The Basketball Podcast: EP337 with Landry Kosmalski on Shifting Strategies and Sustaining Success

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Landry Kosmalski Quotes:

“You start to realize the things that have worked for you no longer do because they’re not sustainable. So, you try to figure out a new way to handle the stress and strain of the job and parenthood. For me, that meant figuring out when I get breaks, how I get my mind clear . . then what happened is we started winning . . I think my energy was so much better for our guys . . I have to have clarity and a clear mind so that I lead our team and my own family the right way.”

“We’ll be very critical with constructive criticism in film [sessions]. ‘We’ve got to do this better. We’ve got to do this.’ But before we go on the court, the last thing is, we look at five to ten clips of guys doing excellent work, excellent effort, or they learned and they’re doing something they didn’t do the game before. So now, whatever they heard before, we leave on a positive note.”

“You have to think differently to do well here. I think that, at times the first three years when we were losing, I was really resentful about that. Now that I’m going into my 13th year, I think it’s been one of the biggest blessings of my life to go, ‘We have to figure this out the hard way.’ It’s made me a much better coach to say, ‘We’re a little limited here, we’re unathletic here, we’re going to have to find a way anyway. I think it really pushes you to find solutions.”

“Motion [offense] is physically draining, but it’s also emotionally draining because you are making a lot of decisions on possessions about how to get open, when to get open, how to use a screen, how to finish your cutout. There’s a lot of emotional energy that you have to commit to motion.”

“The whole philosophy to the push, most people think it’s to get early shots. That is a part, but that’s the smaller part. If you can outrun your opponent and get a shot early when they didn’t run back, that’s an advantage because you’ve practiced it and you’re in better shape. The bigger part, though, is to get the opponent, get the defense, both literally and figuratively on its heels, where they feel like they’re just reacting to you.”

“What can limit our rotations, limit our scrambling? How can I keep you from getting to your strength and use my strengths? And we just play our defense based on that. Now, it’s still team-based. We want to have gap help. We want to have help if a guy does get beat, but we want to make it like what is my strength and what has taken away his strength within the framework of a team D.”

“What do we have to do to have the best chance of success? Personalizing our motion, personalizing our d as we’ve talked about a few times, changing our system a little bit, tweaking it here, playing faster, slowing it down? This is not about doing the system that makes me feel comfortable, this is about what do we do to give ourselves the best chance. That adaptability and flexibility, I think, is a big part of sustained success.”

Landry Kosmalski Breakdown:

02:23 Coaching with a Clear Mind
04:21 Shifting Mindsets
08:33 Implementing the G3 System
13:04 Pressing Strategies
25:17 The Evolution of Practice Approaches
29:51 Technique vs. Tactics in Coaching
30:16 Closeout Techniques and Individualization
31:29 Teaching Screening Angles
32:57 Simplifying Decisions in Motion Offense
38:37 Defensive Philosophy and Adjustments
41:11 Developing Defensive Skills in Practice
48:57 Sustaining Success Through Adaptability
50:20 Ball Screen Defense Strategies

Landry Kosmalski
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