Offense Sells Tickets, but Offense and Defense Together, Win Championships

by Brian Williams

What I am about to write might be considered sacrilegious in the basketball coaching community. The old adage is that “Offense sells tickets, but defense wins championships.”
I do agree that you must be great defensively to win championships. But offense does a lot more than just sell tickets.

My belief is that the best team wins championships and that the best team must prove itself to be the best at both ends of the floor. It is true that you can’t lose if your opponent doesn’t score, but playing not to lose is not what makes a champion. A championship team must play to win and that means you have to be great at both ends. Even Coach Dick Bennett, one of the top defensive coaches in the history of college basketball said, “Often big games come down to legitimate half court offensive execution.” You can’t execute in the half court on offense without spending a great deal of time in basketball practice developing both your team’s offensive skills and offensive schemes.

As you plan your basketball practices, how much time do you devote to each side of the ball? The purpose of this article is to encourage, you to consider devoting a minimum of twice as much practice time to offense as defense. Write it in your practice plan that way and make sure that you have a way to measure the practice time that you spend on each aspect. Here are some thoughts to support my claim.

Individual Offensive Skills Development

There are more individual skills involved on offense than on defense. Those skills are more complex, requiring a longer developmental period and more time must be spent to maintain them. Certainly, you play defense with your heart, your feet, and your head. There is no question about that. But, you play offense with each of those, and you have to be able to dribble, pass, catch, and shoot the basketball as well with more real and perceived pressure due to the defense, the score, and the clock. It takes much more practice time on a daily repetitive basis to develop these essential individual offensive skills than it does to develop defensive skills.

A good coach can take a great athlete of normal intelligence with a desire to play defense, and teach him to be an effective and contributing defensive player. However, that same athlete must have spent years developing offensive skills to even be able to just play offense without hurting the team, let alone helping it. If there is weak link on offense, the results will be empty offensive possessions due to turnovers, missed shots, or eventually playing 4 offense against 5 defense.

Team Offensive Scheme Development

Regardless of how much your team can force the action on defense, you still must react to where the offense positions its players and where the player is who has the basketball. I would not argue that there is timing involved in defense, but timing is much more crucial to effective offensive play due to the fact that player movement, positioning, and spacing must be synchronized with the movement of the basketball.

Proper offensive execution can dictate the pace of play, end of game strategy of both teams, and can negate the defense by getting them in foul trouble and forcing them to change both tactics and personnel. However, none of these things will happen in games without a great deal of time being devoted in practice to their development. The offensive practice required must consistently be given more time and attention (not emphasis) than your defense. I don’t believe that players really think about how much time is spent on any one area in practice. Spending more time on offense in practice will not hurt your team’s defensive mindset. You must sell, emphasize, and reward defense, and spend more time practicing offense for it to have a chance to be as effective as your defense.

I have nothing against using slogans such as the tickets/championships one to motivate players to play defense with the pride and passion of a champion. Your team has to be sold on taking pride in their defense, both individually and collectively. Skilled offensive players, who are essential to winning championships, would much rather play offense than defense. Giving them motivation to play defense is great coaching. My hope is that I have either given one more voice in support of what you already do—spend more time on offense than defense in your basketball practices, or have convinced you to at least examine your beliefs on what practice time rationing is required to have a championship team that excels at both ends of the floor. Defense combined with great Offense, wins championships! Spend the majority of your practice time developing your offensive skills and schemes so that you can cultivate an offensive attack that will succeed in the half court in your biggest games.

Brian Williams is one of the authors of the Basketball Coaching website, The Coaching Toolbox, where you’ll find hundreds of coaching ideas and tools – including 130 Great Ideas to Get a Lot More out of Practice.