How To Become ELITE At Beating Your Defender Off The Dribble

I've talked a lot about shooting recently and obviously for good reason, but it's also important that we talk about the other side of things, which is beating your defender off the dribble. Beating your defender off the dribble is a simple concept, but it's an area that many players are confused about. In this video, we're going to go through the best ways to consistently beat your defender off the dribble so that you can get into your pull up, finish at the rim or create plays for your teammates. All with the goal of making you the most well rounded offensive player possible. Let's get into it Foreign let's start off with some myths about beating your defender off the dribble. The first thing that players think is you have to be super quick or have crazy handles to be able to consistently get by your man. And that's definitely not true, although it obviously helps to be quick and have great handles and those two things will make this easier. It's much more about how well you read the situation that you face and and how you take and create advantages for yourself. Those two things are the keys to being able to beat your defender off the dribble. So what are the situations that you need to take advantage of? The number one situation that's easy to create an advantage for is when your defender is closing out to you. This could be off of a driving kick or even just off of one pass. The best time to beat your defender off the dribble is when the momentum is moving towards you. These clips give you an idea of how that works. The reason that I started with this point is because these are the opportunities that you're going to have the most in real games. You more than likely aren't going to get a ton of ISO opportunities, but you will see a ton of closeouts and defensive rotations that you can attack. So as we can see, the first way to do this is just by ripping through and attacking quickly. But you can also use a shot fake or a jab set to get your defender off balance and create an easier lane to attack. And here's a couple clips of the jab step being used to attack a closeout as well. Catch quick into a jab, step, the defender off balance, leaning to the side, and then you can attack that opposite direction to get downhill. Sometimes it's not necessarily about being really good, it's about being really smart and knowing when to do what. I'll link above to a workout that targets these exact situations, but ultimately step one to this is that every time that you're playing, look for opportunities to attack closeouts to see how much more often you beat your defender. Now when we talk about beating your defender off the dribble, coming from a standstill, or using multiple dribbles, this is where things change a bit. The biggest thing you have to be able to do is change speeds. You as the offensive player have the advantage because the defender has to react to you. Players who constantly play at the same speed are easy to predict and therefore easy to guard. Everybody's played with players who prove this. They may be the fastest player on the floor, but if they always go the same speed, then it becomes much easier to stop them. If you want to get good at beating your defender off the dribble, get good at changing speeds, being able to go slow to fast or fast to slow to fast, specifically in one on one situations. This clip of Steph really shows that he used a quick change of speed to get his defender to jump to the left side. And when his defender does that, he quickly changes directions and goes back to the right. It gets downhill to the basket. The process is get your defender to go really quickly in one direction and then you quickly change directions. That's going to give you an advantage to then get downhill. As you see Steph do it right here. He accomplishes this by getting his defender to move first, which gives him a lane to attack. With some of these other clips though, you'll see that the offensive player changes speeds and goes from slow to fast, which is another way to be able to beat your guy. So if you want to get good at beating your defenders off the dribble, then you have to keep in mind that either you need to make them move first either with a jab step or a shot fake or the quick dribble to the side that's going to take them that direction before you then change directions and beat them. Or you have to move fast and be able to change speeds going from slow to fast. Go to People make sure you guys click the top link in my description below to get my free Elite Perimeter Score workout. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you drop a like and subscribe. Talk to you guys soon. Peace.