Science of the set play: Looking through Steele’s eyes
For Xavier coach, there’s no limit to layers, details
When Travis Steele was a student at Butler, his notebooks were a window into his mind.
The pages were filled with notes and ideas and drawings of basketball courts, doodles littered with lines and arrows in search of something he hoped might come in handy someday.
“When we’d be in class — and I went to class but I probably wouldn’t always pay attention — I’d be doodling and drawing up plays,” Steele said. “I was always intrigued with that side of the ball (on offense) and just how you can manipulate things and control it and get really good shots.”
Today his notebooks are more complex and a lot bigger, and instead of running his designs in his head, Steele gets to implement them at the highest level of college basketball.
Most of the time, Xavier’s coach wants his team to run a flow offense, which is predicated on a few concepts, but mostly it’s a matter of moving the basketball, cutting and driving and teammates playing off each other to find a good shot. It’s specific to each matchup. Steele will give his team ideas of how to attack a defense by simply flowing and finding a rhythm that leads to good shots.
“I’d like to play that way as much as we can,” Steele said. But if he doesn’t like a possession or how his flow offense is running, he’ll go to his set plays.
The idea behind a set play is to get a specific player in a specific situation with the hope that it will produce points or a shot that Xavier likes.
When asked about how many set plays he has, Steele smiles and says, “A lot.”
Why?
“Because there’s underneath (out of bounds), side out (of bounds), you’ve got full-court, you have half-court sets, zone, man-to-man.”
Then there’s ATOS — after timeout plays, which is an area where Steele’s team has excelled this season.
“The play we ran against Ohio State late when Paul (Scruggs) got the dunk that was an ATO play that we had been working on in practice,” he said. “We had never officially put in. But we ran it and obviously, it worked well.” Each play has variations. “There’s layers to it,” said Steele. “Some of the ATOS will look just like our other set plays and there will be little spin-offs. Maybe one thing’s different. Could be instead of a down screen, now we’re setting a back screen, right? That’s how you get an open lob or an easy layup. You want them to look similar so they can’t really tell and they think they know what’s coming.”
Countless details go into designing plays, from choosing how they’ll work against a specific opponent to deciding when it’s the right time in a game to run them.
“You see if they guard it a certain way or maybe this guy can’t guard so we’re gonna go at this guy. I know when this guy’s in this scenario, we’re going to get a layup,” Steele said. “So I’m going to wait to run that play until I know this guy’s guarding this guy. That’s why I watch every game (when scouting an opponent). You watch both sides of the ball. How are they guarding ball screens? How are they guarding underneath out of bounds?
“The way (Cincinnati) guarded it, I knew we could get a layup out of a timeout. We worked on it and we ran it one time. We did it at shootaround. I said, ‘Hey guys, we’re gonna run this out of an ATO, just want you guys to see it.’ So they saw it one time. Boom. We ran it, got fouled, got two free throws out of it.”
There’s a little room for improvisation within a game. Maybe Steele sees something and he draws it up on the spot, but for the most part Xavier has a core set of plays it likes and has practiced for each opponent.
“I already know going into a game who we want to attack and what kind of a situation and where I want certain guys to be,” said Steele. “I usually have it all scripted.”
The Musketeers chart and track everything. Every set play they run in a game gets graded for its effectiveness and whether it produces a good look for Xavier’s offense.
“We also do video playbooks,” said Steele. “So I’ll have every time we’ve run a specific play so I can see them all backto-back-to-back.”
That allows Steele and his staff to break down a play by dissecting every detail. He may not like how a screen is being set, or the angle a driver is taking off a screen. It also lets Steele see how teams are defending that play.
Once the big picture becomes clearer, “Maybe that creates another play? Or you can create a spin-off on another one,” said Steele. “If they’re going to guard it this way, then we’re running this ... so you’re just constantly making adjustments.”