Episode 26: Luke Yaklich on Building a Defensive Culture

Luke Yaklich on Building a Defensive Culture Guest: Luke Yaklich, University of Michigan’s Basketball Assistant Coach In this week’s basketball coaching conversation, University of Michigan assistant coach Luke Yaklich joins the podcast to discuss defense. Entering his second season with Michigan, Yaklich helped Michigan build a strong defensive mindset that resulted in a program record 33 wins, a repeat Big Ten Tournament championship, and advancing to the Final Four for the second time in six years. The defensive approach worked as Michigan led the Big Ten in scoring defense for first time since 1964 and were eighth nationally in scoring defense at 63.3 points per game allowed. Overall, Michigan was third in Defensive Efficiency according to the KenPom ratings (90.5).   Breakdown: 1:00 - Introduction 2:00 - Transition to High School to College Level Coach 4:00 - His Philosophy and the X and O Standpoint 6:00 - Towards the Goal 7:00 - Flexibility, Transition and the Sharing Knowledge with Coach Beilein 9:00 - Defensive Terminology Set 11:00 - Specific Actionable Things in Practice 12:00 - Great Communicators 13:30 - Reward the Player who Speaks a Lot 16:00 - Phrase Communication Possessions 18:40 - Building a Defensive Culture 21:00 - The Goal of Defense to his Players 22:00 - "It's okay to have a Weakness on Defense..." 23:30 - Offense and Defensive Matchups 24:30 - Ways to Focus on Covering the Ball 26:00 - Guard the Ball and the Ball Screen 27:30 - 4 to 5 minutes on Players Cover the Ball better... 29:00 - Emphasizing 3 to 5 things to focus on 30:00 - Stating 32:00 - 3-Point Defense 33:00 - Lack of Help and the On-Ball Defense 35:00 - Getting to get Beat 36:00 - Goal of the Defense and the Rebounding 38:00 - Emphasizing Rebounding 41:30 - "Pursue a 2" 43:00 - Zigzag Rebounding 44:00 - Concept of Kill Spots 46:00 - Scouting Reports 48:30 - Important Things in terms of Charting on Defense 51:00 - Coach Beilein's  "The tone on the Top" 53:00 - Fight and live for Your Core Values 55:00 - Conclusion   Luke Yaklich’s Bio Bio: https://mgoblue.com/staff.aspx?staff=3672 Twitter: https://twitter.com/CoachYak   Basketball Immersion Website: http://basketballimmersion.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/bballimmersion?lang=en YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/basketballimmersion Facebook: https://facebook.com/basketballimmersion See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.