think I’m much more likely to do that if I didn’t think we played well or we lost. I’ve gotten a little better at. If we have a good victory and I know that we played well, I might just let that one sit because I’m already getting on to the next team and that’s what I have to find myself fighting myself on. That is you know we play Wednesday. Saturday game ends on Wednesday. We’re on the bus with the pizza and we’re queuing up Saturday’s opponent. This game’s already gone. You know we won. We played decent enough. We got to get this game plan going because, again, we’re going to spend two days on it. I got to get started on this next team. It’s just like you know. It just doesn’t stop. It’s really hard to bring it down. I will throw on some TV. It’s finally late at night. You’re watching film and I’m like I just got to find something stupid on TV to get my mind. Netflix or just something dumb for 20 minutes, so I cannot think about basketball or my opponent or whatever.
Dan Krikorian: 37:46
Thanks for answering this question, coach, and being open about this. I think it’s always helpful to hear another coach’s routine, especially someone who’s coached in national championship games. Pat and I are also thinking about this, maybe in the sense of your team and your guys and getting them and keeping them ready, and this sort of balance of being loose versus being prepared and ready to go If it flips to the team now. How do you think about keeping them ready?
John Krikorian: 38:10
Obviously they’re the ones you know. They got to be physically and mentally prepared, sharp and ready to go. We feed them pregame meals, where we’re making sure they’re eating at a certain time for us it’s four hours prior to the game. Pretty steady with what we do and this goes back. I mean this is now 30 plus years. This is brand Duffy. We had chicken parm before every game and we pretty much still do that Now. I’ve given them the option of chicken Alfredo, but we pretty much have chicken parm or chicken Alfredo before every game, with a salad and always water, nothing crazy. We always have tons of bananas and Gatorade available to them, maybe some snack bars for pregame and halftime. That’s kind of just if they need a quick refresher there. You know, obviously we’re on the road. We try to get them to sleep. You know I don’t take their phones anymore or anything like that. We just generally talk about sleep. There was a time that we did sleep studies and we had a couple guys wearing wearables that we knew were not sleeping well and because I do value it greatly for them especially, we talk about it. Like I said, we’ve used some technology at times to help some guys that struggle to sleep and then, as a coach, our job is like just try to take as much off their plates as possible, give them downtime. You know I don’t dominate their time and I think that’s really been a shift for me over the last 30 years. I really respect their time. I think different players need different things. Some of them might want to exercise. I have guys on the road. They’ll go in the weight room and pump some iron in the morning of a game because that’s what they want to do. I have other guys that are going to sleep every second they possibly can. It’s about how they perform and what makes them feel good. So I really try to give them as much time as possible, and I do. I build in. So if we play a four o’clock game, we’re going to be done everything that we do, usually by about one o’clock. I’m probably more like 12, 12, 30. So as soon as they’re done eating, they’re good until they got to be there for the warm up. So a lot of guys will take an app. They’ll shut it down and I encourage that. I think that makes perfect sense when you’re talking about having to be at their best, not at four o’clock, they got to be at their best at 545.
Patrick Carney: 40:17
All right, coach, moving along, our next start subset. Going back to the court, we like to ask you about your drop defense. We’re going to give you three player types and this will be the toughest to defend when playing a drop. Defensive coverage in the pick and roll Is it a scoring ball handler, is it a popping big or a rim threat?
John Krikorian: 40:38
screener. Yeah, I think for us it’s been the popping big. Starting in the popping big, those guys, if they ghost it well, if they can pick and pop well and get a lot of separation, that can create some problems for our forward. Getting back out there to that three point shot. And that’s, for me, our philosophy defensively. If you looked at our numbers over the last several years, I mean the three point shot. The reason we drop coverage is to protect from the three point shot. I don’t want to bring a third player involved. You look, we gave up I think 5.2 threes a game this year. On average over the past several years we’re at five, five and a half, maybe close to six. But we don’t want to give up threes. Our whole team goes crazy when we give up three. Everyone’s mad at everybody. When we give up three, they’re all yelling at each other. I’m yelling it down there, you’re yelling at me. So if you get this pick and pop big, it runs out there and hits three threes, we’ll have no choice but to change the match up and switch it. So that’s probably the hardest one. If you look at teams that hurt us, like Washington and Lee had us beat for the last two years pick and pop bigs it’s those guys that have been the hardest for us to guard. You know, I would say the scoring guard would be the sub, although it’s probably a tie. The rolling big, I think would be bigger if we translated the drop to a higher level, like if we were playing against a whole bunch of high level D1 guys or NBA guys where they’re throwing lob dunks over that guy. But we don’t see that a lot. So the rolling bigs typically aren’t nearly as much of a threat in terms of what we see. So I guess the scoring guard we’re generally going to give them the mid-range jump shot for the most part. But if they’re really crafty and they can get in there and score and pass, if you have an elite guard, I would say more than just scoring. If you have an elite guard like Buzz Anthony at Randolph-Macon, our drop coverage is absolutely nothing to stop him. We had to make adjustments for the great guards, so that would be the sub. The rolling big is definitely. We watch your big to roll. We’re fine with that typically.
Patrick Carney: 42:35
With the pop. How will you try to solve it before if you have to make the final adjustment of just switching it?
John Krikorian: 42:41
So what I love about the drop coverage? Several things. One, I think it’s helped us to defend the three, which is really important. It keeps us in good rebounding position, which is also very, very important to us, and not running my big way out there away from the basket, it limits assisting. Which is really important to us is we don’t, if you look at our stats, we really try to make you play one on one. The biggest thing, I think, is the flexibility. So if our big knows how to drop and we work on it every day and if they’re somewhat effective at it and we’ve had some really elite ones it allows us to not just drop but we can then week it. We can go weekend, which we do and have done quite a bit, even on the wings and it really can keep guards off balance. We might do that. We can ice it all over the floor and not let them get to it. Potentially, as an adjustment that we will make and I like to do that Usually the last option is switch and then really the option before that is probably the sub out, my five who can’t do it, or put them on somebody else. I mean, forget what game it was. It must have been Wheaton in the Elite 8. They were just killing us and so we put our shop locker Trey Barber on one of their guards. Then we put a more of a four man on their bag, and so it was a much easier switch to take care of that situation and we had to just live with, you know, maybe their third or fourth leading score going against our center and he actually did a pretty good job with it, it worked. But against Washington Elite, for instance, if you watch that game, we had no choice but to take out our center, who he couldn’t get out to their bags, who could really shoot the ball.
Patrick Carney: 44:11
Cook, you don’t want to give up threes. This is where you’re going to drop. Keep it to one. Two, do you think at all about tagging rollers or tagging maybe the short roll? Or, if the ball is going to the loaded side, a two man, or if it’s an empty side, any sort of on ball help coming from your top guard there or the guard at the nail? Or is everyone really just staying home?
John Krikorian: 44:30
Yeah, it’s personnel based. If it’s split up top, we are not wanting to bring over that next guard for that easy, right in front of you driving kick three to us. That is the worst scenario. I mean, if you beat us on a couple of pick and rolls again, it’s what you’re willing to live with. Now, if it becomes something that you’re really hurting us on, fine. But three or four pick and rolls over the course of a game is eight points and we’re okay with that. Even you know empty side. And then if we have to make an adjustment, we can do it in a lot of different ways. You might have a player on the floor who’s not an elite three point shooter and so we might just spy that guy. We might just kind of say, ok, you’re going to be the automatic help guy on all this stuff, and we might bring him in to help on all that. So a lot of our three point defense is personnel based more than just. I don’t mind giving up threes to guys that can’t shoot them, you know all right.
Patrick Carney: 45:20
For sure. What level of drop do you ask for your big? Is he up to touch and then dropping back? Does he even follow the screener up? What is his depth of?
John Krikorian: 45:28
drop. Yeah, no, that’s a great question. It’s also another reason I like drop because it’s consistent with our off ball screening and again, when you think you stink, and everything for us is simplicity, I want our guys to be so confident and proactive because they know exactly and they’ve done it a million times and so when you screen, we step off the screen. If you down screen, fade, screen, ball screen, it is the exact same movement for our defender on the screen and that’s to step off into space. At one time we used to call it zoning up, but now you’re a helper, you’re helping on a drive and you’re helping on a curl, or you’re helping on a back cut. You’re the helper now and that’s why we’re susceptible to if your screener is a great pop, that is the weakness, but if he’s just an average popper or not at all, we step off. We’re there to help on all that action, and so it’s really kind of like again, it can change game to game, player to player, but middle of the lane, more than an arms length away from the screener, for sure, often to the ball. Just like you are a help defender and then if you drive into me or you curl into me and you are making a move to the basket, we’ll just switch it. It is a switch out of necessity, not out of want. We don’t want to switch. If it’s happening too much, it means there’s either a problem with my defender on the cutter or the guy with the ball, or maybe that is just a really elite action. It will have been something we worked on a lot heading into that game, if they’re that good at it.
Dan Krikorian: 46:58
Kind of tying back to practice in our first conversation. If your team that prefers to drop most of the time and then you’re going to face an opponent that’s going to switch your heads or double, how do you get quality reps, say, in that action, if your guys are not used to doing the thing that your scout is doing, being such a drop team? And then you also mentioned the adjustment to doubling in the NCAA tournament game how do you rep the sort of non-major things you’re going to do?
John Krikorian: 47:23
Yeah, well, you’ve got to get a coach on here. It’s a lot smarter than me to answer this question. This is the conundrum we all have is that there are things that you believe in as a coach and you don’t want to deviate from those things. These are non-negotiables. So you do them day after day after day after day, and which means you’re playing against them day after day after day after day, and you get comfortable playing against them and your players see that and it absolutely has impacted us. The first time we’ll play a team that hard hedges or jumps out and doubles us off the ball screen or whatever it is, or presses because we don’t do that, or gambles for steals Probably the biggest one that we see is, if you look at our numbers, we’re very average or below average at getting steals. We don’t gamble. It’s part of our culture. We try to be very solid. And then when we face a team that’s very aggressive in jumping passing lanes and digging for balls we don’t see that every day it takes a little bit of time. We do what we can. We’ll try to drill it, we’ll throw some stuff in there. But you’re right, I mean, that’s one of the hardest things and something over the course of the season as your team that grows and learns. You try to look ahead as a coach and go okay, the best teams that we’re going to face, the teams that we know we’re going to have to beat to get to where we want to go. We’re going to have to be prepared for these several things that are different than what we do and we’ll have to mix it in there and to practice a little bit. Right Again, we have the ability, with a little four minute scrimmage, I’ll have my assistant coach take the one team and, all right, hey, hard hedge every screen for these four minutes, just today this time. But we won’t really do that until a little bit later in the year, until we feel that everyone has our foundational defense down. We’re true to who we are. And then you know, like the switching thing, I was in the Damian Cotter great interview and they like to switch early. We won’t switch anything early because our matchups are so important to us that we won’t do it until much later in the year when, yeah, I think it’s required but, if at all possible, we’re going to keep our matchups.
Dan Krikorian: 49:18
Coach, you’re off the start subbersit hot seat. Thanks for going through those. That was a lot of fun, Coach. We got one last final question for you before we do. Congratulations again on a great season. I know you’re looking forward to this one as well. You’re welcome back any time and thanks for your thoughts today. Thanks, coach.
John Krikorian: 49:35
Thanks for having me guys. This is great. You guys. There’s a reason that you guys have the best basketball podcast out there. You’ve done your homework, you asked the right questions. Really good stuff. Appreciate it. Yeah, thank you.
Dan Krikorian: 49:44
Coach. Our last question that we asked every guest on the show is what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career as a coach?
John Krikorian: 49:51
If, it’s okay, I’m going to take the liberty of having two answers to that question, but please, you know, I think the very first is that you have to invest in yourself and as a profession and a career, you’re deciding where you want to go with this. As a college coach, do you want to be an assistant for a long time? Do you want to move up to division one? Do you want to be a head coach? Like what is it that you got in this for? What are you looking for? It’s not just going to happen For me. I knew early on that I wanted to be a head coach and so the first opportunity I got at Merchant Marine coming out of Navy was an investment in myself. I got to see if I can do this. That was a big risk. You know, 30 years old, I’m going to New York. If I lose, I’m done Right, it’s over. The experiment’s over. When I left the business world at 23 years old to become a GA, I mean that was an investment in myself to go for it, and you got to have an unshakable confidence and belief in yourself and you have to prepare. Knowing that college coaching is, it’s got to be one of the hardest professions to be successful. You’ve either been fired or you’re about to be, is what they say. There’s a lot of pressure and you got to every day be thinking about how can I be better than my competition? More importantly, how can I be the best version of myself? You got to invest. You guys are doing that with this podcast. You’re doing it. You’re becoming better coaches. And then it goes to my second point You’re making a difference in the basketball community. It’s something I’ve tried to invest in everywhere I’ve been, and that is to invest in the community, the campus community and the greater community. I think it’s so important. Winning and losing basketball games is great and that’s the competitive part of what we do. But, like I tell my guys all the time, when these kids come to our camp which we have grown since I got here they don’t really care whether we won or lost. These kids are looking up to our players and coaches as role models, and the impact and influence that we can have on these kids by being college athletes and coaches is really significant. And so that’s the community. We live here in Hampton Roads, virginia, I think, for 13 years. I have an assistant coach, roland Ross, who has been here for a long time has helped me really navigate our community extremely well and it has been so rewarding. You know, when you’re a coach and you go into the grocery store and you see a kid from camp and he knows your name, and when a parent comes up and said, hey, we saw your player at the Lowe’s last week and he was just so nice he remembered little Billy’s name. You get those letters and emails from people in the community that follow your team and have been to your camps and your games and your clinics. I mean that’s what it’s all about, much more than whether we won a championship or not. It’s really about that impact on the community that we can have and it doesn’t just happen. You have to make the investment, you have to be out there, you have to meet people. I think that’s something that’s been really rewarding for me as a coach, especially here in Hampton Roads.
Dan Krikorian: 52:48
Alright, pat, you know coach reporting and besides having the best name in basketball, it’s what he’s done at Christopher Newport. I mean, they’ve risen to become one of the best programs in division three men’s basketball, obviously with the National Championship last year, and you’ve been wanting to get them on the podcast for a while and those rates finally have them on here. So I got just a ton of takeaways that we’ll dive into.
Patrick Carney: 53:12
So before I do anything from your end like you, a lot of stuff highlighted takeaways here. I will say I think, before we hopped on, I just enjoyed that we started the conversation about practice planning and then ended it with game planning and scout specific stuff. Really cool conversation. I always enjoy where these conversations go, where they end up and what we end up hitting on.
Dan Krikorian: 53:33
Yep To your point. I mean I think this is the fun part about the podcast and there’s different ways to do podcasts. The way we’ve structured this one is we don’t have set questions ever For the guest. We have what we call our first bucket or we have like a general idea which we kind of talked to the coach about beforehand, but there’s no set questions and we thoroughly enjoy and tell them. If you go on a tangent or if we find something, we’ll just follow it. And sometimes it’s more difficult, probably for them and for us, because you just don’t have a set amount of questions to ask and answer. But I think sometimes more fun for us to find rabbit holes, like you just mentioned.
Patrick Carney: 54:07
Yeah, and usually those end up being the better conversations, or the more, let’s say when we go look back, the more memorable conversations is the stuff we aren’t planning on going to until we kind of just get stuck there.
Dan Krikorian: 54:19
Hopefully, if we do our job correctly, after a while you just all three of us forget we’re on a podcast and we’re just talking hoops. So hopefully we do our job more often than not. But let’s dive in. There’s a lot here and I’ll kick it back to you. On our first theme, our first bucket of practice planning and your takeaways, the things I highlighted.
Patrick Carney: 54:37
I love how he listed all of his considerations that went into him preparing a practice plan and kind of the big things that I took away is preparing a lot less than the preseason, why he likes to do that, or the philosophical change taking the pulse of the team. I like keeping players on edge and then managing competition and then at the very end you hit on it a little bit with drills. But maybe something I would have liked to pick out a little bit more when he said if you’ve perfected a drill, maybe it means it’s time to throw it out and keep things messy. I really like that saying. Wrote that down too.
Dan Krikorian: 55:08
Yeah, and maybe I’ll do like a zoom out before I zoom back in for a second, because I always enjoy. You could sense throughout that first conversation you could kind of hear his current philosophy and he did a good job of reverting back to when he was a younger coach and his own evolution as a coach when it comes to all this stuff in the sense of five on O versus competition, five on five and all that, and so you could kind of hear that throughout. He brought up our conversation with Damian Cotter from the Chicago Bulls and the messy practices and you just kind of touched on it too. That was one of my big takeaways is it doesn’t have to be perfect and sometimes that messiness is good to learn and to teach. And coach Cotter had said if you have a perfect practice and I know other coaches on the podcast have discussed this too you can have a perfectly detailed practice and everything gets done and it looks good and then you get done at the end. Did we really learn? Did we really get better, or was it just like a nice efficient looking practice? And I thought coach Gracourian talked on that really well. And one last point on that too is I just enjoy hearing the evolution and really how they think about getting to know their team year by year too, because he mentioned he spent so much time thinking about the practice and he said he spends just as much time planning and preparing as he does actually on the floor, and that was a big takeaway. Too is part of a do I know my team? I think you said the very end. When you walk away, am I connected to my players and like, what do they need today and how does this practice reflect that? So that was another one for me.
Patrick Carney: 56:39
Yeah, on that similar note too, when we tie back to his preparing a lot less in the pre-season, a lot of coach anxiety is not the right word. But where do I start pre-season, what do I do? And kind of his approach he of course has a general direction. You don’t just kind of get out on the court and figure it out why, but like using the first couple of days to really evaluate, learn your team and that they will kind of tell you what’s best, where we should go. Like he said, not being tied to something where, yeah, after like two weeks, because you’re tied to it but it’s now you’ve realized we should change it and you’ve just spent two weeks, let’s say, doing something that doesn’t fit your guys. So like his approach and, like you said, just his shift from what he’s learned and gathered over the years, absolutely.
Dan Krikorian: 57:24
And then the other thing that was great. So then we kind of had this tangent that went into scouting and how they look at the defensive prep, and I really enjoyed that. That’s always something for myself interested in in the sense of how do you get your team ready, the balance of continuing to get your own team ready, doing what you do, but also, okay, we’re gonna take a portion of practice and prepare for our opponents. He mentioned his kind of two-day preparation and how detailed they are, and so that was great to hear a lot of good takeaways on just how much time they spend on it. And then he was gracious and I was asking some follow-ups on specific actions and how you break that down. And you heard a little bit of his preference for three-on-three and it crept into. What we talked about later was the non-switching, so it built into that stuff. Anyway, there’s a lot of good stuff in that defensive kind of game planning part.
Patrick Carney: 58:13
I enjoyed the conversation when we talked about just because he was so matchup driven and their preparation and their scout, but in the considerations he takes into account when they do face a bad matchup, and I think that’s where we then got into the adjustments. But I think it’s always the age-old decision Do you let their best player just cook and try to do the other four, or is it yeah, okay, we gotta take them away, but make their fourth best player? And he gave great examples of where that fourth best player hit like five shots and they lost. And then he let their best player cook and he had 52 and they lost. So I mean it just goes to show. I mean it’s such a fun and miserable game at times.
Dan Krikorian: 58:52
Yeah, exactly that best player that hit those five jumpers, that was coach Johnny Towers St Thomas team that we had on the podcast a little bit earlier in the summer. So thanks for connecting that back to coach Towers D3 days, I mean.
Patrick Carney: 59:04
I think these are all the things we think about is when we’re putting together a strategy and what you’re willing to live with and who’s gonna beat you. And I think that bled in nicely with and when your follow-up of like, okay, well, now you’re in a game, maybe the game plan isn’t quite working and they’re beating you in a certain way, and how he thought about adjustments and to me I thought the framework kind of used in terms of a road out and just being simplistic, having the culture that creates the buy-in for you to make adjustments, and then, of course, your willingness to risk and take a chance.
Dan Krikorian: 59:35
And that was a great part where he talked about his uncle being a good influence on him or a huge influence on him, and that quote about there’s always a way to win the game and just always in his mind about that’s why they prep so much and that’s why they have plan A and plan B, I’m sure a plan C or D as well, and but to your point and those three things too, you’re right, being as simplistic as possible allows you to make that adjustment. Like you mentioned, that we’re just gonna switch the last four minutes or like in that game in the NCAA tournament they’re behind and then they just need to make the adjustment to start blitzing the pick and roll. So, yeah, really good in there. And just background on that too. We did talk to some coaches before who’ve played against him over the years and they did mention they’re great at being able to adjust in the game as well, but that’s not by accident, obviously. Like those things need to be practiced and wrapped out, and so you got a sense of that in that first bucket.
Patrick Carney: 1:00:27
And so I wrote down. You said if you think you stink in terms of considering adjustments to make, and why simple is better, absolutely Moving to start subberset.
Dan Krikorian: 1:00:36
We had fun coming up with these as well, watching the film and myself knowing them from the D3 World at great drop coverage team, the great defensive team, and so that was one of them. But before we get to the drop coverage, the big game readiness was one thinking about all the different ways that coaches can prepare for a game and we all know the stress level the day of the game, especially these big games, and so fun to hear that I’ll just take the first crack at it. Interesting, he sat nutrition and I always say that is the struggle, I think, with being on the road and not knowing where your food’s coming from and totally get that. But I was interested in his exercise and I think we’ve heard that over and over, with coaches just trying to find some way before a game to get out and to ease attention. A little bit was good to hear.
Patrick Carney: 1:01:19
Especially when you get into season play it can become a little bit of a hamster wheel. Important to hear how coaches not only before a game through the week but you’re followed to with post game and just how coaches are trying to manage the stress or come down off of the high, the adrenaline of a game and it’s always a challenge. But I think it’s super valuable to hear how these coaches try to navigate it the best they can and the challenges they face. When he said like he’s a stress eater and his eating’s always gonna be shitty but he tries to take care of it and he’s with the nap and exercise, it’s a struggle. We all go, we get into it.
Dan Krikorian: 1:01:54
Yeah, and I enjoyed him answering the question too. It reminded me of I think we asked coach Meg Griffith from Columbia about sort of the post game stuff and get done late at night. He mentioned he’s gotta watch the film and then maybe after that try to just watch anything to take your mind off of it. I definitely have felt that before trying to come down after the game and keep yourself mentally prepared for that next day. So good stuff there. Let’s turn to the drop coverage. It was fun to come up with what. We had like three or four different drop coverage questions and we settled on this one because it’s always interesting to hear what gives it issues and I’ll kick it back to you. But his start was great with that pop. I think we’ve heard that a bunch of times. That pick and pop big can really be a stress on a drop coverage defense.
Patrick Carney: 1:02:35
Yeah, most recently with coach who’s Matteo, real Madrid, and when they dropped Tavares and how hard it can be to handle that pop. So appreciate coach’s thoughts, his philosophy behind why they pop, and obviously they don’t wanna give up. Three stay out of help. He thinks it puts them in good rebounding position, which makes sense if you’re not helping, if everything’s staying in front or with the hedge, you’re giving up a numbers advantage. And then two he said that limiting assisting and the emphasis they place on just cutting back on the opponents assist right. So enjoy hearing his whys and then I enjoyed getting into how he looks to before he’ll just switch everything, solve the popper A guy who can do damage pop and think about icing it or weaking it. So maybe the ball handler is not using the screen or maybe it’s just a harder pass using the weekend to try to get it to the pop, cause I think that’s the kind of the million dollar question. Like, all right, if we’re gonna drop, how can we solve it outside of just switching it or getting better personnel on it, isn’t?
Dan Krikorian: 1:03:32
always the case, right? Yeah, you don’t always have the better matchup or the person that can come in and do it. And he mentioned the pop and all that and also, too, I think he mentioned well, like, how good of a pop and shooter are you? I think this is why the NBA does a lot too. So they drop the big pops and maybe they take a few threes a game, make one or two. Is that gonna really really beat you over the course of the game? I mean, probably not. I think it’s why it obviously goes to personnel or whatnot. But I know a lot of these coaches think about giving up that three point shot and of all the people to give up a three point shot to in a possession. If you drop, you stick with the wings and the guards and you have a low 30%, mid, 30% big shooting it. Well, he’s not often it’s rebounding and he’s shooting it from an average percentage from the threes. Maybe that’s a win for your defense and, like he mentioned, you have inside read how he’s positioned. So a ton of great points. I liked he did break down the reasons that they drop, like you just mentioned. I think that’s great to hear the overall thought process on this.
Patrick Carney: 1:04:29
I like the point you just raised. If they’re gonna pop and you shoot three or four and it reminds you back to our conversation with coach Heights when he thought about recruiting pick and pop format and what that really means and it’s so much tied to, like their actual percentage but the rate at which they shoot. So, like you said, if they’re only gonna shoot three or four, I mean maybe on the best day they’re gonna make two to three, but that’s not gonna kill you. Now if they’re gonna take seven, then maybe there’s gonna be a problem. There’s your adjustment, then you make the adjustments. But for me it’s been enlightening to terms of thinking about that getting off a percentage and more so about the rate. You know which the other team is willing to shoot that three with. Let’s say, in this case they’re popping four or five. You know whoever they have in that position.
Dan Krikorian: 1:05:10
Absolutely, as we kind of start rounding this out, any misses from your point of view or stuff we wish we had more time for.
Patrick Carney: 1:05:16
Not really. I mean, I alluded to a little bit when he said to that perfect drill and then time to throw it out. I would have liked to maybe pick on that a little bit more, but you followed up with a drill question too, so is it a miss or maybe a follow up? I should have asked other than that nothing.
Dan Krikorian: 1:05:29
So for me I would two things. One you know he mentioned his yearly phone call with a past podcast guests in Gordy Chiesa. I would just love to be a fly on the wall in those conversations with those two guys. Coach Chiesa a couple of years ago had just a phenomenal conversation with us and lucky to stay in touch with him from time to time. His Twitter is awesome. He’s always thrown out great quotes, so we’d love to just be a fly on the wall there. But the other miss and it’s just something we didn’t have time for. But in all of our start subsit questions there was another potential option to start subsit that we did not ask him that I would have just loved to and that’s to have him do with their post defense. And they’re analytically phenomenal defending in the post and I just wonder some of the technique that goes into guarding the post. I mean, they were one of the best in division three. They had a great defensive post shop locker that they had in that drop coverage too, so that surely helps. But I would have loved to maybe follow up with how are you guarding so well in the post, and are the principles you know kind of similar to some of the other stuff, but not coached for Corrine’s fault? I never asked him so. Other for Corrine’s fault? Yeah, exactly, it’s this for Corrine’s fault. Well, pat, if there’s nothing else, we can kind of start wrapping this up here. Sounds good. Well, once again, congratulations to coached for Corrine, national Champions last year. I know they’re looking forward to a great year this year. We thank everybody for listening and we’ll do this again next time. Thanks everyone. Thank you so much for listening to this episode.