Bill Peterson, assistant coach for the Milwaukee Bucks, stopped by one of our workouts the other day. After watching one of the players workout he told him he needed to learn to change speeds. Coach Peterson gave him a great analogy to really get him (and me) to think about. He said if I was going to fight you and just came at you the same way and was beating you down eventually you would find a way to stop what I was doing. If I started bobbing and weaving you wouldn’t know how to stop me. This is the same concept with changing speeds.
Forrest Larson told me last winter that changing speeds needs to be a dramatic change of pace. Not going from 70%-80%, but accelerating from 10%- 90%. Everyone talks about vertical jumping in basketball, but the most important athletic skill is probably explosiveness and the ability to decelerate. If you can go hard and stop quickly you can create space by your guy running past you. Obviously you can start quickly to create separation and it’s a great way to freeze your defender. The more I watch and study the game the more I see this to be true.
I’m not going to claim to know anything about football, but I notice one thing on running plays. When the running back receives the hand off or pitch from the quarterback he doesn’t always immediately try to hit the hole. Many times he goes slow, waiting, surveying, looking for that hole to hit, where he changes speeds and explodes.
More basketball players need to learn how to do this out on the floor. You’ll especially notice great guards doing this coming off pick and rolls. The dribbler will go hard off the screen and slow down when the big hedges, but when the defenders meet on recovery he’ll attack.
How do you work on this? Great question. I really believe one of the best things you can do is watch film and look for the times during a game when players change speeds. Steve Nash and Stephen Curry are great examples of. If you’re in Wisconsin, Iowa, or Minnesota and want to watch a high school player who knows how to do this extremely well, go watch Matt Thomas of Onalaska high school. He was working a camp this past summer for us when we were working on a change of pace dribble series with the players. I asked him in front of everyone…
“Matt, how many players do you play against that are quicker and faster than you?”
“Most of them”
How many players do you go by off the dribble?
“A lot of them”
Don’t get me wrong, Matt is actually more athletic than people think he is, but he usually has the other team’s best athlete guarding him.
Ironically Matt Thomas, Stephen Curry and Steve Nash have watched and studied a fair amount of basketball in their lives. It’s probably why they know how to change speeds.
Hit me up on twitter @mikeleehoops or post any other ideas you have below!
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Mike Lee
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