"Yankee" – Part 2

Tags

Boss Man, Dwayne Wade, FastDraw, LeBron James, Miami Heat, Mike Miller, NBA2K12, Post, Simplicity, Yankee

We had an incredible response to Part 1 of ‘Yankee’, and much of the feedback surrounded the fact that it seemed too simple. Many wanted to know about “what-if” scenarios, ways to tweak it with options and counters, and how to drill it.  Great questions, and we will address them all, but first let’s emphasize the most important part of Yankee: Simplicity.

As a coach, I crave simplicity. Too often, coaches crave control, and their players are not given any freedom to create or play loose. Yankee is simplistic, just as the Triangle Offense is simplistic. Both provide a framework for teaching players spacing and how to run good offense, and then let the players play.

The beauty of Yankee is that it is simple, and it puts the ball in the hands of your two best players every time down the court. How often do you see teams go 3 or 4 possessions (or more) without their best players getting a significant touch? Yankee designates those two players as the ‘Boss Man’ and the Post.

The Boss Man
The Boss Man has to be a good player (a scoring threat), should be a player who can run all day, and needs to understand how to read the defense.

The Post
The Post is the player on your team who either dominates with their back to the basket, or else is the player you feel has the biggest mismatch down low in a particular game.

To illustrate, imagine if the Miami Heat used Yankee, and put LeBron James on the block as the Post, and ran Dwayne Wade as the Boss Man with the double happening for Mike Miller (as indicated in the diagram). They would be set up to have their two best players touch the ball every time down the floor with actions on the back side keeping the defense honest. James would be a tough post matchup for any defender, and Wade’s ability to read and create would be amplified.

This could then flow into any offensive set or system they chose, but would give them a large number of possessions where the ball starts in the hands of two of the most difficult players in the NBA to defend.

It would be fun to see the creativity that LeBron and Wade would harness from these situations, and the simplicity of the actions would allow them to spend their mental energy devising ways to attack the different defensive schemes they would see.The greatest teams of all time have always allowed their best players to be creative within an offensive framework. It is what makes their stars so difficult to guard.

We fell in love with Yankee because of its simplicity. We felt our players were not burdened with having to think too much while running it, and were free to play the game to the best of their abilities. This allowed us to get the most out of our best players and set up our ‘2-Game’ (which will be featured in a future blog).

In the next part of the Yankee Blog Series, we will go into the options, counters, and “what-if’s” that our fans are curious about, but it is important to first let the simplicity of Yankee settle in to your thinking.