NBA Practice

Have you ever asked yourself how an NBA practice is? Here I show you some interesting pictures, where we can take a look at the November 25th Detroit Piston’s practice. They had a home game the 26th against New York.

They start by 10 A.M. with “Arnie Time”. As some of you will know Arnie Kander is Detroit’s Strenght and Conditioning Coach. They spend 40 minutes with him, doing, I suppose, a general warm up.

Then they go through a more specific warm up, consisting in “full court shooting” – “3 on 3 rush drill” that they finish with some free throws and a break for water. It’s very common to have a “basketball warm up” after the general one, to let the players focus on the practice and feel the basketballs, make some shots…

Afterwards, they start the main course of the practice, with a defensive drill “Random P/R defense” where I think “P/R” means Pick and Roll. Different pick and roll defenses, and more intensity. Then, as many other teams often do, they run their plays without defenders, you can see they have many (“chin” “thru” “fist down” “up” “turn” “loop” “floppy away”…) but I’m sure there are many more (you can’t go through all of them in a single practice, and you often focus in the plays - or some of the plays - you are more interested in for the next game). They spend 20 minutes in 5 on 0, and then they run two of the plays with defense, that day they tried “thru” and “chin”.

They put an end to their practice with New York sets’ defense. The coaches have analysed their rival plays, and they give some keys to stop them.

There aren’t many differences between this practice and the ones from European best teams’ practices. Of course every coach has his preferences, but this kind of practices are very common in Europe and in Spain, specially in a morning practice of the day before the game.