Objectives of the press

When teaching a new concept I think there are four important steps to go through with your team:

1. Explain the objectives.
2. Set a set of global rules that define the concept; i.e. what should be observed when anything else fails.
3. Explain the rational behind the rules.
4. Break the concept into smaller sub-concepts that could be drilled in isolation.

In this post I will try to define the objectives of our press defense:

1. Put pressure on the other team to force a mistake: we are not trying to steal the ball from the ball handler, we will only attack the player with the ball when we see a very clear chance of getting the ball without faulting or at the end of the game if we are trying to come back in the score. Our main objective is to force the other team to make a mistake. Mistakes can come in several forms: violations, ofensive charges, passes out of bounds, intercepted passes, 8 second violations or even 24 second violations.
2. Put pressure on the other team to change their ofense: most teams we play against are prepared man to man and zone ofenses, but they hardly train against defenses bases on traps or jumping to the ball. By pressing we are forcing them to react to something they most likely haven't trained and thus we take the teams out of practiced routines.
3. Put pressure on the other team to change the game pace: making the defense more agressive, forcing tunrovers or getting steals may lead to a change in the speed of the game, we can use to our convenience if we think we need to go from a low tempo to a high tempo kind of game.