Clever Basketball Coaching Tactics to Steal Your Team Wins

• By Grant Young

Basketball is a game of inches and angles. And just the slightest margins of error, both on the offensive and the defensive ends of the floor, can be the difference between winning and losing. So any easy opportunities that an opposing team’s defense provides your offense must be capitalized on. 

But what if there was a way to increase the amount of mistakes a defense makes during a game? This would not only allow for easy points but also put added pressure on that team when it’s their turn on offense. And especially at basketball’s amateur levels, applying pressure usually amounts to success. 

Throughout his coaching career, Mike Neighbors has learned how to manipulate opposing defenses into making crucial mistakes using basketball defensive drills, which have earned his team countless wins. Coach Neighbors has been the Arkansas Women’s Basketball Head Coach since 2017, after being the University of Washington’s head coach for four seasons. During his time at Arkansas, Coach Neighbors has guided his Hogs to the best six-year period of sustained success in program history with 120 wins and five postseason qualifications. Coach Neighbors has accumulated 218 wins during his 10 seasons as a head coach, the most of any Power 5 head coach in 10 or fewer seasons, as well as one of only two NCAA Division I Head Coaches.

In his ‘Actions to Make Any Defense Wrong’ course, Coach Neighbors details the precise techniques and strategies that you can use to outsmart an opposing team. Below are some of the key takeaways from his fascinating course, which can set your team up for success by being more clever than your opponent. 

Preventing Opponent from Using Two for One - Using Substitutions

Two for one’s at the end of the quarter are the bane of many basketball coaches. These seemingly indefensible situations put pressure on defenses to double the defense they would as the clock winds down, which is already the most intense moment within a quarter. And since a basketball game can often come down to one possession, it’s imperative that you come out on the winning end of these tricky scenarios. 

Coach Neighbors lays out a simple example of how he manages to prevent opponents from using two for one’s against him. He details a game where his Arkansas squad is playing Auburn, and they had a two for one situation. When Auburn made a shot with 39 seconds left on the clock (remember, NCAA women’s basketball uses 30 second shot clocks), Coach Neighbors had his player grab the ball from the net and toss it to the referee. The referee then tossed it back to her and then the player held it out of bounds for about three seconds before inbounding it to her teammate.

The game clock doesn’t stop with each made field goal but the shot clock only begins once the ball is inbounded, so this back and forth with the referee and holding the ball for a few seconds before inbounding it (although be careful to not hold it for five seconds, as that will give the other team the ball back)—stalling, in other words—gave Coach Neighbors team the final possession in the quarter. 

This is an extremely simple yet genius way to ensure that your opponent won’t get a two for one situation. And while it will only work if the opposing team makes their first shot, Coach Neighbor’s stalling strategy will at least level the playing field in this situation and keep the opponent from stealing a possession away from you.

Use Fouls - Use False Action

Another strategy that Coach Neighbors employs to facilitate mistakes from opposing teams is using any fouls that your team still has to give. 

“If there’s a dead ball, and there’s 34-35 seconds left, and you’ve got 2 team fouls to give, put in your superintendent’s kid and your booster club president’s kid, and tell them to go foul the shot clock down to zero.” 

While Coach Neighbors is making a joke about which players you should get to make these fouls, his point is that using the fouls you have to give can save your team a few seconds — which can be all the difference between winning and losing. 

In addition, Coach Neighbors notes that teams can’t just delay and stall by passing the ball back and forth at the end of games like they used to, because shot clocks have been lessened and teams have wisened up to these tactics. Therefore, it’s up to coaches to create detailed offensive plays that require a lot of time to unfold, but also utilize a lot of passing so that the opposing defense can’t simply foul a player and get the ball back.

Be Prepared For

A crucial point that Coach Neighbors makes is that teams (and therefore coaches) must be prepared to use unconventional tactics at the end of quarters or at other random times in order to throw the opposing team off and steal a few seconds. 

Coach Neighbors noted an example of this was when he began to employ a soft press on defense at specific times of the game against specific teams. Because he typically wasn’t a coach who used the press on defense, opposing teams weren’t expecting it from him. But he spent a few practice sessions working on it with his players, and they got good enough at it where they could execute in a game and throw an opposing defense off. And even if this doesn’t produce a turnover, it will make it so your team doesn’t need to defend in the half-court for as long. 

Some of these clever strategies have won Coach Neighbors games over the years. And you can use them to the same result.