We just discussed the relevance and importance of long-term thinking for coaches. However, there are also many spots where coaches must focus on the task at hand and “win at all costs” or “do what we need to do now, and figure the rest out later.” We call these situations high leverage spots, where it is a very big game that has a lot of implications on the season’s outlook, playoff positioning, elimination games, etc. These games have such huge implications that coaches will often do a few key things:
1) Play the best players – This may seem . . .