那个太长了……新开个
Playoff Preparation
by Sam Presti, Spurs Assistant G.M.
April 22, 2006
With the post-season set to begin I thought it would be a good time to look at how teams across the league prepare for what is hopefully a long run in the play-offs…
Each team spends thousands of hours a year on advance scouting, this is the form of scouting that is focused solely on the X’s and O’s. Advanced scouts are the guys that can tell you what “Double X Red Zipper 45” means when Gilbert Arenas calls the play while running up court, or what out-of-bounds play a team likes to run in the second quarter if they are down by six or more points. Think about it, these guys have every play-book in the league crammed into their memories and can call each play up in milliseconds; the best guys can tell you which side of the floor the team is more successful from with each call as well. A lot of the job is almost detective-oriented. They are using their eyes to look for hand signals as well as the formation and spacing of the actual play, their ears for the actual play call, and their hands to diagram everything out so that the following morning an assistant coach can decode the whole report as if he were at the game himself…
So, all this work and nights of travel by the advanced scout culminates into part of the preparation that our coaches undertake for the post-season. The trick here is of course that some teams could be playing any one of a few teams in the first round…you guessed it: Three different preps are needed in these cases…As the post-season unfolds, teams are always preparing for both opponents that they could face if they are fortunate enough to advance. Luckily, advanced scouts are on the road all year long preparing their teams for every upcoming opponent and normally see a team two or three times prior to when their team is scheduled to play them…that’s a lot of times to figure out if Cleveland is better running “Hawk Triple 61 Slash” with LeBron or Larry Hughes at the point…Luckily for us we have Mike Wells working on all of our advanced scouting and he does a great job. Mike’s job is a grind, he travels to the city of the game during the day, scouts the game in the evening and then files his report late into the night once he gets back to the hotel and puts it into a format that can be sent to our offices though cyberspace…the next morning, he’s off to another NBA city to work on another team.
Another aspect to post season preparation is born in the video room. The video room is a land of long hours and blurry eyes. These guys are responsible for breaking each opponent down both as a team and as individuals. Their effort works in symmetry with the advance scout so that what is developed in written and diagramed form comes to life on video for both the players and the coaches. From here, the coaches will be able to evaluate how each opponent played us during the regular season, and who was successful playing them and why? We use an enormous amount of computer technology in the video room in today’s NBA, things are a lot different now than they were when I started in there in 2000. My basic vocabulary was: VHS, Play and Record…and of course accepting the brutal reality that setting the timer on all VCR’s is like having to complete a Rubic’s cube blindfolded…
Moving on, the video room tapes an average of 30 NBA and college games per night, and loads each play of our upcoming opponents games into a system that can categorize and “break down” the game into a format that can be sorted in various ways. We can call up all of our upcoming opponents “middle pick and roll action” from the three games prior in seconds, or we can sort by time, player, play call, side of the floor, etc…The guy in charge of this for us is James Borrego, and he is assisted by Brian Keefe and Steve Hetzel. Working in the video room requires a lot of tech and basketball savvy as well as patience and attention to detail. The work from this room moves the process on to the coaches, who themselves have been pouring over different forms of film study and information before they get the opponent “breakdown tapes.” From here a game plan is constructed and communicated to the guys on the floor…
The coaches really hammer down to look for tendencies, trends and counters to employ in real time. However, at the end of the day, each team walks into their series with a total grasp of their opponent right down to play calls, hand signals and individual tendencies in each set. There is an old saying: there are no secrets in the play-offs after Game One. Maybe a team can sneak a few wrinkles into the game plan but at the end of the day teams want to do what they are best at and generally what got them into the Post Season…now you have to find a way to stop it.
Something to look for in a play-off series are the adjustments and counters that each team will look to make from game to game and, at times, from half to half. It may be a specific match-up that one team is looking to exploit or adjust to, or perhaps the way one team is choosing to defend the sideline pick and roll. Even substitution patterns can be tweaked as a form of strategy…The preparation for a series is intense and very detail-oriented but ultimately each team’s advanced work is minimized by great players performing at the highest level of play. At the end of the day the game is about the world’s best athletes matching skills, and wills as a team committed to one goal.
So these are just a few things to consider as the post season gets under way, hopefully it will give you a better idea as to the preparation that gets each team ready for their run at the NBA Championship…
Thanks again for all of the wonderful support of our team and organization…