Slappin’ Glass sits down with the Head Coach of BC Andorra is Spain’s ACB, Ibon Navarro. The trio dive into pre-season building blocks from a cultural, offensive, and defensive standpoint, unique player-value statistics, maintaining work/life balance, and discuss transition fouling, 4 v. 4, and much more during the always fun “Start, Sub, or Sit?!”.
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Inside the Episode
This week we had the pleasure of sitting down with the Head Coach of BC Andorra in the Spanish ACB, Ibon Navarro. Long looked upon as one of the best basketball leagues on the planet, the ACB, and coaches like Ibon Navarro, are always worth a study. Here’s a look inside the episode with Coach Navarro…
3 Key Tactical Concepts
- Pre-Season Building Blocks: Coach Navarro discusses his thoughts and philosophies on building a team in the pre-season. We talk about his personal offseason study habits, looking back at holes in the prior year’s roster and style of play, and implementing the building blocks on both sides of the ball in the early weeks of the season.
- Player Value Systems and Building Habits: A fun conversation about how Coach Navarro builds great habits and chemistry with his teams. Coach Navarro talks about his system of tracking and celebrating actions that promote unselfishness, commitment, and team spirit.
- Differentiating Good and Bad “Fouling”: A really interesting discussion around how Coach Navarro thinks about both good and bad fouling, and how it fits into his Player Value System mentioned above. A thought-provoking segment about how certain fouls can be valuable, and how to use them.
2 Quotes from Coach Navarro
- On Coach Popovich and focusing on small details in preseason: “I remember a conversation I had with Tiago Splitter, and he explained that with Coach Popovich, when they started their first practice with the Spurs, they started 1 v. 1, 2 on 0, 2 v. 1… from the very small details. And from then on, day-by-day…Sometimes in two or three weeks, you detect that there is a problem, and you don’t know why? And it’s because of the details that you didn’t focus on in the first days.”
- On Building Unselfish Habits: “Unselfishness is not just giving an assist, (it’s) when you sacrifice yourself. We give values to things that are good habits, and if one of them is unselfishness, or commitment, or team spirit, that means the players must know which actions belong to that value.”
1 Interesting “Start, Sub, or Sit?!”
- Topic: Best “Non 5 v. 5” way to teach concepts
- Choices: 2 v. 2, 3 v. 3, or 4 v. 4
- Coach Navarro’s “Start” (sort of): 4 v. 4