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The Basketball Podcast: EP418 with Zach O’Brien on Coaching Principles and CLA
Zach O’Brien, assistant coach for the Los Angeles Sparks and former head coach of Mist BC in the Unrivaled Basketball League, discusses his approach to player development and coaching methodology. He explained his focus on decision-making, creativity, and empowering players rather than controlling their actions. He discusses the importance of establishing team principles and creating an environment for players to explore and problem-solve.
O’Brien shared his experience implementing constraint-led training approaches in the WNBA, emphasizing the importance of creating environments where players can explore and problem-solve rather than following rigid drills. He explained his coaching philosophy centered on three key principles: pace, shot profile, and spacing, along with defensive principles of on-ball disruption and off-ball shrink.
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Zach O’Brien Quotes:
“These decision-making principles don’t feel very good in the moment. When it comes to development, you learn that’s the best growth . . trying to get away from that block training.”
“The main thing, you want to incorporate decision-making constraints in everything you do and the goal is to cut out as much of the classic teaching, the rep-based teaching, that placebo effect. You want to cut out that as much as possible. There can be pushback from players because it is a different style. What I think the biggest benefit that is being driven by decision making is it allows you to cater your training to specific players.”
“The difference in this teaching style is I try to tell my players, when in doubt in a situation or in a drill, just play, just hoop, just do what you would do naturally. I’m going to get so much information from that . . As coaches, we have to be very comfortable with the struggle, but also we have to be solid in the fact that we might not have control in a lot of this stuff . . if we’re doing this the right way, the players are in control and they’re driving the car.”
“We have data now that tells us essentially that what I tell you as a coach doesn’t stick with players very much at all. What I tell you and what you do are almost never aligned. And so we have to create the habits and we have to create self-reflective players. It’s on us to outline the constraints and to outline where we want to go with this and to give them an idea that we’re not just rolling the ball out, there’s a purpose to this.”
“We don’t want to just work on decisions. We want to give players the platform to make the decisions . . What are they processing and then how are we making these decisions? The question you should be asking your players the most for me is, ‘Why?’ Why did you do that? What were you processing to make you do that?”
“Know yourself, know your personnel, know your teammates, know your role. And at that point, with those four things in mind, if you’re processing those correctly, your decision making should be really high levels.”
“It creates simplicity and it allows you to be process-based . . we’re not talking specific actions, we’re talking when our offense goes stagnant, we need to play faster, we need to space the court more and we need to find better shots.”
“The core of basketball is always we’re just going to play harder than you and we’re going to be the aggressor and we’re going to dictate the terms. With that as your foundation, your principles are built on top of that.”
“The players that we’re coaching are natural, intuitive athletes, and we want them to be thinkers, but we want them to be subconscious thinkers — quick, intuitive, and decisive. Get your players to make quick decisions and trust those decisions. And then trust the fact that everything we do, we work on a counter for it. Any move you have, you have a counter. So, if you make the wrong decision, you always have a counter for it.”
“Give your players the space and the platform to be successful. And simplicity is the ultimate sophistication . . we’ll work with kindergarteners the same way we work with Russell Westbrook, and nothing changes. The language might be different, but at the end of the day, we’re making reads and we’re trying to help the players be reflective and be able to guide their own practices in a lot of ways.”
“The best growth, a lot of times in the moment, doesn’t feel good. It feels like navigating a dark room. But if you’re really intentional as coaches, you start to take pride in the fact that this is going to look really ugly at first, but let’s watch how they work themselves out of it . . the more you do it, the more the players start to take pride in the problem solving.”
“I want that, that initial number of flow and transition to be as high as possible and then outside of that, I really try to dumb it down. I don’t have a lot of sets outside of that. It’s let’s find the bad defender and let’s find our two or three best players and let’s put the bad defender in action as much as possible.”
“Players who love to compete want to be in games and want to be engaged in this stuff. And as a coach, I don’t want to train rep, rep, rep. It’s so boring for me. I want to get you in a game. I want to get quickly to, ‘Here’s our game, here’s our constraints.’”
“What have we emphasized that’s important? And then I can only really hold the team accountable to that. And that’s at all levels. . . but when everything is important, nothing’s important. And so, the principle approach and the decision-making approach allows clarity.”
Zach O’Brien Selected Links from the Podcast:
Zach O’Brien
Noah LaRoche
Sandy Brondello
Diana Taurasi
Skylar Diggins
Brittney Griner
Breanna Stewart
Arike Ogunbowale
Sonia Raman
Rebekah Gardner
Channing Frye
Courtney Vandersloot
Stefanie Dolson
Olaf Lange
Andrew Wade
Cheryl Reeve
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