The Basketball Podcast: EP353 with Joe Mantegna on Teaching the Game and Radical Transparency

Joe Mantegna Quotes:

“How do you build a dynasty? . . How do I get it going? And he said, ‘Listen, it’s really hard to build, but he said it’s even harder to sustain. So, you need to decide right now if you plan on being at Blair for a long time and you have the wherewithal to build a program. You need to understand that if you build it, then you have to sustain it. And that’s harder and it takes a lot of energy to sustain it’ . . if I don’t keep up that growth mindset, then that’s when I’m going to be out of it.”

“We’ve kind of always had this Identity of trying to win special teams, trying to take away the other team’s pet plays, trying to play best player defense against the other team’s best guys.”

“We have two phases to it. One phase is, we call it the dance steps. How are we going to cover a UCLA screen? How are we going to guard a flare? .. All the different actions and how we going to guard them. Some of the actions we have multiple ways we can guard them, and we’ll have to decide  . . how we’re going to guard certain guys and ball screens, certain parts of the floor. But then, you have to decide, ‘Can we just disrupt them with ball pressure? Can we disrupt them playing a ball screen a certain way?’  So, the decision always has to be made between the dance steps and the disruption. And it really depends on the personnel of the other team.”

“They run all this stagger, cross screen stuff and it was really hard to guard, but we kind of landed on let’s understand the dance steps, but let’s make sure they run their offense four feet out from where they want to run their offense and let’s make sure their ball reversal isn’t made in rhythm and we’re going to throw their timing off. So, I think that’s the art of it is deciding where you’re disrupting and where you need to know the dance steps.”

“When I was a younger, more insecure coach, I wanted to run these beautiful practices . . And what we learned was the game’s not played that way. It’s sloppy. Guys have to find solutions. And so, what we try to do is create sloppy scenarios that they have to guard. And it served us so much better because . . the stops don’t necessarily come on the dance steps, but somebody might have to make a late veer and just figure it out on the fly. And so, you know, we want to give the guys the terminology and the freedom if they need to go off the plan defensively.”

“I really try to disrupt my team when we’re coming off of championship seasons. We’re telling them to stay humble and not just run it back and not do the same things over and over. We need to model that as coaches. And so we really try to be disruptive in the face of good seasons.”

“I think there’s a lot of flexibility with icing. People think you’ve got to play way back, and you certainly can, but I think you can vary the depths of the drop . . you can trap out of an ice if you want to. There are ways you can make up for it . . I think you can still do this even if you don’t have great rim protection.”

“We are trying to create advantages on offense. The best way to create an advantage is in a five-on-four or four-on-three. And I have a dynamic guard who can touch the paint. That’s the easiest advantage to create . . it’s an easy read that we work on every day . . let’s not make this harder than it has to be.”

“We teach almost everything that way. Teach it whole, break it down into advantages, show film and then come back to the whole again at the end. I think that’s the best way to teach it and I think we can get a slow understanding and then make quick progress.”

“The culture piece to our program is what I’m most proud of. We’ve won a lot of championships and placed 90 guys at Division 1 schools. But at the end of the day, we’re using the bouncing ball to teach young men to be able to navigate life a little bit . . we all have our heads in our phones . . they don’t get a lot of repetitions talking to one another. Not a lot of people are telling them the truth in life. And so, the two things you want to do is get those guys to be able to be radically transparent with one another and also get used to real time feedback from a place of love from adults in their life.”

“You’re going to hear the truth from me every day. I care about you. And the reason I’m telling you the truth is because I want you to improve and I care about your development. I care about you as a person.”

“We’re beating a lot of good teams, but we can’t get over the hump against this one team often enough. And so, while it was brutal in the moment, those losses, we decided as a staff and I decided personally as the head coach that we had to get better and that we were going to take this disappointment and we were going to use it as a way to learn and grow. And the first place I was going to point a finger was at myself. How was I going to get better?”

“What is the most important thing? . . I think that’s such a simple phrase and I think so many of us, when we were young coaches, we didn’t know what the most important thing was. We didn’t know what made us win at the particular job that we had. And I think trying to figure out in every job that you have what the most important thing is. Is it development of your kids, just getting them better?”

Joe Mantegna Breakdown:

Joe Mantegna Selected Links from the Podcast:

Joe Mantegna
Luol Deng
Royal Ivey
Marial Shayok
Jeff Buxton
Steve Clifford
John DeJesus
Jay Wright
Dan Hurley
Brett Brown
Tony Bennett