The Whip of the God of Basketball

Gergulic's training class starts directly in the training hall of Santa Monica College. There is no classroom for students to sit down and listen to the class at ease, and there is no open whiteboard. Gergulic likes to teach directly on the court, and By constantly moving and positioning on the court, holding the ball and physically teaching tactics and movement details to his students. Then in the video analysis class in the afternoon, he will appreciate some classic playoff games with the students, especially the games directed by his students, and use specific examples to illustrate the use of techniques and tactics.

Of course, on the last day of the training class, he will participate in the Drew League with the students. The students will command a team in batches to compete on the field and test their learning results through actual combat exercises.

In the first three days of study, Gelgulic mainly taught some offensive tactics and strategies, and summarized the tactical ideas that have been popular and commonly used in the league in recent seasons, including the two tactics proposed by Fox-Leon. The tactical routine that combines the sub-quick offense and the triangle offense was evaluated by Gergulic as "a blade-edge offensive tactical system that only a few coaches can control."

The next three days were the focus of Gergulic's teaching, his specialty, defense.

After all the personnel arrived, Gergulic picked up the ball and walked to the middle of the court. Several students were free to choose positions to stand around him to listen to Gergulic's teachings from different angles.

"Some of the people here are either already well-respected head coaches in the league, or they already have rich assistant coaching experience, or they have been surrounded by their own family members. So regarding defense, I will no longer emphasize those basic things. , such as willpower, the basic principles of defending the center and the bottom line, the positioning and changes of zone defense, etc., you have either done well on the court, or you often use and emphasize these things in training, and these things have been used in earlier training classes. Have studied seriously. Okay, we don’t waste time on these things, so in our training class this year, we need to understand more advanced defense, elevate defense to a strategic situation, and understand the role of defense in the course of the game. role, and even how the defense will change the situation of both sides throughout the series, and ultimately make it a tool for you to win. "Gelgulic started today's lecture with an opening statement. No doubt everyone was mentally and physically moved by Gelgulic. Qi was attracted.

Whether it is Brown, Leon or Carlisle, they have all worked with top defensive coaches in actual team operations. They all understand and use defensive tools, and have seen various wonderful defensive designs. Obviously, ordinary defense courses cannot satisfy them at all. Defense must be raised to a new level to analyze it so that they can gain a new understanding.

"For the defensive course, I will start with a few tactics as analysis points and gradually expand to explain the essence of defense in basketball games. Before that, I would like to remind everyone that the difference between defensive tactics and offensive tactics is that offense is more focused. is subject to change, and the core idea of ​​defense is to remain unchanged and adapt to changes. Of course, this is not absolute. If you understand this, your team's concepts of offense and defense will have a deeper understanding." Gergurich gave a formal lecture Before, the last reminder.

"The first defensive tactic we are going to talk about today is not unfamiliar to everyone. It is also the defensive strategy that I became famous for in SuperSonics, Amoeba-defense, amoeba defense. Yes, I was talking about the core idea of ​​defense just now. It’s about staying the same to cope with the ever-changing situation, but in the end I have to tell everyone about amoeba.” Gergurich said to everyone half-jokingly.

The so-called Amoeba-defense literally means amoeba defense. The amoeba is a famous amoeba. Its body is naked and soft, and its legs can extend in all directions. And this bug is a very deadly pathogen that can cause a variety of diseases after entering the human body, which is quite dangerous. The same is true for the amoeba defense. First of all, it does not have a fixed defensive formation. It emphasizes strong pressure and requires defensive players to take the initiative to attack everywhere, like the tentacles of an amoeba.

At the same time, once this kind of defense is successful, it will cause the opponent to make a lot of mistakes, making the opponent look like they are infected and sick, dying in their own steals and counterattacks. Therefore, naming it after an amoeba is a perfect fit.

As Gergulic said, this kind of defense became famous in the SuperSonics. In the 1996 season, the SuperSonics team that entered the Finals relied on this kind of defense to allow Michael Jordan to get the lowest scoring average of his Finals career.

However, this kind of defense has many weaknesses and has high requirements for player configuration, so it has never been popularized in the NBA. Since George Karl's SuperSonics, no team has used this kind of defensive tactics again. Achieve greater things for the core. More often, this will become the team's defensive change option, used to suddenly increase defensive intensity in special phases, rather than being used throughout the entire game.

"The weaknesses of the Amoeba defense are obvious. I still remember coach Charles Riddell repeatedly reminding me that if the Amoeba defense is not used well or unreasonably, it will in turn greatly damage the team's defensive morale and cause harm to the team. Then let us demonstrate the problems and weaknesses that exist in the actual use of amoeba defense." After Gelgurich finished speaking, he asked five of his people to come over and form an amoeba defense in the half. Basic formation - diamond formation.

The core concepts of the Amoeba defense have two points. One is to strangle the first ball release point from the outside, and the other is to use fast movement to form a partial situation of more versus less. This requires that on the one hand, defensive players must have strong mobility and defensive area, so the Seattle SuperSonics had an extremely powerful striker; on the other hand, it requires players to have a very good overall defensive awareness, positioning, and distance. The sense must be strong, which is often easily overlooked. In fact, this one is more important than the first one.

Gergulic then demonstrated that the amoeba defense, which emphasizes movement and double-teaming, has huge loopholes in the two bottom corners and the top of the key. Once the players do not have a tacit understanding of the defensive cooperation with each other, they will double-team and move blindly. , will bring big open opportunities to the opponent.

"A brief explanation of Amoeba. Next, I want to talk about the second defensive tactic. It is the most common and widely used defensive tactic in our basketball games, which is man-to-man. The core of man-to-man is to use Adapt to changes, firmly believe in the player's personal defensive ability, break the opponent's pick-and-roll, break the ball and quickly transfer the ball to ensure that every opponent's player has a defender in front of him. This is the most primitive and ancient defense Strategy is also the most persistent defense. I can say that 80% of NBA offensive tactics are designed to break man-to-man defense." After a brief taste of amoeba defense, Gergulic started to talk about it again. Play the most common man-to-man defense.

It can be said that these are two mutually extreme defensive tactics. One is eccentric, the other is clever and unworkable, one has only a glimmer of brilliance, and the other has lasted forever in the basketball world.

Leon listened carefully to Gergulic's story. He knew that when Gergulic talked about these two almost opposite defensive tactics, he would never do it to popularize science. Obviously, he must have original ideas.

Sure enough, after briefly talking about man-to-man defense and conducting basic positioning drills, Gergulic said: "Why should I talk about these two defensive tactics that are completely different in style? Because , 30 years ago, my teacher, Mr. Charles Riddell, tried to blend these two defenses together into an ultimate defense that not only contains the advantages of both defenses, but also avoids the shortcomings to the greatest extent. Defensive tactics! Of course, he failed in the end. He just used different types of players to implement different defensive strategies at different times. And to this day, I am still looking for this answer. And the purpose of our course The content is to discuss together how to organically combine these two defenses to maximize their power!"

Gelgurich finally brought up the topic of this lecture. He was also his teacher, the Hall of Fame master coach of the University of Pittsburgh who invented the amoeba tactic, and Charles Liddell, who has been pursuing the ultimate defense throughout his basketball career.

Fox-Leon finally felt that participating in this training class might be more interesting and important than trying to get Carlisle to join the Celtics.