Atlanta Hawks focusing on boosting up their speed and agility (Part 1)
Atlanta Hawks have been recognized to be slightly sluggish when it came to their half court offense. Their head coach for the first year, Larry Drew, has acknowledged the issue and has planned to counter this flaw the Hawks have.
He seriously wants the team take their pace up a few notches in this season. With the intention of making it happen he decided to take the Hawks to Georgia Tech. His mission there was to test out individual speeds.
His starting plan was to time the players over a distance of one mile. This way Drew would get an idea of the individual conditioning each player possesses. It was quite obvious from the beginning that the training they were going to undergo would be quite
different to what they were used to.
Spending five seasons with the Hawks and beginning his sixth, Zaza Pachulia had expressed how different he thought the training that took place on October 5th was. He explained how they had never trained or practiced at such high speed. The session
that took place on the 5th truly showed the players what they would have to endure.
Coach Larry had mentioned it to the players around 4 weeks in advance that they should prepare themselves for a completely different training regime and condition themselves before hand.
Larry was most interested in seeing and judging the speed of the team. He wanted to do so both, in terms of a team and individual agility. He devised a number of different exercises for the players. These exercises mainly focused on checking every player’s
endurance and stamina.
He made players do push-ups, crunches, dips, stretches and sit ups all in one go. Through this it made it easier for him to see the players with more stamina. He also learnt about those players that needed to be given more attention and time.
Once he could establish where the players stood and what level they were at, the next step was just implementing the results and talent Atlanta had and using it in the proper way.
Larry saw a lot of plus points that came out of the endurance exercises. Even the slower players enjoyed gaining stamina and becoming agile.
Larry Drew, who is fifty years old, was an assistant National Basketball Association coach for seventeen years, including the last six years as ex-Coach Mike Woodson's number one assistant.
He has played 11 seasons with the Pistons, Kings, Clippers and Lakers. Drew has his golden chance to direct the team on his terms and it looks like he wants to focus most on pace and the conditioning of the team.
Hawks ran quite a lot under Mike Woodson also. It’s not like they did not practice improving their stamina. In fact, Atlanta ranked fourth in the league with 16.1 fast-break points per game last season, according to statistical teams.
The issue was that, on more than one occasion they showed that they were slow when it came to half-court offense. That problem was quite obvious when they were cleaned up by Orlando in the semi finals of the Eastern Conference.
Fans and critics claimed that many of the Hawk players would sometimes wait around longer than they should, simply relying on Joe to create a scoring chance or scoring play.
Larry wants to approach the game with a different frame of mind this time around. He has been teaching the players the necessity of them not only moving fast on the break but to also have immense speed when on the move in their half-court offense.
Larry believes that by adopting a motion attack style of game, more players will get to be in scoring positions. Not only will this increase the number of players actually scoring, but it will also help Joe Johnson receive the help and assistance that he
definitely requires on a more regular basis.
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