The Three-Player Weave and the Downfall of Basketball

Drills are tools to improve skills, not the sole purpose.

Someone sent a video with a high-school coach discussing players who showed up for basketball tryouts and were unfamiliar with the three-player weave. The video was titled, “Will this be the downfall of the NBA?”. The coach and interviewer were flabbergasted players did not know the three-player weave, and they connected the inability to perform the drill with a previous lack of coaching, lack of fundamentals, and the downfall of American basketball.

My opinions about the three-player weave are well-known, as the three-player weave featured prominently in the original Fake Fundamentals, but the problem with their statement is beyond the specific drill. The goal is to develop players’ skills, not to master drills. A drill’s purpose is to improve skills or potentially for fun, conditioning or another tangential reason.

The drill is not the skill. The three-player weave is not passing; it is a drill or a tool used to practice passing, but it is one of many possible tools. Personally, I prefer dozens of other drills, but even if the three-player weave is your favorite passing drill, successfully performing the drill is not the same as being a good passer in a game and being a good game passer does not necessarily mean one is great at the drill.

Mastering drills is not the purpose, but often coaches spend as much or more time teaching the drill’s pattern and ignore the actual skill: Passing. The feedback centers on where to run or who to pass to next or how many passes it should take or how wide to run, which relate entirely to the drill’s execution and not the skill. Learning to run in a figure-eight pattern is not the objective and using only three passes to get from one end to the other does not guarantee the players’ passing skills are improving.

I use a simple three-player weave warmup drill to initiate a three-player on-ball situation. I believe I saw the drill in a Željko Obradović practice. I introduced the drill in my first practice this year with very inexperienced players because, to me, the drill is simple. We messed up the drill over and over. Rather than re-explain the drill multiple times, I changed the drill to a simpler drill: The drill’s goal or the desired outcome was not great enough to warrant additional time explaining the drill’s pattern. Learning the drill was not the purpose.

About a decade ago, I was hired to coach a boy’s freshmen basketball team after tryouts had started. I showed up to meet the varsity coach on the day before the first cuts. I watched. They pointed out players who they planned to cut. One player was the second or third tallest player.

Now, the tallest player as a freshman may have matured early and reached adult height already, whereas shorter players may not have reached puberty. It is a tricky age to make determinations about players’ futures in a sport that values height, but unfortunately that is when adolescents transition to high school and decisions are made.

The junior-varsity coach criticized this player’s inability to do the three-player weave. The players represented a big mix of experience due to the school’s demographics. Some clearly played years of AAU, some had never played on a team before, and some grew up in their neighborhood recreation center, YMCA, or Boys and Girls Club playing primarily pickup games or low-level recreation leagues. The JV coach was cutting based on years of organized basketball and previous exposure to coaching and proper drills, not skills, abilities, or potential.

I implored the coaches to play three-vs-three before cutting players. They agreed. This player’s team won almost every game. When picking players based on potential, should one pick a shorter player who is currently better in drills due to more years of experience in highly-coached environments or the player who is better in scrimmages despite playing less organized basketball? I argued the player who had been coached less had more room to improve and grow, and I persuaded the coaches not to cut the player. He spent most of the season in the top three in our practice competitive cauldron (see The 21st Century Basketball Practice), meaning he started a majority of our games and was one of our better players. Being good at drills does not guarantee one is good during games.

The bigger problem with the original video is not simply identifying a common drill as an indication of skill level, but the pervasiveness of this attitude. Whether or not one believes in the three-player weave, a coach preparing players to try out for this coach seemingly needs to teach the drill, and many coaches think similarly to the one in the video.

As a junior-college coach, I warned players their experiences when they transferred to a university would differ greatly. Without judging good or bad, I am an outlier coach. Whatever the question, I trend toward the extreme: We did less conditioning, fewer undefended drills, fewer dribbling drills, fewer set plays, more scrimmaging, more end of game practice, more contested shooting drills, etc. than almost anyone. We did not have the average practice, and consequently, practices and coach interactions differed greatly once they transferred.

I asked players who moved on to NAIA, NCAA D2, and NCAA D1 programs if I needed to change to prepare players for the drills and practice styles of their future coaches. I was confident players were prepared to play at their next schools, but maybe were underprepared for the style of coaching (volume of yelling) or practices (5v0, shell drill, fake fundamentals), and as the coach in the video suggested, coaches often confuse drill performance with skills and thus preparedness to play in games. Would my players struggle initially because of their lack of familiarity for these drills or for being yelled at frequently?

Ultimately, I did not change and trusted my players’ emotional intelligence and adaptability to new coaches and environments, and we worked to identify coaches who trended more toward my coaching style or the aspects the players liked about our environment and my coaching.

Players show up to my first practices and do not know drills I use or concepts I teach. I understand this will happen because every player’s background and experiences are different. My first rule at clinics and with my teams is to ask questions if one does not understand because I cannot read the players’ minds; I do not know what they know and do not know, or what terminology they used with their last coach for certain things. I do not criticize the players because they start dribbling drills at an angle because they have done the zigzag drill (see Fake Fundamentals) so many times; I instruct them to attack on a straight-line. That is coaching.

Drills are tools used to solve a problem. Once the drill is mastered, it loses its value anyway. What was the coach’s goal for the three-player weave if all the players knew how to perform the drill flawlessly? Conditioning? Improvement does not occur by repeating the same things in the same way at the same level. Improvement requires some change in performance, whether consistency, accuracy, speed, variability, adaptability, and more. The goal is not to improve the three-player weave by performing it faster; the goal is to improve players’ passing skills by developing more accurate, more creative passers. There are many drills one can use. Players not knowing the three-player weave is not a fatal flaw; it may actually be a sign they played for coaches more interested in players’ passing skills against defenders and off the dribble, situations occurring more frequently in games than anything replicated by the three-player weave. Rather than the downfall of the NBA, this could be a sign of positive change away from fake fundamentals.