🏀 How to use the secret of Attitude to WIN

James Purchin

and

Dustin Aubert

Nov 16, 2023

This is the day you become a better player or coach.

Today’s Basketball Academy takes 3 minutes and 7 seconds to read.

Here’s what we’re serving up:

🏀 #1 - Best thing we heard 🎧

🏀 #2 - Favorite Action 🎥

🏀 #3 - Favorite thing we saw 🏛️

LET’S DIVE IN ⬇️

Attitude 🎧

This is how Jay Wright’s teams charted “Attitude” throughout a game:

On Offense: extra passes, assists, screen assists, offensive rebounds, tap backs, paint passes, paint catches, and quick outlets.

On Defense: defensive boards, contested shots, blocked shots, charges, dives, steals, and deflections.

Clearly, Wright is evaluating more than points scored, and this is important because it means Wright is evaluating process, not just results. It is clear from the above that Wright focuses on effort goals, not just outcome goals.

Perhaps, that process orientation can explain Wright's two championships in three years. But, even if Wright's team fell short of a title, that is not how he measured the success of a season (again- he measures his season by effort goals, not outcome goals). According to Wright, when they sat down and judged their season at the end, they evaluated the following:

How did we play from start to finish– did we get better?
How hard did our guys play night in and night out?
How hard did we practice?
How close did we get our players to their potential?

Jay Wright's coaching philosophy at Villanova – evaluating the season based on effort and mastery, as opposed to results alone, may be something that all coaches can learn from to improve their coaching. 🔥

"Where Is Your Mindset After Something Bad Happens"

Must Add Action 🎥

Watch how the Nuggets ⛏️ tweaked the famous “Loop” Action to get Jokic an open 3.

“Iverson Loop Pin.”

Stoics 🏛️

We don’t control what happens, we control to how we respond to what happens.

One way to navigate like the Stoics is to have a “Routine.”

“If you don’t create a routine, you will be assigned one.”

Carve out 2 sacred hours. When James Clear became a father, he carved out “2 sacred hours” in the morning to do his work.
As he says “one hour before 9am is better than two hours after 5pm.”
If work time is sacred, it needs to be carved out.
The second way to create a stoic routine: is to have “trade-offs.”
As famous writer Austin Kleon puts it, as we get older we have three options: “work, family, nightlife” You can only pick 2.

Many college coaches tell their athletes: that there’s the team, class work, and nightlife and you can only pick 2.

Teammates 👀

Watch how Steph Curry celebrates as his record of most 3-Pointers in one game gets broken by his teammate Klay Thompson

Games to watch this weekend: 📺

Friday 11/17

11:30 am PT - Princeton at UCLA WBB on PAC12

7:00 pm PT - Suns at Jazz on ESPN

Sunday 11/19

10:00 am PT - UConn vs Indiana on ESPN

12:00 pm PT - Duke at Stanford WBB on ABC

The Basketball Academy

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