The Point Guard's Ultimate Guide To Basketball IQ

Being a point guard is one of the most difficult roles in basketball because you have so many different things you have to be responsible for. You so many people you have to be responsible for. And there's a lot that goes into being successful at that position. In this video, I want to give you a comprehensive guide to being a high IQ point guard. There may not be a position where IQ matters more than the point guard spot. And so if you struggle in this area, you're going to struggle to be able to be a successful point guard, be able to put your teammates in a good position, be able to score yourself, and ultimately it's going to be tough for you to help your team win. Now, by having a high iq, you, you're going to find that you're going to play with way more confidence. You're going to be able to be much more consistent with your results. You're going to find setting up your teammates easier, you're going to find scoring yourself easier, and you'll ultimately be much more successful. So we're going to dive into a few areas that really, really matter if you're a point guard. So buckle up if you want to take notes. I highly recommend it. Let's get into it. Now. The first job of a point guard is to create advantages and create domino situations. Now, all that means is that the first thing that we're thinking about is how to create advantages for not just ourselves, but for our entire team. So when we think about what advantages are possible, ones would be like a numbers advantage, right? So four on three, where you guys have four, defense only has three. That's an obvious situation that we can take advantage of. So we want to hunt those different situations. We want to create those different situations. We'll talk about that in a second here. But we also have like size and athleticism, so mismatches right there. So you know, there's a switch that happens and all of a sudden you know your big man has a point guard on them, or you know a big switch is on you, and now maybe you can go at them. So we can hunt mismatches as an advantage right there and then momentum advantages. So this would be like a closeouts coming, right? You move the basketball, the defense is rotating, and now we have momentum or we have a closeout to be able to attack right there. So those are different types of advantages that we can create. And the better you are creating those for your team, the better you are going to be at facilitating and being that true floor general who can create for everybody on the team right there talking about that first advantage, which is the numbers advantage, right? The goal for you should be to get two players to guard one as often as possible. And that's how we create numbers advantages. So an example of this would be you come off of a ball screen and they're playing a drop coverage. And so now your defender is chasing you over the top and then the drop defender is also guarding you. Now also you have two players guarding you and then maybe you drop it off to your big on the roll and then they're able to finish you created for your teammate because you got two players to guard you. So we had two guarding one. This could, this could also happen by you attacking a closeout, right? You beat your primary defender and now a help defender has to rotate over and now you have two players again who are guarding you. Meaning we're going to have numbers on the weak side, right? You can kick the ball out. Maybe they have an open shot or they have a close up to attack and then get to a layup, whatever that that may be. So one of the biggest jobs of a point guard is to make two guard one. And the more consistently you can do this and say to yourself like, hey, put, my goal is to just draw in a second defender as much as I possibly can. And if you can get really good at doing that, you're going to be able to open up opportunities for your teammates and it's going to be very, very easy. You're going to be very, very valuable to any team that you might play on when you can do that. So just speaking through like situations where this might happen, obviously we talked about ball screens. This is a very common area where we can get that. So obviously I gave you that drop defender example. But we also can look at like the mismatch example where maybe they switch the ball screen and all of a sudden you know, you have a slower big on you, you can attack or now, you know, your big guy might have a small guard on them and you can get them the ball in the post, they can look to seal whatever. Now also we have a mismatch that we can look to attack right there. Pushing and transition is a great way to do this. And we're going to talk about this later on as well. But if we can really get out and transition quickly, a lot of times we can create numbers, advantages and make it so that there's going to be, you know, one defender responsible for two players. And that's ultimately we want to be when we have that advantage Right there. And like I mentioned as well, attacking closeouts, right? Finding closeouts to attack consistently doing that. The other way that this is good is by you, is like by setting up closeouts for your teammates to attack so you understand, like, hey, if I drive at that defender, I can get them to step to me and then I can kick it to my teammate. And now they're going to have a long close up to attack right there. And so I'm creating an opportunity for them to have a momentum advantage because I set them up by first draw, drawing in their defender. Okay, so again, it all goes back to how often can you get a second defender to start worrying about you and to start focusing on you. When you can do that consistently, you're going to open up opportunities for everybody else on your team. The second area that is so crucial for point guards to understand and have a grasp on is understanding that you are in control of the pace of your team. Different coaches think of it different sorts of ways, and different teams have different goals when it comes to how fast we want to play. My personal opinion on it is that, like, I want my teams to play fast, so I want my point guards to understand the value of going back to advantages and numbers advantages. The faster we can get out in transition, the more likely it is we're going to create either a numbers advantage or a mismatch where they're scrambling to match up and now all of a sudden they have a matchup that's not good for them. We can go and we can identify that and exploit it. If we're really fast in transition, we can create those opportunities over and over and over again. Okay, so there's a lot of value in pace right there. But it's important that you as a point guard understand what the pace should be and what your coaches want from you. But in general, I think that playing fast is going to give you the best possible situations to take advantage of when it comes to, you know, mismatches, when it comes to numbers that you guys are going to be up with. I think for a point guard, a lot of times you get so caught up in, okay, I need to be the primary ball handler, right? And many times that will be the case. But I think in transition, this is where things can be a little bit different. You may be the person that the ball gets outleted to, but then you're going to be that next decision maker. So a lot of times point guards think that playing in transition and being fast means that they're the ones we supposed to be just dribbling the ball before as fast as possible, which sometimes will be the case. But I think understanding the value of advancing the basketball, making an advanced pass to somebody who's ahead of you is so crucial if you want to be and create a lot of opportunities in transition for your team right there. Okay, so don't fall in love with, I always have to be able to bring the ball the floor or I've got to constantly be dribbling the ball and up in transition. If you can advance the ball instead, it's going to be much easier and much more likely that you're going to create those advantages that we've talked about already. So build that habit of advancing it. And really, when it comes to advanced passes, you first want to think up the floor. So if you're on the right side of the floor and you can advance it straight up ahead, that's great. If that's not an option, the defense takes that away. Can you turn the ball out right and cross the ball over to the other side of the floor? What this is going to do is it's going to force the entire defense to shift sides of the floor again and again. Now we have to worry about, okay, numbers wise, do we have an advantage? Did that just like exacerbate that advantage and make it worse? And on top of that, by them having to shift sides of the floor, did they have to switch a matchup or whatever? And all of a sudden, again, we have a matchup that they aren't going to like that we're going to have the advantage in right there. So first thoughts got to be, can I advance up the floor? Next thoughts got to be, can I advance it? Can I go across the floor from right to left side or left to right side and force the defense to shift. And then if you can't do either of those things, you can't advance it for. You can't cross the ball. That's when you're probably going to be the one who's just bringing the ball to the floor because you don't have an option to pass. But your first thought has got to be, can I advance the basketball? And if you can't do that, that's when dribble comes into play. Now, obviously this can change depending on time and score. So end of quarter, end of game, that might be a time where maybe your pace slows down, whatever you're trying to get a specific shot. Okay, maybe you just came out of a timeout and you're running some sort of play or quick hitter, whatever, you might have to slow things down for that right there. Maybe depending on the situation, maybe you guys are really tired, maybe you guys have had like four or five really sloppy possessions. Whatever the case may be. You also have to understand that the context of the game matters as well. But in general, playing with pace, looking to get advantages through that is the best way to create for your team as a point guard. Now I want to talk about important actions as a point guard and probably the most important is the ball screen, okay? And this is an area where generally as a point guard you're going to, you're going to use this action more than anybody else on your team right there. And there's so many ways to make it work for you and your teammates. So I want to go through some, some different ways that we can read it. Some just reading really the mindset for you to have if you want to be successful as a ball screen player. The first thing is you want to be aggressive and then score first, right? So you being a point guard, obviously a lot of times that, that, that means that you want to create for other people. But if you're not thinking score first in the actions that you're in, then the defense doesn't have to respect you and it's going to be harder for your teammates to actually be open. So you need to first understand that by you being in this ball screen action, in any action, you're a threat to score. You should be the first threat to score because you have the ball in your hands and if they don't guard you, you've got to take advantage of that, make them pay. And when you do that, then they're going to shift their attention to you. And now that's where things open up for your teammates right there. This is definitely an area that I see a lot of point guys struggle with is they, they get so focused on, I got to facilitate and be pass first. You should not be thinking pass first. You got to be thinking, can I score first? Because when I think that way, the defense has to think that way. And that's when it becomes the right decision to get my teammates involved. Because they're going to be open, there's going to be less attention on them right there. Okay? So be aggressive in these ball screen situations. And we're just going through like different reads that we might make. Obviously the most simple one is that if they go under on a ball screen, being able to hit that three is a really important skill to have. This is a shot that if you're a point guard, you should be working on this all the time so that you can make them pay. Because when we force them to play over on ball screens or switch ball screens, that's going to create a lot of easy advantages for us right there. They want to play under because maybe they don't respect your shot. And if you don't shoot that shot or make it, it probably is the best way to guard it. So we want to get really good at, first of all, being able to make that shot, but then also being willing to take that shot and not letting them disrespect you, because again, when they do that, they feel like, oh, we don't really have to guard you, so we can put our attention elsewhere and make sure that you can't get other people involved. So they play under that ball screen. We got to be able to hit that three over and drop. Now this is where it can. It can get a little bit better for you because we can. We can make one of their players guard two, right? Or you can look at it and say your defender is going over the drop defender is there. So two are now guarding one, meaning we're going to have a numbers advantage right there. So a lot of times when we're in this situation, we want to slow our pace down a little bit and just think about how long we can keep that drop defender occupied. Right. And either they're going to recover back to the screener, meaning there's probably going to be a lane for you to drive or for you to get to a shot or whatever the case may be, or they're going to stay with you and they're not going to get back to the screener and then you're going to have them wide open because now two are guarding you right there. So really all it is is by slowing your pace down, forcing that drop defender to make a decision on who they're going to guard and then just making the appropriate decision based on what they. What they decide to do. Okay, so essentially we're going to always have a numbers advantage if we play our cards right and usually starts with slowing our pace down and forcing them to. To make a decision, putting pressure on them to make a decision right there. The next read would be like a switch. This can be for a lot of teams. Maybe they feel like they're really good at switching across the board and maybe you don't have an advantage. But a lot of times when you switch, somebody's going to have a matchup advantage. Now, now it might not be you as the point guard, like maybe the guy they switch on to you is a pretty good defender in the perimeter and maybe, you know, it doesn't make sense for you to try and beat them. But what that might mean is now we have a size advantage for the screener and now we've got to look to get them the basketball in the post on a seal, whatever. So whenever we see switches, can we identify mismatches and again go at that again, like we talked about in the advantages part of the video, the next thing would be like a blitz. So this would be basically a double team coming off of it where that screener is going to come up and you know, this kind of overlaps a little bit with a hard hedge where they're going to come and blitz you and then they might recover back to the player. But in this situation, we're saying it's a blitz. So they're just going to bring a double team for you. Off of that ball screen right there. We have a lot of options here. We can look to split that. So if that, if that screener's defender comes really wide, we might be able to split between them. If they don't come wide, they come really like narrow, then maybe we can bounce around the outside of them and get there. And then the other option is to hit the slip off that. So we see that double team coming, your screener is just slipping right away and we can just hit them right over the top. And now all of a sudden, you know, we have a numbers advantage again. You got two players to guard you, two guarding one. And now we have a four on three for your team on the back end now. Okay, so just create a numbers advantage. And now that puts your team is in a great position. And if we understand that that's the read when it comes to a blitz right there, he's really trying to hit that slip. The other thing to understand on ball screens is that it's not just about you and the screener. It's also about understanding where is the help defense going to come from. So a lot of times when we're in different sorts of ball screen coverages, you're going to have what's called a tag defender. And that tag defender is usually going to come from like the same side corner. So if you have the ball in the on the right slot and you have a teammate in the right corner, a lot of times that your teammate's defender is going to tag in on the roll so you come off the ball screen and that that defender in the corner tags over. What that means now is that we essentially have that player being unguarded. So are we able to recognize them as an option? And we might have them for an open shot or maybe they get a close up to attack and boom, you just create a momentum advantage for them right there. Okay. Understand that it's not just about you and the screener. It's about where is the help coming from and can I get the ball to them? You might be able to get the ball into the paint and then next thing you know, you have a weak side defender that helps in. Now you can kick it out to the weak side and now they've got an open shot or they've got a momentum advantage to attack right there. Okay, so understanding that the, you know those, those tertiary defenders, right, so primary would be your secondary, might be that screen defender. Then those tertiary help defenders, are you able to take advantage of them as well and get your other teammates involved too, is a massive part of being great when it comes to ball screens. An area that's super important as a point guard because again, you have more responsibility than just about anybody else on your team is called kyp. Just know your personnel. Do you know your teammates? Do you know your teammates strengths and their weaknesses? Do you know, hey, you know, this guy doesn't really make good decisions when he's in this situation. So I need to make sure I don't give him the ball then. Do you know that, hey, this guy doesn't like when I give him the ball on that side of the floor because he's just not comfortable with his left hand. So I got to understand, like I might be, I might not be able to give him the ball then. Or I know, hey, this guy really likes catching the ball here. So I got to make sure if I see him there, I got to get him the ball. Also, do you understand who they are from a just a person perspective? Like, do you understand how you can talk to them, how you can challenge them? And ultimately do you understand how to put them in the best position to be successful? That kind of goes into my next point, which is the importance of leadership and communication. As a point guard, you need to have your hand on the pulse of the team, right? You need to constantly know how things are. Are things good right now? Is there tension somewhere? Is there something that needs to be addressed? Is there somebody who's upset about something? Like, you are essentially an extension of your coach, right? And you're almost that bridge between the two of them. And so from an emotional point of view, who needs what, right? Is somebody upset about something? And. And what do they need? Right? Sometimes you need to understand who your teammates are, right? So does this person need a word of encouragement? Do I need to encourage them? Or does this other person need me to, like, push them and challenge them? Because that's how they best respond. If you apply a one size fits all approach to all your teammates, it's gonna work for some of them, and other ones are gonna hate you because they're gonna feel like you don't really get them or you don't really care about them at all. And as a point guard, you need people bought into you. You're supposed to be the leader of the team. You. You need people to buy into who you are, and you do that by being a leader that people want to follow, that people like, that people can respect and get behind. Right there. You need to understand how to communicate with each person individually and, you know, specifically how they respond to different types of leadership. There's an author named Brett Bartholomew, has a great book called Conscious Coaching. And in this book he talks about how there's all these different archetypes of players, right? So you. You have different players who respond differently. An example would be, you know, he has like. Like the mouthpiece is one of them. This is, you know, the. The type of player who's always. Just. Always has something to say, right? Always has something to say. And then you have the wolverine. This is a person who's like, you know, super intense. Then you might have the technician and you might have the leader, and you might have the manipulator, and you have all these different personality types that all need different things when it comes to how you communicate with them. And, and that's obviously something from a coaching perspective, but if you understand these things as a point guard as well, and you say, hey, when I talk to that guy, that way, he doesn't respond well to it. So I need to take a note of that and approach it differently. If I want to get the best out of my teammate, I got to know how to best communicate with them. That's what great point guards do. That's what great leaders do. And it's super important that you, as a point guard, have your pulse on the team and also understand each of your teammates, what makes them tick, how do you. How do you motivate them, and how do you help them when they're in their own head or they're in a rut. And when you do that, you become not only a super powerful player as a point guard, but like you become somebody who everybody loves and everybody respects and people will literally go to war for you because you understand these things. Now the last thing that I want to talk about is one of the most important aspects of being a great point guard and it's having great situational awareness. So obviously the first part of that is you always have to know time and score. Like that's got to be something that's always in the back of your mind is you always, if you shouldn't even have to look at the clock and you can be able to tell, you know, somebody, hey, like this is time to score, right? It's something that you should always be constantly scanning, surveying, taking note of. This goes for end of quarter, end of shot clock, and especially end of game, right. Do you understand where exactly you are at all times and, and how the score might impact the way that you approach those end of quarter, end of game situations? So when should you do what? I think that's a question that, that a lot of players have and obviously coaches have different philosophies on, okay, do we foul when we're up forward or up three? Like, do we, you know, do we push the ball in this situation? What time do we wait until at the end of the quarter for us to go get a shot? Like there's a bunch of different philosophies when it comes to that right there. There's plenty of generalities when it comes to this sort of stuff. You know, if you're up four with a minute left, then you have to understand that, hey, we're not taking any shots that in a wide open layup or a free throw if we get fouled, we're not taking open threes, we're not taking open mid range shots. Like we are taking guaranteed points. And that's literally it. Because we're up by four with a minute left, we don't need anything. So that's, that's a certain situation right there. You know, tie game with 20 seconds left. When do we take the shot? What kind of shot do we take? Great point guards know this and they're prepared for it so that they can communicate these things to their teammates. Because guess what, a lot of your teammates are not going to remember these things in the moment. They won't. They're going to have complete lapses about it. So if you can understand these things and be able to constantly relay them in these moments, you're going to be incredibly valuable to your team. And again, you're going to become someone that everybody respects and looks to and somebody who has to be on the floor in these moments. Here's a list of some examples of like, important things that you should know as a point guard. So number one, if we're up with the ball with a minute or less on the clock, we want only wide open layups. Kind of like what I mentioned earlier. We are only taking wide open layups, guaranteed points, or obviously if they follow us, free throws. We don't need an open three when we're up with a minute or less left, right. Even if it's wide open. Because if we miss it, like there is no need for it. Okay, so we're taking guaranteed points and that's it. So something you can communicate, relay to your teammates so that they understand these things. Now, if we're down with a minute or less, we want to look to trap first and then when we foul, we want to go for the ball while we're fouling. Okay? So obviously we're going to be in like a full court press and you know, we're going to give them like the 10 seconds. So we're not going to foul right away. Like we had to make them get the ball over half court because they have the 10 second clock. So if we can keep them there for 10, we're going to get a turnover or we get in there for eight and they have to throw a wild pass and next thing you know, we're able to, you know, steal the ball. So we want to allow that to happen. But then once they get across, we got to look to trap. And if we can't get a steal or a jump on the trap, then we got a foul. But we want to make sure that we're swiping at the ball when we foul so that maybe the rep doesn't call it, maybe it looks like it's clean, whatever the case may be. But something to understand when we are down with a minute or less, like we want to look to trap first and if we can't trap, we got a foul going for the basketball end of quarter. So this is where it can, it can vary a little bit. But my personal approach on it is that ideally we want to kill the clock till there's about 10 seconds, maybe 8 seconds left, and then we want to get to whatever sort of action or play you might want to get to. So maybe you have a specific set that you, that you run at the end of a quarter to get a Quick shot, maybe you have a certain action, like, for a lot of things I've been involved in, we'll run like just a pick and pop. So screener will set that screen with maybe seven seconds left. And we're immediately thinking, because a lot of times teams get so focused on the ball when there's not that much time left, they forget about the screener. And we can get an open shot on the pot, but we're gonna wait till there's probably 8 seconds left till we do that. So end of, end of, end of quarter, we want to wait till there's about 8 to 10 seconds left just to make sure. If we know we take that shot with 13 seconds left and we miss it, then they're gonna get the last shot they can push about on the floor. And the worst thing that can happen, there's the. The worst momentum killer right there, is that you take a shot too early, miss it. They go on the floor and score on a buzzer beater at the end of a quarter. And that's just like a real slap in the face that you don't want right there. So we want to kill enough time that that doesn't happen, but still give us enough time that, you know, we can make a play on the offensive end if we need to, right there. And then the other thing is, you have to make sure that you know how many fouls you have to give before the bonus. Like you always in your mind, and you should be constantly asking your coach, asking the scorers table, asking whoever, how many fouls do we have to give? Right. If you're playing in a state where, like in Pennsylvania now it's. It's five fouls per quarter. So you get five team fouls each quarter. Once you get to that fifth team foul, immediately it becomes double bonus. So if you know that, okay, we are up by three and you know there's 20 seconds left, and we only have two team fouls right now, end of the game. We can look to foul here and be able to stop them from getting into some sort of rhythm or getting into their set. We can foul and they're going to take the ball out of bounds and then reset everything. We can kill some clock, kill some momentum that way there. Okay, if you know, hey, there's eight seconds left, we have, you know, three team fouls and they're coming on the floor. Well, I can pressure them a little bit, and then once it gets like four seconds, I can foul them. And then now they're out of bounds and now they have, they don't get to just run at us in transition. They, they have to set something up real quick from an out of bounds perspective. Now this is something that you always should have a grasp on. And also likewise understanding, hey, if we're already in the bonus, we can't foul here, guys. We can't do it. Like we're up two and they have the ball with 10 seconds left. We just can't foul, cannot foul, can't do it. We got to force them to take a tough shot. And making sure your teammates know this can prevent some of those like huge mental lapses where, you know, someone gets lazy and just fouls and all of a sudden now you're going to overtime because you gave them two free throws. Okay? So those are important things to understand as a point guard. Important situations for you to have your, your, you know, your like full grasp on. And then also understanding the fact that again, your teammates aren't going to know all these things, right? They're not going to. That's why they're not the point guard. And so you need to make sure that you take that responsibility and have those things and communicate them at a high level. So like I said, there's a lot of stuff that goes into being a great point guard, being a high IQ point guard. But by taking on that responsibility of, you know, being able to create and attack advantages and create advantages for your teammates, being able to set the tone for the pace that you're going to play at, knowing your personnel, having, you know, a high quality of leadership and communication and understanding, you know, who your teammates are, how to communicate with them, and then having great situational awareness, you can constantly be that rock that you know, that guidance for your teammates, you're going to be able to be so successful, you're going to, players going to always have to be on the floor and ultimately you're going to make every single player that is on your team better. You're going to make every team better, you're going to win more. Basil is going to be way more fun. So the, a great point guard is unbelievably valuable, right? And not a lot of teams have them. So if you can, if you can become that, there's literally no limit to the, to the success you can have as a basketball player. So hopefully this gives you some ideas. If you want another resource that's going to help you take your IQ to the next level. I have a free hour long basketball IQ masterclass that's a top link in the description down below. It's going to help you to score more points, create more for your teammates, play with way more confidence, develop some of the mindsets that's needed to be like an elite player and way more than that as well. So completely free. An hour long this is something that I say all the time will help you to easily be able to add six or eight points per game to your average right now just by going through and applying the stuff that we talk about inside of the masterclass. So make sure you check that out. Top link in the description down below. Completely free. I appreciate you for watching. Talk soon. Peace.