A visit to Cleveland Cavaliers practice, and an emphasis on defending the three in 2014-15

By Rob Senderoff

Head Coach

Yesterday, the whole staff had a chance to go up to Cleveland and watch the Cavaliers practice as they are going through their training camp.

The biggest difference that you see between the Cavs and us is how quickly they have their systems put in offensively and defensively. They already have probably 30 plays or wrinkles to plays. It takes us much longer to get that many wrinkles in. I think it’s due to the amount of basketball these guys play. It’s all they do. It’s their living.

Defensively, the terminology they use and how they guard actions is put in very quickly. They had 17 or 18 guys in practice, and every single guy understands how they are trying to defend things and what their principles are. I’m sure as they continue to get reps and as they practice and play games, they will do a lot of teaching on the fly through game film and through practice. It’s just very impressive how quickly those guys pick everything up.

When you leave there, you see why they are professionals. They study film. They are in there early getting shots. They are in there early working on some offensive things and breakdowns. They are in there early working on some defensive things and breakdowns. They work overtime on the concepts they have. 

We go to watch the Cavaliers practice every year. This year the practice was just a little bit different than what I’ve seen in the past. On the whole, practice is practice at that level. Guys are competing. It is great to see the best players in the profession get to compete like that and to see the best coaches in the profession get to coach.

The biggest difference with Coach Blatt in terms of learning is they do a bunch of dummy drills back to live drills. That’s different than how I’ve seen the other NBA coaches that I’ve watched do things. Sitting their with our assistant coach, DeAndre Haynes, who played overseas, he said that is the way they do it in Europe.

They will start out 5-on-0 dummy, and then go back to 5-on-5 or 3-on-2. It was interesting to see it done like that.

A view of the Cleveland Clinic Courts from the
official website of the Cleveland Cavaliers

There is so much value in the little things you can learn whenever you go to watch a practice like that, go to a clinic or watch a coaching DVD. You may pick up a wrinkle to a drill. You may pick up a concept that might fight your personnel well. You may pick up a side out-of-bounds play. Sometimes it is terminology. 

Two years ago I spent a few days with the defensive coach of the Boston Celtics, Mike Longabardi, who is now with the Phoenix Suns. There is always a thing or two you take from every opportunity like that. I go on our off days to watch other schools practice, whether it is Pittsburgh, Ohio State, Cincinnati or Xavier, just to see what they are doing. We have a good idea of what we are doing, but you may find a small emphasis, a word or a term that helps better describe some you are already doing. 

You always learn something, that’s why you go out like this. There is always a chance to see something you haven’t seen before or something that may help you do a better job of teaching what you already doing.

I spent a lot of time this summer watching film and talking with a former assistant at Weber State who is now in the NBA, Phil Beckner. Weber State has been the best in the country at limiting other teams from shooting threes. That is going to be a big emphasis for us this year when we are playing man-to-man defense, eliminating the other team’s opportunity to shoot threes. If you see us do a good job with that, you will say it is because of some of things we worked on this summer. 

In our locker room, we have changed a couple of our goal charts regarding defending threes. There is a small wrinkle we have added to what we are doing defensively to try to make sure our guys do a good job of limiting opponent’s threes. When you look at the NCAA Tournament, the biggest factor in the “mid-majors” beating the high majors is when the mid-majors get hot from three. 

You can even think back to 2002 when Kent State lost to Indiana, it was because of the number of threes Indiana made in that game. But as a general rule, limiting the other team’s three-point attempts is something that we are going to emphasize this year. With our length inside, we should be able to contest shots on the perimeter a little differently. We have more length this year throughout our roster. 

I have spent a lot of time this offseason studying teams who have guarded the three effectively. 

Reflecting back on the Hall of Fame Career DeAndre Haynes

By Ty Linder

"Voice of the Golden Flashes"

Hall of Fame Weekend is one of my favorite times of the year at Kent State. Not only is the event usually surrounded by a bevy of great home sporting contests, but it’s always been a pleasure to see former Flashes greats from all different eras back on campus.

I consider myself to be exceptionally fortunate to have the job I do. And I am equally thankful to have had the chance to hone my craft at a pretty young age. When I was an undergraduate at KSU, I had the chance to announce several Golden Flashes men and women’s basketball games on the main radio network. 

When you are in this business, you remember some players and coaches better than others for whatever reason. It’s just the way it is. And I remember one player in particular has always held a special place in my KSU sports memory bank.

DeAndre Haynes had the impossible task of taking over a role vacated by Andrew Mitchell. That would be like someone saying, “We are going to redo ‘Gone With the Wind’ and we need some young unknown actor to take Clark Gable’s place.” And this is all after an Elite Eight run!

But the young sparkplug from the Motor City never disappointed, and despite some occasional growing pains evolved into one of the best all-around players this prestigious program has ever had. And most of the time he did it with his trademark wide smile and fox-like grin he still exhibits today while on the KSU bench.

As a player, Haynes was perhaps the most unselfish teammate I have ever seen. He left KSU as its assists leader, minutes leader and had the honor of becoming the school’s first Mid-American Conference Player of the Year when he helped lead the Flashes to the 2006 MAC title and NCAA Tournament – in his hometown of Detroit. 

My hat – err, headset is off to DeAndre Haynes on his induction into the Varsity K Hall of Fame. It is richly deserved.

8-week summer training comes to an end

Note: Kellon Thomas is a junior on the Kent State men's basketball team and isworked for the Athletics Communication department during the Summer to fulfill a requirement of his Practicum I in Sport Administration course. As part of this course, Kellon wrote a weekly blog to give fans an inside look at how the Golden Flashes are preparing for the 2014-15 season. This is his final entry prior to heading home until the beginning of fall classes at the end of the month.

We completed our eight-week summer program this morning. Coach Bob did a great job with us the entire summer to help everyone become faster, stronger and in playing shape. We started the week by doing 185 on the bench press. We also had done this at the beginning of the summer so they we could see how we progressed over the eight weeks. Everyone got more reps than they did in the beginning of the summer and I feel that we did a really good job in the weight room this summer, which will help us during the season.

We had our final two team practices of the summer on Thursday and Friday morning. Still trying to improve on our offense and defensive strategies, we worked a lot on our basic principles. We are getting much better at it, and will continue to work on it when we come back in the fall. Overall, I think we did a good job with learning and bringing some of the newcomers up to speed on what we want to do.

I think we had a very good summer. We worked hard on our individual goals and areas we wanted to improve, and also got better as a team. I think everyone would agree that we enjoy being around each other and we have a strong bong together on and off the court. As long as we continue to work hard, push each other and all work towards the common goal, then we will have a very successful year.

Weight room yields camaraderie and broken records

Note: Kellon Thomas is a junior on the Kent State men's basketball team and is working for the Athletics Communication department during the Summer to fulfill a requirement of his Practicum I in Sport Administration course. As part of this course, Kellon will be doing a weekly blog to give fans an inside look at how the Golden Flashes are preparing for the 2014-15 season.

Kellon Thomas broke Mike
McKee's power clean record for
Kent State guards this past week.

Our team has now completed seven weeks of summer training, with just one more left. We did testing and maxing out in the weight room this past week, which is different than our usual weight training. Coach Bob spent all summer training to us to get strong, faster and more explosive, and then tested us this week to see our progress.

On Tuesday we did our power clean test, and I broke the program record for guards at 274 pounds. Our director of ops, Mike McKee, was the previous record holder at 270 pounds back in 2009. All of my teammates, Coach Bob, and even Coach McKee, were cheering and motivating me throughout the lift. It was a great feeling after I had completed the lift, and everyone was going crazy and celebrating .Khaliq Spicer, my roommate and probably the teammate I am closest with, lifted me up as if we had won a championship.

It felt good to break the record, but it felt even better that I had the support of my teammates. I like how unselfish we are as a team, and one person’s success excites us all. We have learned to push each other, compete, and be great teammates all in what seems like a short 7 weeks looking back.

Even though it was testing week in the weight room, we still had our two 30-minute individuals and our one-hour team practice. We continued working on some basic concepts we put in to help us for our upcoming year, such as our base offenses, defensive strategies, and ball screen offense and defense.

We worked a lot on post entries and playing out of the post, which I think this will be a bigger emphasis this year. We have great guard play, but we will also have a great presence down low this upcoming season with the addition of guys like Jimmy Hall, Raasean Davis, Blake Vedder and Marvin Jones. I feel like our returning bigs—Khaliq, Chris Ortiz and Marquiez Lawrence— have all shown improvement throughout the summer as well.

The intensity last practice was very good and we were all competing. We have to continue to push ourselves and try to get better each time so that we can be one of the top teams in our league. 

Special guest provides motivation to work harder

Note: Kellon Thomas is a junior on the Kent State men's basketball team and is working for the Athletics Communication department during the Summer to fulfill a requirement of his Practicum I in Sport Administration course. As part of this course, Kellon will be doing a weekly blog to give fans an inside look at how the Golden Flashes are preparing for the 2014-15 season

We finished off week six with some on-court conditioning with Coach Bob. Each week, we do conditioning on Friday and I feel like we get stronger each week as a team. Another one of the new players on our team, Xavier Pollard, got to campus this week for the beginning of a new summer school session. Xavier, who will be redshirting and sitting out this season, participated in this week’s workouts and also played open gym with us this week also. Xavier is a smooth guard that can score and will really help out this team.

Earlier in the week Coach Sendy asked one of his former players and good friends, D.J. White, to come in and speak with our team. D.J. graduated from Indiana and was drafted 29th in the first round back in 2008. He spoke to our team about what it really takes to make it to the NBA and overseas, and also how to apply yourself to get ready.

In between his junior and senior year of college, D.J. went from a second round draft pick or maybe not being drafted at all to a first round draft pick, which guaranteed him about $5.6 million for his rookie contract, along with his Nike contract. D.J. said he lost about twenty pounds during this time, did strength and agility work about three times a week, and basketball workouts twice a day.

Hearing his story first-hand, really lit up the eyes on some of the guys on our team, including myself. We all have aspirations of playing at the next level, so actually hearing what it takes and what we need to change really lit a fire under us.

Coach Sendy challenged our team by getting at least 10,000 shots up on the gun or by ourselves for that entire week by Sunday night. We finished the week with 11,360. I feel that D.J. coming in really helped our team focus more and work harder. I also feel this will continue to help our team work even harder as we try to reach our team goals and individual goals.

Continued emphasis on defense and coming together as a team

Note: Kellon Thomas is a junior on the Kent State men's basketball team and is working for the Athletics Communication department during the Summer to fulfill a requirement of his Practicum I in Sport Administration course. As part of this course, Kellon will be doing a weekly blog to give fans an inside look at how the Golden Flashes are preparing for the 2014-15 season.

 

This week marks week 5 of our 8-week summer program. We started off this week on Monday with an hour team practice. Defense was the main focus for this week, doing some basic shell drill and defensive drills. We also played more in the half court, which let us focus on better executing our offense in the amount of time that was on the shot clock. This team practice was very productive in the sense of everyone is learning and progressing.

Coach Haynes talked to me about coming off ball screens and changing pace and also being able to know my next move. It is always good to talk to Coach Haynes because he really knows the game from the point guard position and he has been a big part of my growth here at Kent State.

All of our on-court skill workouts we done in the beginning of the week because our coaches are currently on the road recruiting at AAU tournaments. We still had our 4 days of lifting this week and then conditioning on Friday. Deputy Athletic Director Devin Crosby joined us in running the hill, which was pretty cool to see him in an environment different than what we’re used to.

I can see our team developing and becoming more of a team just by the way we all bond with each other. We have showed our new guys the Kent State tradition and we have all brought them aboard to trying to reach our goal of winning a championship.

New month marks halfway point of summer training

Note: Kellon Thomas is a junior on the Kent State men's basketball team and is working for the Athletics Communication department during the Summer to fulfill a requirement of his Practicum I in Sport Administration course. As part of this course, Kellon will be doing a weekly blog to give fans an inside look at how the Golden Flashes are preparing for the 2014-15 season.

This past week marked the halfway point of our eight-week training program. We had our elite camp for high school players Monday night, which went on from about 5-9:20. During this time, some of our guys demonstrated a short 20-minute workout for the campers to see the type of drills and work ethic it takes to play at Kent State.

It was a shortened week with the holiday, but we still had our scheduled individual workouts Tuesday and Thursday, and another one-hour team practice on Wednesday. During this hour, we continued to work on some of our offense and things we need for the season. One of the things we worked on more this week was ballscreens and how we want to defend them. Coach Sendy had us run a drill where you earn points for getting defensive stops, not offensive scores. I like when he does this because it puts our mindset towards getting defensive stops and not worried about offense. One area we have to improve from last year is playing better on defense. We have plenty of scorers and playmakers but playing in a league such as the MAC, you have to win games on the defensive end.

On Thursday, we did another team-building and conditioning event. We had a mini track meet of seven events. Although I do not like conditioning, I like being with my team getting better and knowing that we are all chasing the same goal. Our freshman, Raasean Davis was on my team for the track meet. He is new to this type of work ethic and some might have been questioning him because of his size but he really surprised me how well he ran. He finished every sprint and timed event in the time he was supposed to. We will need him and his size to be successful this season.