Buzz Williams: Transition Defense

Here is some practice footage of the 2011-2012 Marquette team working on transition defense.  In my opinion, transition defense is one of the most under-taught and under-practiced elements of basketball.  The video can be purchased at Syskos.

Chris Lowery: Blending Transition Defense with Half Court Defense

Here is a brief video of Chris Lowery's transition defense that leads into his half court defense.  Coach Lowery does a great job of simplifying transition defense.  I also included some notes on a breakdown of his transition defense in the link below.

Chris Lowery: Blending Transition Defense

Bo Ryan: Wisconsin Transition Defense

A few years ago, I heard Bo Ryan discuss his philosophy to transition defense.  It was absolutely great.  It was amazing how simple it was and logic behind it.  I broke down my notes and diagrams to show the basic concepts of his transition defense.

Wisconsin Transition Defense

Vance Walberg Drills

Here are some intense pratice drills that Vance Walberg uses daily in his practices.  Each of these drills teach transition offensive and defensive concepts.  Even if you don't run a DDA/DDM style offense, you can adapt them to fit your style of play.

Scramble Drill
Texas 22
Texas 111
Cardinal

Competing with Less Talented Teams

Most coaches at some point in their careers will experience a team that is lacking in talent. This was my case a few years ago when I was coaching girls. We won 4 games over the course of 2 years. At practice, we did a lot of fundamental development focusing on passing, dribbling, footwork, shooting and ball toughness.

My thought at the time was that in order to keep ourselves in the game, we need to minimize the number of possessions that the other team would have and play really good defense. Looking back at this approach, especially the offensive side, I can see that this approach was not ideal. I could see it working had our players had a good base of fundamentals. However, it was a struggle for us to get ball reversals, find quality shot attempts and ultimately we had a large amount of turnovers each night and were struggling to score 30+ points. Regardless of how good our defense was, it is tough to win games if you are scoring 30-35 points.

Over the years, I have done some research, talked with numerous coaches and watched some videos on this topic. Granted, I came across many different philosophies that emphasized slowing down the game, but ultimately, my opinion has changed. If I could re-coach those 2 years with those exact same players, in a nut shell, my approach would be as followed:

1. We would look to do the bulk of our scoring out of our transition offense. We would spend a large portion of practice working on a sideline break that would also serve as our press break. As I noted above, we had a hard time scoring out of our half-court offense because of our fundamental ability, style of play and the athleticism of our opponents. Rarely would we get a quality shot that was not contested. Therefore, getting the ball up the floor as quickly as possible with the pass and attacking the rim in transition would have probably given us better quality shot attempts. It would have also given us a better chance of getting offensive rebounds and more free throw attempts, both of which we struggled to do in the half court set.

2. I would have also been more aggressive with our defense (full court and half court). I probably would have stayed with our match-up zone, but would have been more aggressive with trapping. I would also have extended our defense and played the game full court. Granted, we were going to get with some of our rotations, but we would also force a few more turnovers that would have led to higher quality shots that we were not getting in the half court set.

3. In both our transition offense and defense, I would have had to play more people in order to play that aggressive style for a full game. In reality, there was wasn’t much difference in ability from players 1-12. Not only would more kids have played, but I think kids like to play this style anyways, so we would have probably been a happier team regardless if we would have been winning or losing.

4. I would have continued to use a simple have court offense that emphasized attacking the basket with the dribble and with the pass regardless if we saw man or zone defense. I would have also reduced the number of sets and quick hitters.

5. Fundamentals would continue to be taught in practice. I would have just incorporated more multidimensional drills that incorporated combination skills in the transition game (being that is where most of our game would be played at).


I don’t know if we would have won any more games than we did those 2 years, but I know I would have enjoyed coaching more and the kids would have enjoyed playing more. In my opinion, even if we lost those same games, but were scoring 50 points rather than 30 and more kids played that were probably about the same ability level anyway, it probably would have been a better couple of years.


We are currently using this approach this year with our boy’s program. We have done a lot with statistical analysis and have found that the numbers (FT attempts, shooting percentage, turnover differential and points per possession) support this style of play for us. We have an athletic group which makes it even more enjoyable to coach and play.