On defense, when you need to pick up a dribbler and help a team- mate who is being beaten, remember to pick up or help across from your man, not up from him. This is simply done, if your man stays outside or merely stands still while you are helping. But if the man you are guarding is a good player, he will try to get behind you, down low for a pass over your head. Your job, even though you must help, is to stay across from your man, so that you can recover and get a hand in his face if the ball is thrown to him.

If you move across to help and your man moves down toward the basket, then you must move down toward the basket in order to stay across from your man. Don’t permit your man to get behind you and receive a pass over your head. Help-defense does not require that you stop a penetrator’s jump shot. (You cannot expect to stop every shot on the court, regardless of how good you are.) Help-defense does require you to get in the penetrator’s way and stop his layup. Therefore, you move into the penetrator’s path as quickly as possible, and you stop him as far out as you can while still staying across from your man (or down lower than your man, never higher or “up,” which allows a pass over your head to the basket).

As long as you remember to keep your man in your sight while you help, you will be in good position. If you lose sight of your man, you are suddenly “up”, not “across”, and you will have to get back fast.

From Dick’s book Stuff

I hope that you aren’t one of those guys walking around thinking you give 100%. Because you don’t. You loaf. Everyone loafs. And the guys that come closest to giving 100% know this better than the others. No one gives 100%. There are so many things you can do in a basketball game, so many opportunities to help out a bit more on defense or to overplay a bit more, or to run back faster or block out better…the list is endless.

Good players know after a game, even a game in which they played well according to the papers, that they could have done more, could have hustled better, could have made a few more things happen if only they hadn’t rested at the wrong time, if only they had put out just a little more.

It is not simply a matter of conditioning. Of course, good players are going to be in good condition. A good coach gets even mediocre players in condition. It is simply that you can always do more.

Your only chance to approach your potential is to strive constantly to do more—always with a nagging sense of inadequacy, of having loafed and failed. Satisfied players are rarely good ones.

From Dick’s book Stuff

Coaches always tell their defensive players, “See your man and see the ball.” And that should tell you, if you want to get open on offense to go somewhere that your defender can not see you and the ball. Often, you can do this by ducking and leaning to your defender’s back side but hardly moving your feet. The advantage of ducking out of his sight is that you disorient him. You make him wonder momentarily if you have cut backdoor, and you get all his attention—and often his feet—going after you, and then you can react accordingly.

Players trying to get open to receive a pass too often jockey back and forth, working very hard but not really going anywhere. Although they think they are confusing the defender because they are faking one way, and the other way, and the other way, and the other way, the defender can guard them by merely standing still.

Choose to go backdoor or choose to come out for the ball. And just before you choose, ducking out of sight, disappearing low and behind your defender’s head will often get you free by several steps. It works simply because defenders are not accustomed to guarding someone who disappears! Either they lose sight of you, giving you the opportunity to thrust out while they are not prepared to move as you do, or they overcommit (thinking you’ve gone backdoor) and are badly faked out when instead you are suddenly coming out for the ball.