It's Time To Do Your Self-Scout

As you are gearing up for post-season play, I believe it is time to self-scout your team. When I was the Head Coach at Ashland Blazer HS (Ashland, KY), we did this around the District and Regional tournament time. I am going to give you five points to consider as to why you might want to do this, and how we went about performing this process.

Five Points to Consider

1. The natural tendency is to focus more on your opponent right now. You want these win-or-go-home scouts to be the best they have been all season, since so much is on the line. However, if your team isn't the best version of themselves, it really won't matter how many set calls you picked up on film or how far you drove to live scout a team. I think we focus on taking away 6-8 points from our opponent and neglect trying to add 6-8 points for our own team this time of the year. The truth is, you should do both.

2. You want your line-ups and sub rotations to be spot-on by now. Self-scouting helps you confirm whether or not you have the right personnel packages.

3. Self-scouting will give you the mindset of the coach trying to beat you. You will catch some glaring issues that "if you were playing you," you would try to exploit.

4. I guarantee that you will want to correct the following parts of the game:

   1. Screening in your execution

   2. Cut timing and intensity

   3. Press offense

   4. Out-of-bounds efficiency

5. You will end up redefining roles to some of your players to ensure they know what your expectations are for them. This may include adding a player to your rotation or taking one out.

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The Process

1. Personnel

   1. Divide your players up and assign certain players to a staff member to breakdown. The feedback they give you will create courageous conversations.

   2. Personnel breakdown should begin with analytics. Encourage your coaches to get a mental picture of a player without even watching one clip of film. The process I use for this is as follows:

      1. %'s - 2FG %, 3FG%, FT%

      2. Shot chart tendencies - Hudl does this for you, as does Synergy. For example, by noticing that a player shoots .67 from the right elbow as compared to .33 from the left elbow, you might be able to pick-up on how predictable your PG is off Top-of-Key (TOK) ballscreens.

      3. FGA : A ratio - This is the selfish stat (usually). This ratio will tell you how many shots a player is taking vs. how many assists they are dolling out. This is tainted by position. Your PG should be somewhere around 3 : 1 or 2.5 : 1. The bigs are going to be somewhere around 7 : 1 or higher (posts are often the end point of an assist). The leading scorer is going to be somewhere 5:1 - 7:1 as well. However, there are exceptions. When I was coaching a Valdosta State, we had a 6'9" wing, that was a fantastic catch and shoot guy. His ballhandling was not very very good, but his role was to pick & pop, and catch and shoot off of penetration. His FGA : A ratio was 14 : 1... and that was okay, because that was his role.

      4. An individual player's TRB% (Total Rebound %) - you can do this by using, 100*(Total Rebounds*(Player's Minutes Played/5))/(Player's Minutes Played*(Player's Total Rebounds + Opponent Team’s Total Rebounds))

      5. Efficiency Ratings - Hudl uses the VPS metric. I have found that this is very useful in determining if I am playing a player too much or too little.

      6. Shot zone characteristics - similar to shot chart tendencies mentioned earlier, but you are mainly looking to see what % of their shots are coming from what zones on the floor. You will notice players shooting too many 3FG's or not enough. If a player is shooting .28 from 3FG, yet .58 of their shots come from 3FG.... you have an inefficient player.

   3. Each Assistant should make a personnel clip tape of their assigned players. Similar to what you would do to prepare for an opponent's personnel.

2. The Head Coach should take the 30,000 foot view approach.

   1. I always tried to watch the following five games:

      1. Best game we played

      2. Worst game we played

      3. Most competitive game we played that isn't one of the games above

      4. Last two scheduled games that aren't included above

   2. Analyze your team's Points Per Possession (PPP) overall, in OBU situations, and in SLOB situations. You will probably tweak what you are running, realizing that your OB actions are stale need new actions.

   3. Analyze your quarter-by-quarter play. How does your team play:

      1. 1Q or first 4 minutes | 4Q or last 5 minutes (blow out wins will skew this 4Q number)

      2. Last part of 2Q or 1Half | First part of 3Q or start of 2Half

   4. Watch your ATO action. Do you need to become more effective in timeouts? You will win or lose a game in post-season coming out of a time-out.

3. Answer the following questions:

   1. If you shoot it poorly, how do you still win? Prepare for that game.

   2. Who is your go-to player and what is the best action for them to score?

   3. If you were preparing to play your team, what would be your top three defensive keys?

   4. If you were preparing to play your team, what would you try to exploit offensively?

   5. If you were preparing to play your team, based on your self-scout, who would you start, and who would your first two subs be? See if it's what you currently are doing...