Get it now
The Basketball Podcast: EP404 with Zach Chu on Winning in the Margins
In this week’s basketball coaching conversation, Radford head coach Zach Chu joins the Basketball Podcast to share insights on winning in the margins.
Zach Chu is in his first year as the Head Men’s Basketball Coach at Radford University. Currently the youngest head coach in NCAA Division I men’s basketball, Zach Chu brings nine years of experience in the NBA and a deep analytical background. Chu capitalizes on a deep analytical background, uniquely positioning him to navigate the rapidly changing landscape of college basketball with an end-to-end application of analytics from portal management, roster composition, and individual player development to game strategy.
After accompanying Coach Rick Carlisle to Indiana to manage game strategy, following five years in the Dallas Mavericks’ organization, Chu helped the Pacers leverage a data-driven approach to engineer one of the most efficient offenses in the NBA and an appearance in the Eastern Conference finals by their third year.
Recognizing the potential impact of this differentiated strategy in the NIL era, Chu accepted the role as Chief Strategist at SMU last year, where he implemented the same conceptual approach proven at the NBA level, producing the 20th ranked offense in the country while being one of only two schools in the nation to have six players average double figures. The Mustangs posted a 24-11 record, including a 13-7 finish in their inaugural season in the ACC.
Listen Here:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
Stitcher
Art19
Zach Chu Quotes:
“Our staff has to maintain what we call the longest view in the room. We are implementing what we believe is a completely distinct approach, and that requires time and dealing with college kids, kids who are trying to figure out how to balance what’s best for them in terms of maximizing their market value while at the same time figuring out their team’s objectives.”
“I believe one of the outcomes of the analytical approach . . is that we can increase our players’ IQ, which is so important today, given the style of play that is shown to be successful, being able to play more through concepts. We are seeing improvement every day, but it doesn’t happen as quickly as you would like.”
“I believe that a data driven approach can be the greatest driver of success in this new era The ability to complement basketball instinct with data will become an essential competency for college basketball programs.”
“There are four crucial areas in which analytics can be impactful to create a competitive advantage. One is optimized personnel selection. So, we use predictive modeling to try and project a player’s impact. The second thing would be optimizing NIL spending and validating your investment to stakeholders with quantitative analysis . . And then third I would consider player development and fourth being coaching strategy.”
“My main role in Indiana was to come up with edges to what we called winning in the margins . . to extend an analytical approach across different aspects of the organization and to contextualize data to get buy in from staff and players to make adjustments that would give us better odds to win one game or, in a bigger picture, to be successful over the course of a season. A great example of that for a single game would be a matchup. In the NBA, we can actually quantify how good a matchup is defensively for us.”
“I knew I wanted to incorporate is a flow or fluid system where you’re not always having to walk the ball up and call plays. One interesting thing about that that we’re experiencing is just the challenge in teaching guys that have never been asked to play this way. The challenges of having 14 new players who have never played together or played for me, to see just how long it takes to really build this kind of offense and this kind of style of play.”
“It does take time. We’ve really had to make sure our guys understand that there’s a lower floor to try to play like that, but there’s also a higher ceiling. We try to maintain the longest view in the room through struggles, through ups and downs to be able to teach guys the value and how we can truly drive efficiency through playing with pace and playing with really precise spacing and movement without calling plays is ultimately the goal.”
“To coach in college now after, after being in the NBA. The three-point line is tighter. It’s harder to space the floor. We don’t have as much shooting as the teams I coached on in the NBA. So, we’re having to find different ways to space the floor. We try to cut more now than I did in the NBA. We’re trying to come up with more principles to get guys cutting. We try to cut on every drive to the basket.”
“With as much as you see the hedge in college, the thing that I think is really difficult is the balance between the quick short roll passes and using two dribbles to stretch the coverage and allow for everyone behind the ball to pull behind the ball. We chose to try to attack and stretch the coverage with two dribbles.”
“Dribbling into post-ups is a choppy, slow, kind of methodical action that is really effective. And so having to get used to that and allow guys to work their way in there and use the dribble to work their way around the basket, that’s been an adjustment.”
“The post-up in college is more efficient than it is in the NBA. The efficiency of those plays and those actions . . forces you to have to guard more post-ups and it also forces you to have to commit to potentially putting two on the ball on post ups more than in the NBA.”
“Everybody right now is trying to find every way possible to put pressure on the rim and to make it a rim and three game as much as possible, but primarily the rim. It’s one thing to be able to create those shots, it’s another thing to be able to finish them . . if you take the top 10 teams right now in college basketball in terms of rim volume, rim attempts per game, only one of them ranks top 100 in rim field goal percentage.”
“Can you put guys in situations to get to their strong hand more? And then going back to the personnel piece, can we get our taller guys . . creating more of the volume around the basket? Those ar really two directives that we’re thinking about right now.”
“Making a decision off-balance in college is the trickiest thing. And so, the more times you can create contact initially and then get to two feet and make a decision from there, the better.”
“Can you practice like you’re 7 and 3 when you’re 3 and 7? Can you have a spirit and an energy and a connectivity in practice? That is absolutely important and necessary to get over this hump.”
“If there’s a moneyball approach to basketball in the last 10 or 15 years, it truly has been shot selection. There’s nothing that drives winning and efficiency more than the shots that you take. And so, finding ways to create the highest value shots you can is the most important part of this.”
“I would say the first thing is figure out what shots are truly valuable for your team That’s the one thing that in my opinion is worth manually tracking in practice is what your field goal percentage is or overall shooting efficiency is from each region on the floor, whether it be the rim, the paint, the mid-range or the three. And when you figure out what, what your strengths are, that is the why behind everything we do. We run, we play fast to try to create those shots. We run specific actions and play through specific concepts to create the shots that are truly the most valuable for our team.”
“As much as we want to emphasize kicking the ball ahead, I’ve never had as much of a plan as to what we do next as we do now. Being able to talk about, specifically, if you throw the ball ahead and you drive the ball where do you want all other four guys on the floor. And the one that I think is, is even more tricky that we’ve had to work towards is coming up with a plan when you throw the ball ahead and you cannot drive it. What do you want the next thing to look like? Part of coaching in college is these guys need a little bit more structure and some more answers to the test than some of the teams I worked for previously.”
“The most important balance, as you might expect, is trying to figure out which things you’re willing to budge on versus sticking to your guns on. For example, playing with pace. Should you slow down in certain games or in certain situations or do you want to play as fast as you can all the time?”
“The thing we’ve tinkered with the most is how much pressure to on defense. There are games where we press 80% of the time. There have been games where we press 20% of the time. And so, just the balance of game-to-game making those decisions, but also over the course of the year making sure that you don’t lose your identity as a team.”
“We truly want to serve these players, to help them not only improve their market value, but we truly want to maximize their basketball potential. With all the things that we’ve talked about thus far about player development, aligning with our team development, giving our guys a schedule that is challenging . . that forces us to respond to some adversity.”
“It is important to contextualize the data and to always use film and go back and validate what the data presents. So when we look at lineups, if there’s a lineup or if there’s a player, for example, in a game that goes minus 10 in four or five minutes, it’s so important to go back and study and really make sure that from a basketball perspective, that there’s a real reason behind it. And it’s a great way to teach a player, where he went wrong or potentially why he impacted the game positively or negatively. And it’s a great way to observe lineups and to make sure you go back and understand why a lineup may or may not be working.”
“Of all the advice that I got when I got to Radford, maybe the most consistent advice I got in terms of practice was to practice and to work on special situations.”
Zach Chu Breakdown:
Zach Chu Selected Links from the Podcast:
Zach Chu
Marcus Jenkins
Rick Carlisle
Myles Turner
Chris Mooney
Jordan Surenkamp
Andy Enfield
Mark Cuban
Haralabos Voulgaris
Please Support the Podcast
As we build our podcast following please take the time to support the Basketball Podcast. Our goal is to openly share as much useful basketball coaching info to stimulate your coaching.
- Tell your friends about us.
- Give us a shout out on social media.
- Give us a five star review wherever you listen to podcasts.
How to leave a podcast review at iTunes
Go to the iTunes page of the Basketball Podcast.
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-basketball-podcast/id1398261897
Click the View in iTunes button.
View in iTunes
At iTunes, click the Ratings and Reviews tab.
Select Ratings and Reviews
Rate the podcast using 1 to 5 stars.
Submit a brief honest review.