Cody Toppert on Expected Possession Value, Skill Application, and Defending ISO Mismatches {Capital City Go-Go}

Chapters

0:00 Improving Decision-Making in Basketball

4:18 Randomization in Basketball Training

9:43 Player Development

21:13 Analytics in Basketball

27:23 Analyzing Decision-Making and Cognitive Testing

36:48 ISO Defense and in-Game Communication

45:27 Effective Communication and Timeouts in Basketball

56:37 Wrap Up

Transcript

Cody Toppert: 0:00

And maybe I’m 10 years down the road. This is where development goes. But having the conversation now, I think, is interesting, because for too long it’s just oh, he made it or oh he missed it, or he turned it over. Now you’ve got screen assists. I mean that’s great, right, that creates a selfless mentality. You’ve got to reward great screeners. You’ve got hockey assists the guy who makes the pass to the guy who makes the pass. All of those things have value. Whoever led the league in hockey assists last year? Who is that guy? I don’t have the answer. I bet he’d be a valuable guy. You know, to me the next wave of decision-making is understanding how to score it and evaluate it and then understanding how to teach it. I think is important.

Dan Krikorian: 0:44

Hi I’m Dan Krikorian and welcome to Slappin’ Glass exploring basketball’s best ideas, strategies and coaches from around the world. Today we’re excited to welcome Capital City Go-Go Head Coach, cody Toppert. Coach Toppert is here today to discuss measuring and improving decision-making, impulse control and spatial awareness, expected possession value, and we talk defending ISOs and in-game communication during the always fun start, sub or sit. 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 easily searchable 750-plus video archive on SGTV, through our live coaches’ social Las Vegas. Sg Plus is the assistant you would hire if your athletic director didn’t already get the stipend to football. For more information, visit slappingglasscom today. And now please enjoy our conversation with coach Cody Toppert. Something that we’ve all talked about a little bit, but we’ve talked about it before, and that’s decision-making, and it’s on everybody’s mind as a coach all the time, and how you improve it, how you drill it, how you measure it and everybody’s so different. And as you’re just stepping into this chair as the head coach of Capital City, go-go and the G-League and you’re always trying to figure out how to obviously get to that point with your guys and your views on all of that how to measure it, how to improve it, how to drill decision-making.

Cody Toppert: 2:53

Yeah, I think ultimately, when we look at the game of basketball, that’s what it boils down to. It’s a game of decisions. It’s arguably one of the most free-flowing sports in the world, right, soccer, kind of being the foremost. And so when I look at decision-making, it starts with the ability to retain information and learn, and I know you guys have had a lot of guests on this podcast and dove into some of those things in terms of how to look at the learning process, and I think, from reading a number of books along those lines, what I’ve come to is skill acquisition and skill application being two almost separate entities that have to work together, right, and so when I say skill acquisition, to me that is the act of acquiring these abilities, right, whether it’s a left-hand pocket pass, a left-hand hook pass, a specific finish at the rim and things of that nature. But at the end of the day, you might be able to do those or execute those skills, if you don’t know when to use that skill, the skill almost becomes irrelevant, right, and so, taking that a step further, retention of information is not just about our plays or our playbook, and I would argue even more likely, it’s most importantly about our ability to identify what the defense is doing and understand our solutions to attack that, in order to generate the high-quality shots that we value and that we’re looking for. And so, as we build out our workouts and our practices, I think there are several things that flip the traditional way of thinking upside down. Right, and what I mean? Shell Drill’s been Shell Drill for a million years, right, help, sync, fill, a baseline drive, you know, trap outside the box, sink to the level of the ball X out on the backside, all of these different things. And that’s great and our guys need to do those drills. But at the end of the day, you never know when you have to beat the guy. You don’t know when you’re gonna be countered on to be a help rotational defender. You don’t know when you’re gonna be countered on to be a secondary sync guy. Right, you’re not sure. Like, because the opponent is running their offense. They’re doing their stuff. Yes, you might be trying to funnel them into a certain look, but that’s not always the way it works out. And so you know. You take a simple drill like Shell Drill. The guys are performing the drill, they do it great every day in practice, and then we look back in our game film. It was oh man, the low man was never there. We never sunk back on the weak side. Yet we do Shell Drill every day. Well, that, to me, is the epitome of performing a drill but not learning a concept. You know, that also flows onto the offensive side of the basketball, identifying coverages and how we’re gonna crack those coverages with our different solutions. And so to me, I’ve got what I call like the three Rs of the learning process, as it pertains to some of this on-court stuff, and that is randomized, repeat, retain right. And I say the randomized element because the way you know we’ll be doing Shell Drill this year in capital city, the way we did it a little bit last year at LSU, and kind of the way I think things are trending, we’ve got our slot drive, we’ve got our baseline drive right, we’ve got maybe middle drive and certain supports that are built into that. Well, let’s randomize the Shell Drill right. Let’s randomize where guys are starting, let’s close out and make it more game-like, because in the game you never know when you gotta be there. And so by randomizing something like actually what drill we’re in, it changes the dynamic of the entire process, of our rotation and how our players are viewing the next rep. You can no longer blindly sit out and fall asleep now. You can also no longer just sit out and watch the next group and think, oh, I’m gonna do what that guy did, because you might not be in that spot and we might not be doing that version of the drill. The more you randomize it and then the more you repeat that randomization to me it leads you to that third R you get a lot closer to the retention element, which, ultimately, is what we’re all looking for as coaches.

Dan Krikorian: 6:43

Cody, great stuff there and that example you just gave with the Shell Drill something kind of in the team element of all this. How about now when we flip to something that’s more like player development?

Cody Toppert: 6:55

That is almost its own entity as well. And so what we like to do is try to include some layer of a passive decision in almost every drill series that you’re doing. And then we want to make what we do variable right. We don’t wanna have like a blocked segment. Very rarely are we gonna be shooting five of the same shots consecutively right Now. Is there a time and a place? Absolutely. There’s technique practices, there’s vitamin times that are built on those micro details that are perfecting one specific thing in a blocked environment. However, anything that we have to do at game speed within the game has to be ready to be operated in a variable environment where we don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen. And now you’ve gotta decide do I Euro in one foot finish or did the low man help? Do I kick in respace? And so there are ways, if you are doing incorporating three shot series and things like that, that we work on essentially doing those same elements in terms of the randomized repeat retain. But the more decisions these guys can make right, the better basketball players I believe we can make them. And what we always talk about is man, how many reps did you get today? Man, did you get a thousand reps, you shoot 2000 shots. Today Steph Curry shot one million shots in one day and that’s why he’s the greatest. That’s kind of been the narrative and to me I look at okay, how many reps did you get today? I’m like, how many decisions did you make today? How many times did you recognize the over versus the under? How many times did you recognize or anticipate the switch and set the low angle screen to open the pocket? How many times did you recognize the low man, help and lift out of the corner to create a long closeout? How many times did you recognize a slot cut opportunity or a kill cut on a baseline drive? To me, those are the separators, and so what we have to do when we put together our player development workouts is marry the act of finishing that kill cut, executing and finishing that kill cut and whatever our finish is gonna be there with the act of identifying oh wait, it’s time to kill cut. So to me, decision making is the separator.

Patrick Carney: 8:57

You mentioned trying to always include a passive decision. Can you just define what a passive decision is or what you’re trying to include there?

Cody Toppert: 9:03

So a passive decision would be like a one level decision. And what a one level decision would be if, say, we’re working on finishing. A great way to include a passive decision after a finish or before a finish would be just having a low man step over. We don’t know when you’re gonna have to pass it and we’ve got a coach in the corner and we’re working on left, left finishes. Oh, but if this guy steps over, you throw it to him. You might do three finishes in a row because we’re kind of blocking that element. But a passive decision would be low man rotates, we throw a pass, Maybe we move where that guy is on the weak side. So now you’re focused on hey, I’m dialed in on the footwork of the Euro step or the dish finish or the that finish, but then, oh wait, boom and I pass. As opposed to scripting the help, this is totally like completely randomized. Or we’re at the free throw line. We shoot 10 free throws in a row. Today in the G league it’s one for two. So today I had one of our players shoot a free throw and in between each free throw we did some type of a finish Shoot a free throw. Now we did a floater, and so now he steps back to the free throw line. We variableized that thing to try to make that free throw more game like. And another example would be, say, the over under or first level read in some type of a screening element, we might be working on the finishing. But if we just add in, like a dribble handoff or a ball screen with two light defenders who are just showing us he went over, well, now we might be executing the Euro step finish, that might be our designated finish at the rim. But now if the on ball defender trails, I know I’m gonna turn it. If the on ball defender goes under, I know that we’re gonna whip it and read screen to flip the floor and I’m still doing the same finish. And then the next level would be making the variable that at that second level, whether that low man’s in, and so there are different ways to do this without killing their legs, without taking away from the focused activity on the specific technique that you’re working on, and I think that that, to me, is where we can look at Tom Brady as a quarterback. How could Tom Brady play when he’s 40 years old and lead Tampa Bay to the Super Bowl? He’s slow, he’s this, he’s that. I mean his ball was wobbly, he was throwing ducks all over the field, but the reality of it is is, cognitively he was so far ahead of everybody that then he would drop back and he could see, read and he can make great decisions. And so he never had to. You never got flushed out of the pocket, you know, he knew when to throw it away and he was able to anticipate what the next decision was for him to make, right. So when I look at it as well, from the basketball component, the guy who’s used 500,000 pick and roll is going to be better than the guy who used 50,000, is going to be better than the guy who used 500. And everybody has says, from the first year to the second year, the game slows down. Right, we talk about the game slows down. Well, nobody’s moving any slower. Where did we come up with this? Because we know the game didn’t get slower. Well, the game slowed down for him. Well, what does that mean? It probably means that he was in those situations. He saw both success and failure and you know, basically, from those failures he learned don’t do that anymore, or maybe do this, do more of that. And so it’s kind of like that logical connection leads you to becoming a better player. Well, can we recreate that type of an atmosphere or environment or those conditions in our practice? The more we do that, the more likely we are to help accelerate that process. And that’s really all we want to do in player development is accelerate the organic development that’s going to take place through game reps.

Dan Krikorian: 12:29

Cody, I actually wanted to go back to. You mentioned a little bit about when a little bit of blocked repetition might be good for a player and I know like we’re gonna keep going down this rabbit hole of randomization and all that. But in your mind, when would maybe a little bit of block shooting or skill work be good? And then the second part of that question is when would you do it in practice after practice, part of a team thing, like when would that come into place if you were gonna block something?

Cody Toppert: 12:57

It’s a great question. Every time I took the floor as a player, I had a specific routine that I did. I went straight to the front of the basket as vitamin deal that I do this one-handed routine it’s only in the front, you know. I’d make five or whatever it is and move back. I’d go back as far as I could. I’d come back up. I’d use two hands. I use the same workout warmup with Devon Booker as well. That to me and this is like kind of before real organized team activities, before your real vitamin, before your real player development that was a calibration of sorts, calibrating, keeping my shot straight. To me, great shooters shoot the ball straight 90 plus percent of the time, right, 99 percent of the time. So their misses are short, long Very rarely are they right left. And so, as a player, when I’m just first getting onto that court right there, as I’m feeling the ball, smelling the jam and getting ready for the practice, getting that shot line was huge for me, I can imagine it’s like going to the range and you’re just trying to line one up. You know what I mean. And just okay, straight. Straight is an arrow, straight is an arrow. And then after that, once we’re ready. Once I got my muscles going and once we’re starting to sweat a little bit, we’re out of the block for the majority of the workout. And right now, if we’re doing a plus two, plus three, plus five type of an exercise, what I mean by that is any shooting type of a drill where you might pop out to a spot and then get a plus one. So you shoot it, make or miss, you get a plus one or a plus three. Well, now what we’re trying to do is either, if I’m the passer, I will simulate short, close, long, close, left, close, right, close, and so you know now it’s short, close, catch and shoot. And I’m giving like a visual cue, right, cause we’re trying to read the close out before the catch and we’re making that shot segment variable right as opposed to just block. But you might pop out and go set it and if I see the guy miss a couple of set shots in a row, as the passer and the guy who’s determining what the next shot is, I might force a block, rep two or three of the same, because we’ve got to see the ball go through the basket as well and we’ve got to build a level of confidence that, yeah, we can do that. So there’s a time and a place. Also, post practice is not a bad time as well, but to me, before we start team activities, that’s the time to really block out whatever it is you’re doing left hand, you know Euro finishes right, things like that.

Dan Krikorian: 15:12

Kind of going back to the decision-making now, randomizing stuff you kind of mentioned before and Pat and I were talking about this before we hopped on to about different players make decisions well or not well in different parts of the game. So sometimes guys are great ball and hand decision makers but then they’re not good spacers or good cutters or lane runners or understanding those things. For you now that you’re head coach, you got all these players. You’re trying to make work in a scheme, how you take the different decision-making habits of on-ball, off-ball spacing and start to put those pieces together a little bit on top of now the skill acquisition piece that element starts with our pre-practice work and it kind of flows from there.

Cody Toppert: 15:58

What I mean by that is we have a segment of practice. So 45 minutes before our practice, everybody will be out on the floor. That next 15 minutes will be considered our vitamin segment. The next 15 minutes of that will be considered our development session, which is where we’ll start kind of moving. And so what we’ve got is a pre-practice curriculum. It’s broken up into individual concepts without the ball, individual concepts with the ball, and then two main concepts, three main concepts, four main concepts, five main concepts. So let’s touch on individual concepts without the ball Spatial awareness, cutting reading and setting screens, opening passing windows and the way I view this is like a menu of sorts. And so what we want to do is we want to grab one, two, three things from the menu every day for these segments Individual concepts with the ball, reading closeouts, rem reads, pick and roll, dho as handler or screener, finishing.5 decisions, attacking the closeout and reading stampede. Then you’ve got two main concepts and we’ve got that separated by likes and then more coverage guard, big, traditional right. So now you’ve got DHOs, quick pitches, hit under ghost roll, transition, screening, things like that with your likes, because screening angles are everything right. Everybody wants to switch a like size interaction. And so now you’ve got to work on physicality to prevent the steer. You’ve got to work on screening under the switch screen, below stable. You’ve got to work on opening pockets. You’ve got to work on recognizing botched switches, switches back and switches not under or, you know, miscommunicated switches. So that would be that type of a segment. And then you’ve got your two man pick and roll DHO concepts where the guards are working on the setup, the read, the passing, the bigs are working on screening angles, the roll, they’re working on how to handle veers or taught reads, re-screen reads, things like that, and then the combo would be working together and all those things. And that’s still just two guys. But you know we’re trying to build a chemistry with each other. And so now you know we’ve got to have recognition of over under, we’ve got to have recognition of rerouting. Get out right Like a dynamic roller who’s just going to reroute the guy over the screen and go for the lob dunk versus a hit and split guy. Or if you have certain rules right, like on step ups, usually it’s going to be hit, then split, because you know sometimes, or a lot of times on step ups, you know we want to actually make contact because we can’t run out of that anyways for a sprint lob dunk. So well, what we look to do then is perhaps let the ball handler go before and snake it, or the ball handler puts them in jail and then allows the big to go ahead of him for the gore top things like that. But we’ve got to work on those coaches and over there, like calling the gore top, our players have to be able to recognize and execute it. And so then you know, we’ve got to work together on the RPO stuff too, and I mean by RPOs roll pop option, especially today’s game with a lot of different guys. Right, you know there are designated rollers. We’re even popping non shooting bigs now, and sometimes that’s happening organically, you know. And so now we have to clean up back to our one man concept, spatial awareness, cutting awareness. If we’re going to pop, then we’ve got to cut the next guy, our three man concepts. Now that goes more into, like, our team based action stuff. Right, our flow, our trigger reads. We can incorporate some of the off ball cutting in that, if we pop a guy or man concepts, including, but not limited to spacing and re spacing concepts. After I pass, where do I go Right? And then, how do we continually like reminipulate the space to open driving lanes and passing windows, both, and then your five man concepts would be spacing reads plus decision making that can also be based out of your triggers and your flow option. Man, that was long winded. I need a glass of water.

Dan Krikorian: 19:48

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Patrick Carney: 20:56

Slapping glass and cha Cody within the individual concepts, without the ball and when we look at like spacing, how would you think about adding decision or again this recognition of when to space and how to space, if we just kind of to provide some context.

Cody Toppert: 21:13

Yeah. So let’s just say we’ve got two guys on the weak side, right. And let’s say, on any middle drive we’re going to cut the corner. On any baseline drive, we’re going to cut the middle guy. Well, now we’re just out there with two guys and could be a coach is the high guy, it could be another you know the players the low guy, right. So we’re working with a coach, but if we go baseline, he’s got to read to stay. And so now the sudden, we’re going to cut that middle guy, which will be the coach. And if he makes that right decision, he does it correct, we’ll reward him with a one plus two, one plus three. Then he’s got to reset it and now we’re going to go again. Now, if it’s middle drive, he’s got to read the cut. So if he reads the cut, we’ll drop it to a finish. After that finish, we never rest inside the three. So we’ll respace and sometimes it’ll be like if he makes the first shot, he earns the plus two. If he misses the first shot, there is no other rep. Because it’s a fine line between like, we need makers, not takers. You don’t always get the next one if you don’t make the last one, and so you know those would be some of the main ways that we can work on those Now without the ball. Working on things like screening or actually, let’s say, let’s talk about opening passing windows, for instance. Same concept, right, we’ve got coach with the ball in the post and now we’ve got, maybe, a primary defender. If he goes to double, you know we’ve got to lift out of the corner, pull behind, look to open the opportunity for the shot. If he stays out, then maybe we’re working on a cut. We’re going to do a lot of splitting stuff off the post. So this is where you can work in some of that as well. You can also do it on drives, right? So now you’ve got coach drives, flat drives. If we drive flat from a spatial standpoint, I don’t mind you backing out Anytime you break the nail right, which is really what we want to do. We want to drive to score. As a player, I want you to funnel out. So it’s a back out versus a funnel out mentality. So that means if I drive down and I pass to, whichever coach I pass to on the weak side, I’ve got to recognize a deep drive and I should funnel out usually weak side corner unless you’ve got built in, like golden state type actions where you can run to a filled corner and it’s going to be automatic pin-ins. You’d have to work on something like that, but that would be ways to help this player understand spatial awareness. Where do I go after I pass?

Dan Krikorian: 23:22

We’ve talked a little bit about over the year off air a little bit, and that’s expected possession value and maybe some things now getting into coaching decisions and helping you, as a coach, understand health of an offense, helping your players understand how they can help a possession and things like that and so I’d like to just kind of ask you broadly about what that is, and also S2 cognition, another thing that we can dive into, and how you maybe use those tools within all this.

Cody Toppert: 23:49

If we’re dialing it back right quick and just talk a few general like offensive concepts right now, in today’s game again, we talk about manipulating the space, spacing, respacing and you guys do a wonderful job talking about this on your podcast in terms of dominoes and getting two on the ball, the entire goal is to make two guys guard one guy, wherever and however we can create that trigger. We want to create that trigger and so, within that, what we want to preach is create coverage confusion. We want to confuse their defensive coverage so that, hopefully, they have a breakdown somewhere that allows us to accumulate the advantage and then, hopefully, ultimately find the shot. Now, there’s a lot of stuff that goes into that right, whether it’s us as the coach yelling the play calls or whether it’s the players themselves which is what we hope organically understanding what situation they’re in and then being able to read that and act accordingly. Now you talk about expected possession value, epv, and there’s a paper that was written on that Sloan Analytics, their conference and things like that. You’re talking about trying to put a numerical value on a decision at any given point in time during a possession, which would be essentially like pressing the pause button on that possession, which is what we do after the game. Right, we pause it here. A what’s the best decision based upon where the defense is? A pass to this guy. B drive it for a layup. C, you know, turn it over or take it on paint to the coach, takes it out of the game. No kidding, that’s a trick question, but you know, that’s what we kind of do with the film. Well, some really smart people right, way smarter than me have figured out that because we have all this tracking data now we can kind of put a numerical value on a series of different decisions that are being made and theoretically we could then put a value on that exact possession. So if we freeze a possession at a moment in time, if player who has the ball shoots it, we know what the EPV is. If player who has the ball passes it to another player who shoots it or attacks a close effort, we can put a numerical value on that, based on who we’re passing to and based on their ability to finish and based on how we anticipate the defense rotating based on the previous scenario that they ran. It’s highly complex math but from a theological standpoint it makes logical sense because, oh, if we’ve got, you know, 10 million drives with the defender rotating from five feet outside of this position, and we know what that expected shot quality would be. Now what we can do is we can put a number on that possession and so it’s all about kind of the XY data points moving on the screen. Now, how does that help us? It can help you a number of different ways. What we have right now are just basically linear analytics. It’s just all. At the end it’s the inbox score, make miss, turn over, whatever. It’s what happened at the end. We don’t have a value about what’s happening in the middle, and there’s so much that happens in the middle that may lead to a quality shot or may not, because if I pass the ball to a guy who should have made the extra pass and he did not, I may have done something beautiful and spectacular and brilliant for our team, but I’m not getting the credit for that Now as a player, maybe I’m undervalued within the relative market to my team. You can look at that from an MBA perspective. Well, can you find one of those guys who’s undervalued because of how he fits within the context of the others and put them on your team with your pieces in your system and now maybe he’s able to shine and create value that you already knew was there and help you in basketball games. Now we can also dial that back to. If we can theoretically put value on a possession at any given point in time, then we can also rate the decision-making process that subsequently happens. Now what we can do is we can use it as a teaching tool and we can identify, oh man, when so-and-so drives left. He never makes that corner kick pass early. Well, okay, well, why doesn’t he do it? Well, we just flagged that at this point in time, during this possession, that would have yielded us the most points or the highest value shot. He’s always in these opportunities Like why can’t he make that pass? Oh well, we got to work on the pass, we got to work on recognizing when to make the pass, and then we’ve got to try to blend it all together and then hopefully we’ll see that improvement Maybe 10 years down the road. This is where development goes. But having the conversation now, I think, is interesting, because for too long it’s just oh, he made it or oh, he missed it, or he turned it over. Now you’ve got screen assists. I mean that’s great, right. That creates a selfless mentality. You’ve got to reward great screeners. You’ve got hockey assists the guy who makes the pass to the guy who makes the pass. All of those things have value. Whoever led the league in hockey assists last year? Who is that guy? I don’t have the answer. I bet he’d be a valuable guy. So to me, the next wave of decision-making is understanding how to score it and evaluate it, then understanding how to teach it from the three Vs visuals video variety and then taking it to the floor. I think is important.

Dan Krikorian: 28:55

Cody, maybe you can go a little bit deeper now on S2 cognition and trying to test these things that you’re talking about so that they can lead to on the floor results.

Cody Toppert: 29:07

I’m not going to claim to be an expert on S2 cognition. Maybe I’m an expert on this. Call at it unless you guys have been to the website. Maybe you guys already know more than me. But what I’ll say on that is I just came from LSU and obviously LSU has a juggernaut football program, great football program. Brian Kelly does a great job. It’s just been a traditional powerhouse, so they have tremendous resources there, and S2 cognition was a resource that was at the fingertips of the football program for a long time under the guys of a guy named Jack Mariucci, and so Jack, who actually started a bat company Mariucci Bats, like all these major leaguers use him has this mad scientist lab at the LSU football stadium, and so when I found out that I had access to him, I tracked him down and met with him. His office is amazing. I was sitting in a chair from the original Fenway Park. He was sitting in a chair from the original Wrigley Field. It was like a field of dreams. It was like crazy thing. He meets like back to the future, like Doc back to the future. He’s in there like 1.21 gigawatts and I’m like, oh my gosh, it makes sense, like this is beautiful. And so, anyways, he starts to tell me a couple of things. First thing I’ll talk about is pupils. Right, you guys know the term. The quiet eye, right, you guys have you guys heard of this? No, no, oh, this will be fun Quick sidebar conversation and there’s a couple of different variations on the quiet eye, right, but it’s all about, like the great ones know where to look, they can sort through the noise, right, there’s a lot happening during a basketball game and their ability to clearly like see it. You guys remember they’re seeing the legend of Bagger Vance. Oh, yeah, the guy would get up to hit All of a sudden, the Camranger would like change and like the focus would go and it’s like he sees the path. That’s kind of the way I compare it, right. And so a scientist did this test on the highest level maestro piano players, and you know they’ve got a bunch of keys and they’re navigating these keys and the people who are graded at the highest level of piano players actually have the smallest pupil movement while playing. And even as you take just a slight step down in the expertise of the piano player, the pupil movement starts to go a lot worse, right, and then you take it down to where my six year old’s at and she’s like just all over the place, right, she’s trying to hunt the solution, and so that’s kind of the term quiet eye, right, your ability to kind of see through the mess and, like, find those solutions. And so what Jack had done with LSU football is he would test pupil dominance. They would wear these goggles. It was unbelievable. And he tested all skill position players, because you’ve got to read routes as a quarterback but you also got to run the routes and run to the open space and hit gaps in the defense if you’re running back and all these different things, right. What he found was the same concept that all of the top players have minimal pupil movement, and that includes, like a Joe Burrow, who he did a lot of tests on. So Joe Burrow, when he drops back and I would assume it’s a Tom Brady thing as well you can be overwhelmed with the amount of information that an NFL quarterback is taking on at one time while somebody’s trying to knock their head off in four seconds. And so the ability to read and then commit to the decision, right, or understand. Oh, instead of going A, b, c, I’ve got to go A. Nope, it’s right to C Because of those conditions that you’re under is part of what separates the good from the great, and so what we were going to do we never got a chance to do this. This is what we were doing before came to this wonderful opportunity was look at that in the pick and roll. Why not do the same thing and put a guy in live pick and roll play and track pupil movement across extended periods within the game and dial it back to okay? Here we are. You can’t see that corner pass because you’re not looking in the right place. You can’t see that corner pass because your pupils are looking in too many places, and so there’s some interesting stuff on that. That’s the quiet eye. And then he segwayed from there to blow in my mind with this X2 cognition stuff. Now Joe Burrow tested a 99% on the test, and so it’s basically a test. You sit down at a computer and you play a video game, essentially so like. There’s a bunch of different exercises, and if you can envision one of them that I remember quite vividly, it’s like a box, maybe I had phones on, and you’re in a quiet space and the environment’s created and there’s a box, and you know, there’s 20 white dots in this box, cool. Well, then four of these dots get highlighted in red randomly. Then the highlight goes away and all the dots just scramble across the screen in different directions and then it freezes. And now what you’ve got to do is remember which dot was which dot. Now, my brother could use that in Spain when we were in Las Ramblas, which is like that square where they do the thing with the three cups that they steal all your money. But that’ll be another conversation. So at the end of this, basically, you’ll get a score, and your score is divided into three things Court vision, decision skills and execution control. Subsets of those within court vision will be reception speed, search, efficiency, tracking capacity, and then the subsets of decision skills would be spatial awareness, decision complexity, instinctive learning, and then execution control would be impulse control, distraction control and improvisation. And then what they’ll do is they’ll generate a final score for you. That score will be on a scale of zero to 100. Essentially, 80 to 100 is elite, 60 to 80 is higher average, 40 to 60 is average, and then so on and so forth, and then they will put you into like, basically, a quad based on speed and accuracy. And the fascinating thing for me, because I took the test was number one taking the test was very challenging. And then number two as a coach, which we had talked about briefly, the way I see the game. It’s important for me to know that. What am I looking at? What am I recognizing? Are there things that I need to work on to understand or recognize or anticipate something that’s going to happen in the game so that I can make a good decision? But the S2 cognition score all of our players at LSU took the test All the football players and the basketball players, and there’s a connection to the eye test, for sure. But what it gives you now are things to dial in on, things to work on. And when we kind of know those things, if a guy doesn’t have a good impulse control in high pressure situations, you know that he’s probably going to let you down. So how can we create those high pressure situations? If a guy is not good at spatial awareness, right, you can anticipate, for sure, right? Oh well, if he doesn’t see that spatial awareness piece, well, he’s probably not going to cut into that open area for that layup or open that passing window for that shot. If their decision complexity is low on that read and react decision making element, well, we can probably expect that we’re going to struggle, pick and roll decision making right and now as a coach, rather than sit there and just bark he’s not good enough. You know, we got to change the player or think that it’s hopeless, and you got to shift to a different offensive style or whatever abandon. You know, whatever it is that you think you want to do with your team, here are some areas that we can work on. To me, it’s all logically connected that I would think that it’s. It’s highly likely that you can improve these things, and that’s what Jack has told me. So it’s fascinating stuff.

Dan Krikorian: 36:24

Awesome stuff there. We want to actually transition now to a segment we call start, sub or sit. I don’t think we have this in the wheelhouse when you came on the first times. This will be your first time on start, sub or sit. So for those of you listening for the first time, potentially we’re going to give you three different topics. Ask you to start one, sub one, sit one, and then we’ll have a discussion from there. So, cody, if you’re ready, we’ll dive in in this first one, absolutely. This first one has to do with effective isolation defense against a good player, and let’s just for this instance, you’re ISO on defense against someone that it’s more of a mismatch. You don’t have Kauai or drew holiday guarding the ISO, so you got to do something.

Cody Toppert: 37:05

It’s me versus Kauai on offense mismatch, like it’s not a good matchup for us, is what we’re saying.

Dan Krikorian: 37:11

Exactly. These are three different defensive tactics you can do in an ISO situation to try to maybe get the ball out of their hands or do something different. So start, sub or sit. Option one is send a late double at that offensive player. Option two is try to really get up and hug that player and force a drive down and to help somewhere, not to let them rock and maybe shoot. A three or third option is jump into some kind of zone. So go and zone up behind them and just offer a lot of help. So start, sub or sit those three options on effective ISO defense.

Cody Toppert: 37:46

I’m going to start the double team, the hit. I will sub the zone and I will sit force the drive.

Dan Krikorian: 37:55

Okay, cody, I want to start with your start and we’ve talked to coaches over the last year, so a lot about hitting certain situations, these late clock things when it’s been effective for you, I mean one, when to go, how to go, the other three guys involved you know all those things involved, I guess, in that late ISO hit.

Cody Toppert: 38:15

Yeah, so, and I’m, you know, going through a lot of this right now, right, and there’s a lot of switching in the game and cross matches are going to happen early, especially in transition, and sometimes you can’t fix those right away. And to me, you know, the biggest thing is, if we have a severe mismatch like that, it’s all about most dangerous, and every team has a team hierarchy, and it’s not even necessarily, to me, always about, well, the fourth player and the fifth player on the floor, like they’re not good. That’s not the way I view it. They’re not allowed to do certain things on their team. They have constraints that have been put on them by their coaching staff, and so there are probably certain shots or certain things that they have tried to execute and maybe haven’t done so successfully to this point in their career. Well, I want to put them in that situation. Right, I want to get the ball out of most dangerous, and the further down the list that that can go, the better. Now, when you talk about the strategy on hits, to me it’s got to come from the crowded side. That’s number one. Number two we have to have a strategy in terms of when we’re going, and it has to be done in unison, meaning we have to rotate to the next man and essentially, as we hit, the only thing that we want to do is give up the furthest weakest pass and make sure that we can scramble out of that if necessary and hopefully that’s an air pass as well and then just have a cover mentality all over the floor to try to get square. But at the end of the day, if we force them to make two passes or more out of a hit situation, I would feel good about us being in a pro clock situation in our favor. If, hopefully, if we, maybe we executed the switch 14 on the clock after their main action and now hopefully, like the shot clocks working against that guy, or if it was a switch that was early. Hopefully it’s somebody who we’re putting in an uncomfortable situation. You know where. Maybe it is their night, we’ll see. But I’m certainly not going to sit back and let the guy who they pay all the money to be their top guy just go to work and dice us up. You know, and hope is not a strategy.

Dan Krikorian: 40:12

Absolutely. So you want to follow up on the types of skill sets that would make you want to say get it out of their hands, versus let them just operate and live with whatever shot comes with. We can think of situations where a guy’s hot or whatever it is, but is there a 3 point percentage that worries you? Is there a certain ability to draw fouls to where you want to get the ball out of their hands?

Cody Toppert: 40:34

So first there’s a general strategy. To me I call the nose of the guy who’s defending in that particular mismatch, which usually is, let’s be honest, is usually a small on a big right no walk-in threes, no blow by layups, no one pass threes. Right Stick, hand up at all times. You know has to be the strategy. But when you’re talking about what dictates that, I think we don’t need to over complicate things. It’s going to be kind of your traditional linear statistics. Now this is where the beauty of it from second spectrum is. Now we can look at off the dribble versus not off the dribble, we can work at expected versus actual percentages. And so now we can kind of get into the weeds. If a guy can shoot 35 or above off the bounce from the three, like we got to get them off the line, that’s a good shot, that’s a good percentage from that type of a zone. And when we look at just overall 3 point shooting percentage, that could be misleading, because guys who are primarily catching shoot 3 point shooters right. How many have they taken off the bounce? And so what we started doing, actually when I was at Memphis number one, we started going under a ton of pick and rolls, even on great shooters. Quintin Grimes, we went under his pick and rolls at Houston. Well, man, he’s a great shooter. Well, what we did was we charted all of his three point shots and we separated them into buckets. How many did he make off the dribble? How many did he make off the dribble in the pick and roll or the handoff? And what we found was number one. It was usually low volume and what we found was it was usually a really low percentage. And so we might have this 45% three point shooter. But if we take out all these catch and shoot rhythm threes or off-screen shots that we kind of dive into the details here, he’s not great at that. So if this guy can shoot 35 to 36% off the bounce, that would be elite in my book and we would need to make sure that we get him off the line right Now. You know you’re looking at some of the other categories foul drawing that’s an interesting one. Another reason to hit to protect your big from additional foul trouble in that type of a mismatch situation. And then rim finishing and rotating defenses. And like is our lineup multi-positional, that we have length it two, three, four to cover? You know, things of that nature would be some of the questions that you’d probably have to ask.

Patrick Carney: 42:40

On that point you sat forcing the drive like you know maybe two a week and force them just to go downhill. Why was that your least preferable option?

Cody Toppert: 42:49

Two reasons. Number one is we’ve all done shell drill for a million years. If I had a dollar for every time the lowman wasn’t there and we need him, I can tell you what well I’d still be doing this job because I love it, but I would be a rich man. You know what I mean, and so to me, rotations and cycle of help is the quickest way to give up one of the high value shots that you’re trying to discourage. Because if you run him off the line with extreme ball pressure, it’s probably not settling for a midi. He’s probably gonna have a runway to the rim. And now what you’re gonna have to do is you’re gonna have to rely on that lowman to rotate over. I’d much rather like my chances dropping into a two, three zone for sure, which would then basically the lowman would come over. Cleansing on the strong side would be fine there. Drop back, play two on the weak side and just show crowded driving lanes in our fill spots on both sides. That would be a much better scenario for us. But run off the line and rely on the rotations can get very difficult.

Dan Krikorian: 43:46

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Patrick Carney: 44:25

All right, cody, moving along to our next Start Sub Sit. This has to do with effective in-game player communication, and the question I’m gonna post to you is what is the hardest part of effectively communicating with a player in the game? Is it being able to effectively communicate a clear message or having proper language? Option two, being able to use a proper tone or, option three, just the correct time of when to communicate and have a conversation or deliver a message with said player.

Cody Toppert: 44:58

So I start the time, I sub the tone, I sit the message Okay, this’ll be fun, let’s go.

Patrick Carney: 45:05

Yeah, I’m gonna start with. What is the difficult part with the time, or what are you considering with when I should approach this player with a message?

Cody Toppert: 45:14

It’s kind of like at the airport, right, you’ve got to see something, say something kind of mantra, right, suspicious bag. Say something, suspicious shot attempt. Don’t say anything at that moment, right, that’s kind of the rule of thumb. The reason is, basketball is such an emotional sport, right, and now you’ve got all these eyes on the players and on the staff and phones and social media and all these things, and really at the heart of this are people who have the same anxieties and insecurities that anybody else would have, and so everything they’re doing is just under a microscope. As I look at it, a guy usually wants to make the shot. I don’t really, you know, seen anybody who’s out there trying to miss. Guy usually wants to follow the defensive game plan. Guy usually wants to be the low man. As much as he might not get there in that moment, he probably wants to do that. Generally, these players want to do, right, they’re not out there on purpose, kind of going against whatever it is that we’ve worked on leading up to the game, and so, because of that, when it doesn’t go their way, usually they are their biggest critics, and so they’re already in a moment of negativity and as coaches, we try to preach this next play mentality Right. It’s so easy to say that next play, get onto the next play, just get onto the next play, and it’s like, yeah, no crap, right, like get on the next. But they’re going through something at that particular point in time and so you know. What they need to know is that you’re with them. And so a lot of times to me that’s just silence, that’s not delivering a specific message about a botched rotation or a botched ATO. You should have set the screen but you messed up. We came off the board, you trashed the ATO. If I go at you in that moment to me more often than not, I’m not only not going to correct that situation, because it’s already gone and as coaches we need to learn to get onto the next play, but what I’m probably going to do is prevent you from being at your best on the next three to five possessions. And there are even players who I have coached who, in those type of really emotionally charged moments I went at, I might lose them for the entire game, and that to me is just too much of a risk.

Patrick Carney: 47:20

I like to flip it to your sit which was the message and again, I think when we were putting this question together is you know, sometimes we have the best intentions as a coach and we say something, but our intentions are interpreted wrong. We missed the mark, maybe, with our message. What have you learned about when delivering a message, whether it’s words to avoid or just how you think about delivering a clear message that doesn’t get lost in translation?

Cody Toppert: 47:46

The big thing is the simplicity of it. The simplicity of the message is everything you can’t get with the player right now and do a Slavin’ Glass podcast during a quick time out right in the middle of the third quarter, and expect the guy to go out there and remember what you did, what you said. You know all those different things, and one of my big things is macro versus micro. As coaches, we can get so micro and when we get so micro, we lose sight of the macro, and that’s where we’ve got to kind of have that balancing act. And so to me, if you can’t say it in about three words or less, then it probably doesn’t need to be said and it might be something as easy as you got this. Make the next one right. I mean four words. We believe in you. Like you know something that gets you going. Now, is there something technical about a coverage or they’re going over, or whatever? Well, in that case, if you’ve got some bench technology, you can sit down with the guide, we can look at the play and you can say tag was in. Well, if I’ve taught him well in the workouts, he’ll know what I mean by tag was in, cause I’ve probably been on his rear plenty of times about passing to the role in the tags in. We’re not seeing the throwback pass with the tag tag was in. He went under. If our cues are on and our development plan is on, and I just say he went under, he should know immediately. Make the logical connection to should have rescreened. And so to me you talk about okay, you know, like I want to get T-shirts made right. Create coverage confusion. Next action mentality. Connect the dots. These are some mantras. My hope is, like our team will get you know, month into the season I’m going to have my point guards in the huddle saying man guys, next action mentality, let’s get us to the next action Ball can’t stick. You know what I mean. Create coverage confusion, man, we’ll mess them up. They don’t know if they’re sleeping. Whatever it is right, and if you teach them bullet points, you can always draw back to some of those things. And usually, if it rhymes I think Snoop Dogg figured out like it’s usually gold. If it rhymes, then basketball, it’s pretty similar, right?

Dan Krikorian: 49:38

Yep, cody, my last follow up on all this kind of relating to everything we’re talking about, but half time. You mentioned the timeouts right now, but you know, as a coach, trying to like the slice of the pie of technical stuff to go over, tactical, big picture stuff to go over and then like the emotional fabric of your team and giving confidence and all that you know if you got 20 to 30 minutes and five to 10 are spent with your staff and them getting water and how much you think about giving them at half time. When it comes to all those different things you can do as a coach.

Cody Toppert: 50:13

You know, let’s dial this back to. Every stoppage of play is its own moment in time and there’s an opportunity to overload, underload or find just right. And so to me, timeout structure we don’t put enough. I’m not gonna skirt your question, because I’ll get back to half time. When I get halfway through my season, guys call me up and hold me to this stuff. I don’t think we put enough thought into this because it’s so emotionally charged. We either had a great two plays going into the timeout and, as coaches, like we’re running over a chest bump and we’re high-fiving, the vibes are great and we spend the first 15 seconds in this emotionally charged yeah, we’re gonna win that. You know, there’s so much left to do and break down. Or like two, three negative things have happened and guys are sulking, they’re walking, coaches are going over, sprint to the bench, and all this. Does it really matter? If you do sprint to the bench, okay. What matters is if we can talk about next play, like, let’s get on to the next play, what’s gonna happen next? And so to me, timeouts with your coaches, right. So this is how I will be structuring my timeouts this year. First thing we’ll do is we’ll talk about who who’s in the game. And so now do we need to make a sub or not? Because there’s a time sensitive situation in terms of making sure that we get that done before we deliver our message, so that guy can get locked in and engaged, and all of those different things. The second thing would be general defense. Do we need to make an adjustment? Is plan A working? Do we need to? You know, check down to plan B or plan C, and then usually the defensive coordinator or scout coach from there will go and address the team before I get there. The next thing would be offensive flow. Are our general principles meshing together in the way that we like? Let me dial this back because I forgot after defensive flow, it’ll be defensive ATO. Are we gonna disrupt? So are we gonna trap zone? Are we gonna throw a wrench in their plan to try to disrupt them? Right, then it’ll be offensive flow, it’ll be ATO. What are our next two plays? Are gonna look like Cool Now, when I break the huddle and go sit down. Always lead positive is kind of my general philosophy, so the first thing I’m gonna do is give a few encouraging words. If we haven’t been doing XYZ very well, but maybe we’ve been defensive. I think. Well, guys, they only got two offensive rebounds. Man, we are boxing out, we’re controlling the glass. This is gonna be great for us as we go down the stretch, boom. So you hit him with something positive. Anytime somebody leaves with something positive, ears go up a little bit and you’re back in for the rest of the message. Then confirm the defensive adjustment why they’re making or not making. Confirm the defensive ATO. Give him a quick touch on the flow, which, unless you’re really changing that, requires very minimal time, and then it’s right to what is our next ATO offensive play looking like, and so I think that maintaining that type of a structure is important. Now, let’s carry that over into halftime. More extended stoppage. We’d like to flood them with film. We’d love to do that. Number one is it a theme or is it a one-off? If you’re gonna put on us not running back on defense, to me, okay, duh, we should run back on defense. You’re not gonna change that right now, and all you’re gonna do is these guys gonna be like, oh, he’s on that run back on defense deal again, and before long me, I think they’ll realize. Well, he just says that when he doesn’t have really anything to say, right? And so again, check back with me halfway through the season. That might be way off, but when you get in there, number one, lead positive. Number two don’t flood them with clips that are not specific, relevant, technical and that are not things that have been done, not as well as we have liked, not been executed at the level we would like. Repeatedly, if it’s happened three times, four times, we’re not tagging what we should. Three times, four times, we’re not veering back when we should. Cool Now, don’t show all three, don’t show all four, show one, veer backs. We need to have a veer back mentality. If you can’t get square, we veer back. Pursuit, east-west, veer, north-south, simple directions. And now we’re onto the next, offensively. What’s happening right now? What are they doing? Okay, well, they’re icing right. Okay, hey, we’re trying to flip that screen too much. Let’s just dive into the pocket and, if not, play onto the next man. Right, are we making some small little adjustment there? If you have one clip there, that would be great, but to me it’s three to four clips max. Anything above that, you’re just gonna kind of lose them in the oblivion of a film session where they think about falling asleep and so that, I think, can keep them engaged. Now, after that, you gotta leave them with something positive again and you really can’t bring a negative mentality in there. You have to bring a correction mentality. I’m not here to nag you, I’m here to help us correct what hasn’t been going well. Now, if we’re sleepwalking through it, I’m not saying you can’t challenge your guys, but then when you go out there you really got three types of guys. You’ve got the bathroom guy, you’ve got the sit down and never get up guy, and then you’ve got the eager layup guy. So there’s really three types of dudes. Right, the eager layup guy is usually the guy he might be your best player. The guy that never gets in, but super high character. Your best player might be the sit down guy. So something that I’ve always been interested in is can we shorten the time in that locker room space and can we do something different to maximize our time before the tip? Because how many dudes just go out there and they put the heating packs on. They never touch the ball. We switch sides of the basket. They didn’t shoot one jumper, or we’re out there just kind of messing about. Nothing is really being accomplished and so it’s like well, I don’t know, do we do some type of a quick, dynamic, two minute calisthenic deal? Do we do some type of a more structured shooting thing to get them re-engaged? Some players might not like that, but I can’t tell you how many really really good players I’ve seen who are the sitters or the bathroom guys. You’re writing the ATO and the buzzer sounding right. We’re like 30 seconds from live play. Mean back in. The guy’s running, he’s just running in, he’s just jogging, and you’re like, did that really just happen? And now you gotta like dumb down your ATO or whatever it is right. And so I’m kind of interested in how we handle that right, and I don’t necessarily have the answers, but I have a lot of questions.

Dan Krikorian: 56:05

Absolutely Well, cody, you’re off the start sub or sit hot seat. We’ve got one final question for you before we close, before we do awesome having you back again. Congrats on the new job, wishing you luck as continued success on this. So you’re welcome back a third time anytime. Thank you.

Cody Toppert: 56:22

There was a lot of pressure going into this. The start, sub and sit. I promise you, every time an episode drops I’m like thinking I’m rating that. I’m like, man, you went with this one versus that one. It’s fun stuff, man. It really gets your mind going.

Dan Krikorian: 56:35

Good, well, glad you enjoy it. We do too. So, cody, our last question is usually the best investment, but we asked you that one the first time you were on, so we’re going to ask you the question we’ve been asking our second time guests, which is what are you most curious about when it comes to the game coaching leadership? Any of this?

Cody Toppert: 56:54

So I’ll just touch on kind of the game right, and we’ve talked a lot about decision making and retention and learning and all these different things. My question is scouting, shoot around, how we deliver the information before the game. Is this the best way, the way we all kind of do it? Is there a better way? Are we not doing it in the most efficient manner? Right Is spending all the time walking through two down fist. Is that more for us as coaches? So we checked the box versus helping the players prepare to go to battle that night and win the game. That, to me, is what I’m kind of toying with and trying to turn upside down. The days of the paper scouts are long gone. Right, we’re dealing with kids who learn a lot through their phones and so the way they absorb and retain information is so different. But yet a lot of these scouting reports and scouting meetings have not changed significantly. So that’s something that I’m really interested in and curious in how we can kind of tweak those To help our players better retain the information we need them to going in the game.

Dan Krikorian: 58:01

Pat, always fun having Cody topper around, never a bad time. Never a bad time. No, you know it’s funny as we were going through the conversation flashes of gosh. It’s three years ago now when we first had him on, when this podcast was first starting. I think he was podcast number four, but flashbacks of just movie references, high energy, great communicator, all that stuff was coming back and got a chance to get to know Cody a lot over the last few years on. Like we mentioned special projects here and there, but just a great guy, great coach and share of the game. So pleasure having him back today.

Patrick Carney: 58:34

Yeah, Love his energy. I think it’s infectious every time I mean we sign off with him and like we’re ready to go. And especially what came through in this interview is I really appreciate his curiosity for the game I mean he mentioned flip things upside down, look at things differently, you know, challenging kind of accepted beliefs or traditions, and I really appreciate that about him and I learned a lot and come away just thinking about a ton of different things.

Dan Krikorian: 58:59

Absolutely yeah, me as well, and so this first bucket here is a big one, and Cody did an unbelievable job discussing a lot of things when it comes to decision making and we wanted to really focus on the measuring, the improving and just different ways to think about it. And I think, as this conversation continues and this will be one that you and I are interested in continue to have on the podcast is the complexity of player development, team development, skill acquisition, skill application, like he mentioned as well, and it’s not just one of these things, it’s all of them working together and how the modern coach can kind of get a sense and grasp on to how all these things fit together and how to fit them into a program and a practice. It’s a lot, but I think he spoke really well on and connecting those things together and how they might fit.

Patrick Carney: 59:56

Yeah, and I think this is where he’s really done a great job and breaking things down. When it comes to this skill acquisition and skill application part and breaking it down he mentioned it too you got to randomize, you got to repeat and you hope they retain. The retain comes after the randomization, after repeating, so like breaking it down and then taking that piece and how to make it better. We got a good conversation about the block training, adding passive decisions. I mean I like that passive decision, just like simple Simon stuff that can help this retention, which is the ultimate goal of them being able to take the skill and put it on the court. But it first comes from breaking it down, learning and what the components are and then how you can improve each component. And I think Cody I know he has from our first conversation of this has really thought a lot about it and thought about what goes into it and the efficiency of teaching these things.

Dan Krikorian: 1:00:47

Yeah, and I think that with all this stuff, what it can give help and hope for hope for the players, help for coaches is not immediately labeling players, just hey, they’re bad decision makers and they’ll never be this or they’ll never be that, and perhaps there’s a little bit of the nature versus nurture here and there and all this where there are certainly players that we know have a kind of a natural feel for the game in some capacity finishing, shooting, decision making and pick and roll off all these things that go into basketball. And, like he mentioned, it’s not football where you just play one side and be pretty good, you got to play both and there’s this whole flow. But I think, like for coaches, it’s thinking about where do they struggle, where do we put them to maximize what good decisions they can make? And then I think, as we got deeper into the conversation and maybe I’ll just quickly touch on like the S2 cognition stuff and the different layers of decisions and in the future, really thinking through how a player learns and how you can measure it, I think there’s like a whole frontier there.

Patrick Carney: 1:01:57

Yeah, when we get into the quiet eye and that S2 cognition stuff. Before we get into that, rather I do want to hit on. When we talked about the block and then he mentioned we got into kind of like his pre-practice routine with the guys, the 45 minutes I think he mentioned we’re the 15th, they’re vitamins but then the individual concepts without the ball, individual concepts with the ball, then two man game, three man game, four man game. Again going back to how I appreciate how Cody thinks about the game and developing his players and then overall his team. I really enjoyed that part of him sharing and we got into a conversation about how you teach spacing and then pass outlets and how you can train that decision. But I enjoyed that conversation and just kind of getting into his practice philosophy a little bit there, pre-practice routine, when we got into this expected possession value, this S2 cognition and how we can measure stuff. To kind of hit on or elaborate more on your point, not just using a broad label of he’s a bad decision maker, but understanding again what goes into decision making it. He mentioned a ton, the ones that are able to write down quickly enough, or like the impulse control, the spatial awareness, decision complexity. So, again, understanding how people make decisions and if you understand where maybe they’re good at these parts, but if they’re bad at this part, well, now you know what to train and what to work on. And I think obviously a lot of this conversation was again Cody’s curiosity of imposing these questions and stuff we should be thinking about and trying to understand what goes into decision making, what makes a bad decision maker. Again, if you can break it down and component, if you can identify certain things, this is going to help us as coaches, improve our players, and I think before we hopped on, we talked about, you know, if we take impulse control, maybe it isn’t something on the court that they just need a ton of reps at, and we got to randomize this more as a breathing techniques, as a visualization. Again, when we can identify the problem better, break it down into more simplistic pieces rather than taking one big hole over generalization, we’re going to help our players and hopefully we’ll become better coaches as well.

Dan Krikorian: 1:04:03

Well said and all that. The other thing you mentioned and Cody talked about in that first bucket expected possession value, the EPV, and it reminded me at the top a little bit of our conversation with Utah Jazz head coach Will Hardy and our conversation with him he mentioned a lot of times when they’re watching film they’ll run the film all the way up until the shock goes in or goes out and just talk about was this a good possession, based off of all the things that we did screening, cutting right decision, things like that and if we’re happy with it, if we’ll live with it, then not who cares if it goes in or out, obviously you want to go in, but as a coach and as a team you can live with the result the right guy shooting that right shot and so kind of reminded me of that when we got into the expected possession value. And another thing that’s just really interesting and I think we’ve talked about this before but the difference between descriptive versus predictive analytics and box scores and a lot of the older stuff being they’re describing something that’s already happened but the context is lacking a lot of things and Cody mentioned that as well on the podcast of trying to figure out things that are more predictive in nature, before they happen or not, just taking straight box score stats and I think the great point got brought up a little bit again also and start subset with, like that ISO player and how he shoots off the bounce versus how he shoots off the catch, can you actually use that to predict what actions you want, rather than just saying, oh, he’s a 43% shooter. We should always treat him like this because it’s different in different situations. So I think just that whole conversation this isn’t a mess by Cody If I had more time, we’d keep talking a lot more on this podcast about more predictive analytics in their nature and how that can really help coaches in their decision making and then help teach players in their decision making going forward.

Patrick Carney: 1:06:04

On that point the same with me. I wrote down, I mean, I circled and throw next some more time. I would have loved to kind of dove a little bit deeper into the quiet eye and what that information? Obviously, how you can use that information when, okay, yeah, he pupils are massive and I move in all over the place versus the guys who are dilated and locked in. He left L C Before he could kind of go into that further with point guard play. But, yeah, what’s that telling you when? Again, is it something that can be improved? Is it an innate thing? I think this is what was really enjoyable about the conversation. It left me with so many more thoughts on the game, with these predictive analytics, the expected possession value, all this new stuff that’s out there. That’s kind of in the ethosphere of data collection and tracking and just as it continues to get better and what we can continue to learn about players, skill acquisition and decision making Exciting, to be honest.

Dan Krikorian: 1:06:58

Yeah, very exciting. And just to put a bow on it before it starts to upset, first of all, I love the bag or Vance reference, one of my favorite golf movies, so always get a couple of good movie references out of coach Toppert. But yeah, like there’s the chunking. Information has been a thing talked about a lot in science and decision making is how much information you can take. And you know the great decision makers and you mentioned quarterbacks a couple of times and they can take in all this information quickly and chunk it all down. And it’s so true when you talk about eyes and all that. When you watch a great player, they’re not just scattered trying to take it all in all the time, they just have this very smooth look to them or they just feel it, see it all come in, the reads are easy, they know where to look. I think it’s fascinating.

Patrick Carney: 1:07:42

Just reminded me. I would like to ask you a little bit. More early on in the conversation you talked about anticipation, and so obviously we’re talking about we want to make better decision makers better able to read the defense, but then I guess, what role does anticipation play in? That was also another piece I circled and would have liked to have hit on.

Dan Krikorian: 1:07:59

Yeah, exactly, we haven’t done any three hour long ones yet, multi part, but maybe someday moving to start sub or sit. Both of these were born out of our own discussions about our own teams and with other coaches recently about, you know, iso situations and work on those things. And then, obviously, the critical conversations during a game is always a good one. Actually, we’ll start with that one and the one you asked which was about the effective in game communication, so I’ll kick it back to you on takeaways there.

Patrick Carney: 1:08:27

What stood out to me the most when we started talking about the language and delivering a clear message and tying in your cues and maybe your player development plan when you want to correct or help a player in the game, and he mentioned using like three words or less, or four.

Dan Krikorian: 1:08:43

I really enjoyed how he broke down timeouts as well as the half time. I know I followed up about those things, but just the kind of structure of it and you know how much information to give them. And then like, what kinds of information to give them, and he talked about half time, like the film, but not too much film, and you know he got into a little bit of the. You know what do we do at halftime when we come back up. Sometimes guys want to sit there and get a couple more extra minutes of rest but then all of a sudden game starts and they’re kind of stiff and I thought it was interesting conversation about what we do when we come back up. But the structure of those things and who’s in the defensive flow, defensive ATO, offensive flow, like just you know, I think that that gives a good rhythm to your timeouts and to your halftime.

Patrick Carney: 1:09:28

He raised a good point when we talked about like when to deliver the message and the timing and we had a really good conversation with Andy Bass about the words we use as a coach and Cody brought it up that if he says something right away after a play, that more often than not that’s probably going to mess up the player for the next couple plays, worst case for the rest of the game, he said. And that really reminded me of our conversation with Andy Bass as I referenced that, yeah, just being aware that when we give feedback at certain moments, we’re taking that player out of that moment or taking away his ability to just react and play freely and slow up his movement, slow up just his thought process at times, like we said, it just distracts him and gets him on another chain of thought which maybe is detrimental to the next couple plays. So I enjoyed that part again that it reminded me of our conversation there, of, just again, the role we play and often like our best intentions and go astray, like with all these things, tone, message, but timing, specifically here what we were talking about, absolutely. So, dan, we’ll finish out with our last start subset where we talked about defending isolation players that have the mismatch. So what were some of your takeaways there from that conversation?

Dan Krikorian: 1:10:44

I think you and I were talking, before you hopped on with Cody, about this one and just the different ways. You can just not be at the mercy of a great ISO player in late clock and you know a lot of this. It depends contextual time, score, all that. But yeah, just ideas, I think, to work through when it comes to trying to not get burned by a great player in certain situations. And so I think the interesting one for me was his start was, I want to say, the most interesting? Another miss for me was asking about the shifting to a zone. I wish I would have followed up more on that, because Cody’s got roots in Europe as a player. I know he studies European game a lot. That’s something that we’ve seen quite a bit where you kind of protect the rim and protect your defense by shifting to that zone In late clock. I probably could have followed up with him a little bit more on that, but I thought it was an interesting conversation on the art of that hit or the quick double, and when to do it, how to do it, why you would do it and the other three players that are rotating out of it. And I think that you know, especially at his level, g League, high level division. One was at NBA. You got to find someone else to beat you. And my last point, before kicking it back to you, I liked how he mentioned those other players on the floor likely have constraints by their own coaches as to what types of plays they should be in, and so putting them in those situations where they’re kind of having to go potentially against what their role or what they’re comfortable in is already a win, whether that ball goes in or not.

Patrick Carney: 1:12:21

I found it interesting that he started double teams and then he sat forcing the drive, because in my mind or when we put this question together, I mean obviously they’re not the same but they’re very similar in the fact that you’re going to force a rotation, like if we sat in the zone a gap. It was maybe a little bit more reactive and you’re going to see what kind of play it out, but with loaded help. But those two were obviously with the double. We’re going to run or we’re going to force them into our help. So I thought it was interesting that he put them on both ends in terms of start and sit. And I really liked his thoughts on why you hit on to the double with guys that have constraints so you can kind of leave off of them.

Dan Krikorian: 1:12:59

You know who you’re going to leave open, but then why he was opposed or it was his least favorable to force the drive and my quick thought on that would likely be that with the drive, the ball still in the best player’s hands, making the decision where the hit, it’s like just get it out of this guy’s hands and we’ll live with the decisions and the shots of all the other guys where the drive he could likely make that skip pass to a guy who can still catch and shoot. I think maybe was his rationale on that.

Patrick Carney: 1:13:26

You’re right he mentioned and why he was opposed. Or because, yeah, you’re giving that guy that runway, you’re getting him downhill and then you’re also dependent on having the rotation get there in time. The low man, as he said, he’d be a very rich man.

Dan Krikorian: 1:13:40

Yeah, and like all of these things, it’s depends, because I’m sure there’s situations too where if you’re up four or five and you just don’t want to give up a three, no matter who it is in that late game, and you rather just force that thing down to the paint and make a, make it tough too, and so you’re still up a possession. Obviously, that would probably change too, but I think in general, getting it out of that best player’s hands he’s most comfortable with, or you can do it.

Patrick Carney: 1:14:09

Jay Laranega reference with his conversation with Michael Jordan. Just kind of take away everyone else and let MJ get 85. That’s right.

Dan Krikorian: 1:14:19

Yes, absolutely. Well, I think we both mentioned a couple of things we could have went deeper on here. Was there anything else, though, from your end that we could have went further on, man?

Patrick Carney: 1:14:31

probably all of it, to be honest. It was very interesting and he got me thinking on so much, but no, I’ll leave it there. The big ones for me were the quiet eye and anticipation. I would have really enjoyed to kind of go further down with him. Yeah, absolutely.

Dan Krikorian: 1:14:46

And I know I mentioned a couple already, so I won’t keep adding more. There was just a ton of stuff, great takeaways and things we could have kept going down a rabbit hole on. So, Pat, if there’s nothing else on your end, we’ll start wrapping this thing up. That was good. Well, we wish Cody Topper and Capital City Go Go best of luck the rest of the way. Thank you for coming on. Thanks everybody for listening.