9 Small-Sided Game Scenarios
Practice situations for incorporating concepts & player development
🤔 Thought Starter: JJ Redick
⛹️ 9 SSG Situations from around the world
🤣 Meme-rable
🎼 The Playlist
🤔 Thought Starter: JJ Redick
“I consider myself to be someone who has a high level of curiosity and a love of learning. I’m not going to be perfect. I know that. The pursuit of perfect, which I’ve tried for my whole life, I recognize that you’re never going to get there. So, giving myself a little bit of grace is going to be important.”
- JJ Redick, The Athletic
⛹️ 9 SSG Situations from around the world
A project I’m working on this summer involves creating a database of small-sided game situations for the upcoming season.
I don’t have Synergy, so as I’ve written about in the past, I spend a lot of time on FIBA’s YouTube channel. More often than not, I watch the first quarter of the game looking for scenarios that can be broken down into 2v2, 3v3, or 4v4 situations. (Or 2v1, 3v2, 4v3, etc., if you want to scale up the advantage for the offense.)
Most of the clips involve actions or concepts we teach. Other clips are actions or clips I’m interested in, or maybe scenarios that could be good to practice. The situations I really like, I draw up on FastDraw. The other clips are labeled and kept on a hard drive.
Through the proper manipulation of task constraints, coaches can design SSGs in practice that expose their players to the same affordances encountered in games. This allows players to be able to act on these opportunities in-games. It also prepares them to come up with different solutions as the game changes.
- Alex Sarama, Basketball Immersion
I should point out that these situations work on a couple of different levels.
First, they can be included in the Principles of Play for a conceptual offense.
Second, they can be used for player development.
Finally, they can provide players the opportunity to perceive 🔗 Affordances in a representative environment.
I’ve read that lists with odd numbers attract more attention, so here are 9 situations from 9 different countries. Hope you find something you can use.
1. Finland Ghost ➡️ On-Ball Screen 3v3
Concept you can make part of your transition or work out of in half court situation.
2. Croatia Ghost ➡️ Flare 3v3
When breaking down the film, sometimes the players don’t actually run the concept us coaches see. In this case, the player at the point doesn’t set the flare screen for the “ghoster”, but you can see the possibilities. Also like how they get into this.
3. Norway Flare ➡️ On-Ball 3v3
Another great concept to work into your transition attack. I like creating the huge gap, but you might allow the flare screener to fill the ball corner to see what happens.
4. Romania Ram ➡️ Flare 4v4
We run a ram screen into a ball screen as an ATO a lot, so I loved seeing this from Romania to offer a counter. Can’t wait to see what players do out of this SSG.
5. Ireland Corner Lift w/ Flare 3v3 (secondary)
Several different SSG options your can run out of this opening-game set from Ireland. I picked a nice secondary action that you can incorporate to help your players flow into if the primary action doesn’t lead to a scoring opportunity.
6. Mexico Transition 3v3
Not a fan of Mexico’s spacing in this transition clip, but transition basketball is rarely perfect. So this is a nice situation with a couple of defensive constraints that should give the offense a slight advantage. On the other hand, I like this because the two “late” defenders make the offense have to attack quickly. And, yes, we would discuss our Seek-the-Sideline principle.
7. Germany SLOB Handoff 3v3
Discussed the other day with an assistant coach how dangerous sideline out-of-bounds plays could be if the players worked out of concepts. Here’s a start to building some SLOB Principles of Play.
8. Montenegro Post Kickout 2v2
I posted this a couple of weeks ago in the newsletter, but I’m including this again to demonstrate a player development SSG. I plan to use this as a warm-up finishing activity. Drive the kickout to finish or pass to the player who was doubled.
9. Cyprus Zone 45 Pop 4v4
The final SSG is a really simple concept to initiate the offense against a 2-3 zone. Start a player on the nail and then they pop out. Build up from there.
🤣 Meme-rable
Been sitting on this image for a while to use as an appropriate coaching-related meme. Figured this would be as good time as any.
🎼 The Playlist
9 songs hand selected for you to enjoy while basketball planning to start the month of August. (Not sure, but enjoyment could carry over to other sorts of planning.)
